About 1935 Hazel Brannon Smith, a recent college graduate from Gadsden, Alabama, bought the local weekly newspaper, the "Durant News", which had been failing. Over the next several years, she turned it around, and served as its editor and publisher into the early 1970s. In the 1950s she also acquired the "Lexington Advertiser", and later two other small papers, and was based in Lexington, the county seat. She was among the first journalists to cover the African-American community for its positive contributions, for instance, noting in 1943 during World War II that a local civic group had donated money to the Red Cross. Later she became well known for her editorial writing about the civil rights movement; Holmes County had many activists involved in education and voter registration. In 1964 Smith was the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing.