Dayton Daily News


The Dayton Daily News is a daily newspaper published in Dayton, Ohio, United States. It is owned by Cox Enterprises, Inc., a privately held global conglomerate headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, with approximately 55,000 employees and $21 billion in total revenue. Its major operating subsidiaries are Cox Communications, Cox Automotive, and Ohio Newspapers.

Headquarters

The DDN has its headquarters at the Cox Media Group Ohio Media Center at 1611 South Main Street in Dayton, and is located near the University of Dayton campus. The newspaper’s editorial and business offices were moved there in April 2007. For more than 100 years the paper's editorial offices and printing presses were located in downtown Dayton. From 1999 to 2017, the paper was printed at the Print Technology Center near Interstate 75 in Franklin about 15 minutes to the south. In 2017, CMG came to an agreement with Gannett for the paper to be printed at Gannett's facility in Indianapolis. This resulted in the closure of the Franklin facility.
Ohio Newspapers also publishes two other daily newspapers and websites in Southwest Ohio: Journal-News and the Springfield News-Sun. CMG Ohio also publishes weekly papers Today's Pulse and Oxford Press, and had published several other weekly papers until CMG Ohio ceased their operations in January 2013, including The Western Star , formerly the oldest weekly paper published in the state, the Pulse-Journal and the Fairfield Echo.

Merger

In late 2010, Cox Enterprises merged all of its local media holdings under the CMG Ohio brand and consolidated locations to The Media Center. In early 2020, the private equity firm Apollo Global Management purchased Cox Enterprises' radio and TV properties and all Cox Media Group Ohio media entities. In March 2020, Cox Enterprises took back ownership of Ohio Newspapers, which included the Dayton Daily News, Journal-News, Springfield News-Sun, Dayton.com, and related digital brands.

History

On August 15, 1898, James M. Cox purchased the Dayton Evening News. One week later, on August 22, 1898 he renamed it the Dayton Daily News.
The paper was founded with the intention of pioneering a new type of journalism, keeping weak ties to politicians and advertisers while seeking objectivity and public advocacy as primary functions. These goals pushed the paper in the direction of valuing the public interest.
A Sunday edition was launched on November 2, 1913. In 1948, Cox purchased two morning papers, The Journal and The Herald, from the Herrick-Kumler Company. The next year he combined them to form The Journal-Herald.
For the next four decades, The Journal-Herald was the conservative morning paper, and the Dayton Daily News was the liberal evening paper. The papers operated newsrooms on separate floors of the same building in downtown Dayton. On September 15, 1986, The Journal-Herald and the Daily News were merged to become a morning paper, the Dayton Daily News and Journal-Herald, with both names appearing on the front page. The Journal-Herald name last appeared on the paper's front-page flag on December 31, 1987.
Cox was the Democratic Party's candidate for U.S. President in the election of 1920, and the city of Dayton has voted for the Democratic candidate in presidential elections since. Cox's running mate for vice president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected president in 1932.

Recent operations

The paper was led by Jeff Bruce as editor from 1998 to 2008. Bruce replaced Max Jennings, who retired. When Bruce retired in 2007 Kevin Riley, 44, a graduate of the University of Dayton, was named editor. Riley spent most of his career with the paper, starting as a copy editor and later serving as sports editor, Internet general manager, and publisher of the Springfield News-Sun in Springfield, Ohio. He was promoted from deputy editor.
In 2010, Riley was named editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and that paper's editor, Julia Wallace, under whose leadership the AJC won Pulitzer Prizes in 2006 and 2007, moved to Dayton to become Senior Vice President of news and programming for CMG Ohio heading a new combined newspaper, television and radio newsroom. She was soon after named the first female publisher and retired in 2016. In 2011, Jana Collier was promoted from managing editor to editor-in-chief of CMG Ohio and was responsible for content and operations for all daily and weekly papers. Collier is also the first woman to be editor-in-chief of the Dayton Cox newspaper organization. In March 2020, Jana Collier was named publisher of the newly formed Ohio Newspapers brand. Jim Bebbington was then named editor-in-chief of the Dayton Daily News.

Notable employees

In 1998, reporters Russell Carollo and Jeff Nesmith won the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on dangerous flaws and mismanagement in the military health care system, a series very relevant to its readership because of the presence of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in neighboring Greene County.
The paper is the home of cartoonist Mike Peters, who draws the Mother Goose and Grimm strip and won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1981, and columnist Dale Huffman, who had written a daily metro column every day for more than eight years before beginning a hiatus on January 30, 2008, after he was diagnosed with kidney cancer.
The following people at some point worked at or wrote for the Dayton Daily News:
Jim Zofkie
In 1988, Daily News publisher Dennis Shere was fired by Cox Newspapers because he rejected a health lecture advertisement by homosexual groups. Shere cited his "Christian perspective" in declining to print the ad. The Southern Baptist Convention subsequently passed a resolution calling on "all media to refuse advertising that promotes homosexuality or any other lifestyle that is destructive to the family". The resolution said Shere was fired for his "commitment to defend traditional moral and family values". The company responded that it was defending freedom of expression for all people, saying "We cannot compromise on the constitutional issue of equal access to the press".

Citations