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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In March 2020, Jana Collier was named publisher of the newly formed Ohio Newspapers brand.

[6] 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 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 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".