The Newport Daily News
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The Newport Daily News

The Newport Daily News is a six-day daily newspaper serving Newport County, Rhode Island. It publishes in the mornings on weekdays (Monday through Friday) and in the morning on Saturdays. The Daily News was the state's largest family-owned newspaper until it was purchased by Gatehouse Media in 2017.

Until its sale to Gatehouse Media, the Daily News had been locally owned since it was founded in 1846. It was named "Newspaper of the Year" by the New England Newspaper Association in 1991, 2001 and 2004.

In 1970, the newspaper moved from Thames Street in downtown Newport to an office on Malbone Road in the northern part of the city, shortly after the completion of the nearby Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge. In 2018, Sherman Publishing put the Malbone Road property up for sale; the paper continued to be based out of the building until new office space could be found. In March 2019, the paper's office moved to Middletown, Rhode Island. Journalist Jim Gillis was a reporter for the Daily News from 1980 to 2013 and was well known on Aquidneck Island for his weekly "Spare Change" column, which he continued to write until his death in April 2023.

Edward A. Sherman Publishing Company, the family-owned publisher of the Daily News, also prints three free weekly newspapers in southern Rhode Island: Mercury, a Wednesday alternative weekly covering Bristol, Newport and Washington counties; the Friday Newport Navlog, the U.S. Navy's oldest base newspaper (founded 1901), covering Naval Station Newport; and Ocean State Independent, mailed to non-Daily News subscribers on Aquidneck Island.

The company also owned South County Newspapers, which publishes The Independent, a weekly newspaper covering the towns of South Kingstown (including the villages of Kingston, Peace Dale and Wakefield and the University of Rhode Island), Narragansett and North Kingstown. The Independent, formerly based in Wakefield, now shares office space with the Newport Daily News and Mercury in Newport.

All of Sherman Publishing's publications were purchased by Gatehouse Media, which also owns The Providence Journal, in November 2017.

In June 2018, Gatehouse sold South County Newspapers, The Independent and South County Life magazine, to Rhode Island Suburban Newspapers. In November 2018, publisher William Lucey and editor-in-chief Jon Zins both departed from the newspaper.

The Mercury, another publication of the Daily News, traces a lineage as one of the oldest newspapers in the USA. The history of that publication dates back to 1758 when the widow and son of James Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's brother, established the Newport Mercury as a weekly publication, making Ann Franklin the first woman in the Colonies to publish and edit a newspaper.[citation needed]

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