After founding the South Bend Times, a Democratic newspaper, he sold out to John B. Stoll and moved to Saline County, Missouri, where he became editor of the Sweet Springs Herald .

Moving to Noble County, Indiana, with his wife's family, Stoll helped establish the Ligonier National Banner, a Democratic newspaper.

A historian of the Indiana Democratic Party and of St. Joseph County, Stoll eventually sold the Times to the News-Times Printing Company in August 1911.

Along with Stephenson, the newspaper's editors included John H. Zuver, Boyd Gurley, Sidney B. Whipple, McCready Huston, and Fred Mills.

The paper and its immediate predecessors also helped launch the career of American sports columnist and short-story writer Ring Lardner, who worked for the earlier South Bend Times, and author J.P. McEvoy, best known as the creator of the Dixie Dugan comic strip, popular in the 1930s and '40s.

The News-Times enjoyed a "high-spirited competition" with its rival, the South Bend Tribune, a Republican newspaper, as the two papers tried to outdo each other in local news coverage.

The News-Times was popular with South Bend's large Eastern European community, remarkable considering that the city had numerous papers in Hungarian and Polish for many years.