It serves primarily Fond du Lac and northern Dodge County in East Central Wisconsin.

The Reporter traces its founding to August 22, 1870 when the Fond du Lac Commonwealth, which had been a weekly newspaper since 1856, began daily circulation.

In 1970, the paper was sold to Thomson Newspapers, which erected a new building at the corner of West Second and Macy Streets in Fond du Lac.

Gannett eventually downsized their Fond du Lac operations upon the 2009 purchase of the parent company of Action Advertiser, a local shopper paper which also did contract publishing, moving out of downtown to an expansion of the Action Advertiser offices near the I-41/WI 23 interchange on September 20, 2009.

This necessitated the move of The Reporter from publishing in-house to out of Gannett's Appleton facilities for the Post-Crescent, with the Oshkosh Northwestern also following suit.