Career
He founded Exhibitors Herald, which became an important national trade paper for the film industry. In 1915, Quigley purchased the film trade journal Exhibitors Herald. In 1917, he acquired and merged Motography.
In 1927, he acquired and merged The Moving Picture World and began publishing as Exhibitors Herald and Moving Picture World, later shortened to Exhibitors Herald World.
After acquiring Motion Picture News in 1930, he merged these publications into the Motion Picture Herald. Quigley was an active proponent and co-author of the Motion Picture Production Code, which governed the content of Hollywood movies from the 1930s to the 1960s.
A devout Catholic, he began lobbying in the 1920s for a more extensive code that not only listed material that was inappropriate for movies, but also contained a moral system that the movies could help to promote – specifically a system based on Catholic theology. This original version especially was once popularly known as the Hays Code, but it and its later revisions are now commonly called the Production Code.