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Portsmouth Daily Times: The Story Behind Southern Ohio’s Oldest Paper

There’s something kind of remarkable about a newspaper that’s outlived pretty much everything around it. Wars, recessions, floods, the entire internet showing up and wrecking the print business model, and somehow, it’s still going. That’s the Portsmouth Daily Times in a nutshell.

Let’s get into it.

A Paper Older Than Most Countries’ Current Governments

The Portsmouth Daily Times was founded in 1852. Just sit with that for a second. That’s before the American Civil War. Before the telephone existed. Before pretty much anything we’d recognize as modern journalism.

It was started by two brothers, John and David P. Pugh, in Portsmouth, Ohio, a small city tucked along the Scioto River in the southern part of the state. It began life as a weekly paper, which honestly was pretty standard for the era, most towns didn’t have the readership or infrastructure to support a daily edition yet.

Over time, though, demand grew, and the paper evolved. By 1894, it had officially adopted the “Daily Times” name, reflecting its shift toward daily publication. That’s a genuinely long runway of continuous operation, over 170 years now, which puts it in some pretty rare company among American newspapers.

Where Exactly Is Portsmouth, Ohio?

Fair question if you’re not from the region. Portsmouth sits in Scioto County, right along the Ohio River, near where the Scioto River flows into it. Southern Ohio, essentially, close enough to Kentucky that the paper’s coverage actually spills across state lines.

I think that geographic detail matters more than people realize. The Daily Times doesn’t just cover one small town, it serves five Ohio counties (Scioto, Adams, Jackson, Lawrence, and Pike) plus two counties over in Kentucky (Greenup and Lewis). That’s a genuinely wide footprint for a paper this size.

What Does It Actually Cover?

Local news, mostly, and honestly, that’s exactly what it should be doing. Local government meetings, school board decisions, business openings and closures, community events, the stuff that never makes national news but genuinely shapes people’s day-to-day lives.

High school athletics get real attention too, which, in my experience, is basically the beating heart of small-town American newspapers. Friday night football coverage isn’t a footnote in papers like this, it’s often the most-read section of the week.

The paper’s also part of the Associated Press network, which means it’s plugged into a wider system of shared reporting and journalistic standards, not just operating in total isolation.

A Newspaper That’s Survived Genuine Disaster

Here’s a bit of history that I think deserves more attention than it usually gets. Back in 1937, the Ohio River flooded catastrophically, one of the worst flood events in the region’s history. Portsmouth and the surrounding area got hit hard. Thousands of people displaced, widespread damage, genuine crisis conditions.

The Daily Times kept reporting through it. Front-page warnings as the water kept rising, updates on whether the floodwall would hold, evacuation guidance when things got dicey. Then, once the water receded, coverage shifted toward recovery, cleanup efforts, and community relief coordination.

That’s what local journalism is actually for, honestly. Not glamorous. Not going viral. Just showing up, again and again, when a community genuinely needs accurate information fast. I think that’s worth remembering next time someone dismisses small local papers as irrelevant.

The Business Side Has Been a Rollercoaster

Like basically every local newspaper in America, the Daily Times hasn’t had it easy in the internet era. Print media took a beating over the last couple of decades, and this paper wasn’t immune.

In April 2010, the paper printed its final edition actually produced on-site, shifting production to Gallipolis, Ohio instead. The physical production staff got laid off. Rough moment, genuinely, for a paper with that much local history behind it.

Ownership has shifted around a fair bit too. It went through Civitas Media, then AIM Media Midwest picked it up in 2017. Most recently, in July 2024, West Virginia-based HD Media LLC acquired the paper, folding it into a broader regional network that includes outlets like the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

I think there’s something bittersweet about that kind of consolidation. On one hand, it probably kept the paper alive financially. On the other, a paper that started with two local brothers in 1852 is now part of a multi-state media portfolio. Different era, different economics, same basic mission though, hopefully.

Why Local Papers Like This Still Matter

Here’s my honest take, and it’s a bit of a tangent, but bear with me. Local newspapers do something national outlets just structurally can’t. They cover the school board meeting nobody outside the county cares about, but that genuinely affects where local tax dollars go. They cover the small business opening downtown. They cover the high school kid who just broke a decades-old track record.

None of that trends nationally. All of it matters intensely to the people actually living there.

Papers like the Portsmouth Daily Times are, in a real sense, a community’s shared record. Decades from now, someone researching their family history, or their town’s past, is going to end up combing through old Daily Times archives, the same way people do today with the paper’s coverage of the 1937 flood.

Final Thoughts

The Portsmouth Daily Times isn’t a flashy operation. It’s not chasing viral headlines or national attention. What it’s doing, and has been doing since 1852, is quietly showing up for a specific place and specific people, through floods, ownership changes, industry collapse, and everything in between.

I think that kind of persistence deserves a bit of respect, honestly. In an era where local news deserts are becoming genuinely common across America, a paper that’s survived 170-plus years, adapting where it had to, is worth paying attention to. Even if you’ve never set foot in Scioto County.

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