The News Leader is a daily newspaper owned by Gannett and serving Staunton, Virginia, and the surrounding areas.

[2] Opie worked as a reporter for The Daily News, which was a morning paper, before starting The Evening Leader.

[2] When the papers were combined, the new edition adopted the volume number of The Daily News and so the current edition's volume number goes back further than the 1904 founding date.

In the 1960s, the Opie family combined The Staunton News-Leader with The Evening Leader, and Staunton was left with only one daily newspaper, The Daily News Leader.

The Opies sold the paper in 1979 to Multimedia Inc., which was purchased by Gannett Co. in 1995.