Dayton Daily News

James Middleton Cox founded the Dayton Daily News in 1898 when he purchased the Dayton Evening News and renamed it the following year. Cox was a prominent name in the newspaper business, but he was also notably the Democratic Party's candidate for U.S. President in the election of 1920. Cox's running mate for vice president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected president in 1932. Cox was governor of Ohio from 1913-1915 and 1917-1921.

The Dayton Daily News expanded with a Sunday edition debuting on November 2, 1913. In 1948, James Cox purchased The Journal and The Herald, from the Herrick-Kumler Company and in 1949 merged them as The Journal Herald, which continued as a morning paper and was considered more conservative than the Dayton Daily News . The Dayton Daily News circulated as an evening paper. Cox ran both the Dayton Daily News and The Journal Herald out of the same building in downtown Dayton. It wasn't until September 15, 1986, that The Journal Herald and the Dayton Daily News were merged together to form the Dayton Daily News and Journal-Herald, a morning paper. However, the merged title only lasted through the end of 1987, when the Journal-Herald portion of the name was dropped.

Award winning reporters for the Dayton Daily News include Russell Carollo and Jeff Nesmith, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for their reporting on mismanagement in the military health care system. Mike Peter, a cartoonist known for his strip Mother Goose and Grimm, also won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for editorial cartooning. Tom Archdeacon, Si Burick, Ritter Collett, Clem Hamilton, Dale Huffman, Hal McCoy, John Scalzi, Myron Scott, Dennis Shere, D.L. Stewart, Charley Stough III, and Dann Stupp are among many notable writers who worked at the paper.