About Chatham Daily News

Chatham Daily News

The Chatham Daily News is a daily newspaper published in Chatham-Kent, Ontario, and the only daily newspaper in the municipality — a sprawling southwestern Ontario community of about 100,000 stretching from Lake Erie to Lake St. Clair. Its lineage reaches back to the early 1850s, when it began as the Kent Advertiser, making it one of Chatham-Kent's oldest businesses still in operation. Owned by Postmedia Network, the Daily News covers the Chatham-Kent municipal council, the region's agricultural economy, the courts, health care, education and the OHL's Chatham Maroons orbit of junior hockey, alongside its sister publication, the weekly Chatham This Week.

Overview

Chatham-Kent — formed in 1998 by amalgamating the city of Chatham with Kent County's towns and townships — is a municipality the size of a small county, anchored by the city of Chatham at the forks of the Thames River. Its economy runs on agriculture (it sits in some of Canada's richest farmland), automotive manufacturing, health care and the service industries of a regional centre. The Chatham Daily News is its daily newspaper: the newsroom covers the municipal council — one of the largest municipal governments in Ontario by geography — the courts, the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance, the school boards, and the communities from Wallaceburg and Dresden to Tilbury, Blenheim, Ridgetown and Wheatley.

The paper's modern newsroom is a case study in the economics of small-city dailies: a J-Source/Editor & Publisher report on "news poverty" described a newsroom of just three reporters — Ellwood Shreve, Trevor Terfloth and Tom Morrison — working above a busy downtown intersection, a far cry from the bustling operation veteran Shreve joined in the summer of 2002. Yet the paper continues to publish as the municipality's daily record, supplemented by the weekly Chatham This Week.

History

The Chatham Daily News began as the Kent Advertiser in the early 1850s, owned by Colin Rose — the man who later converted Chatham's Rankin Block into a hotel. In the mid-1860s Rose sold the paper to John Gemmel, whose parents owned the Sarnia Observer; Gemmel renamed it the Chatham Weekly Banner, and through those years it served as the Liberal Party's voice in Kent County, competing against the Planet, the dominant Conservative paper that needed no party subsidy to survive.

In 1895 the paper became the Chatham Daily Banner, and shortly afterward took the name it carries today, the Chatham Daily News. In those years it was owned by A.C. Woodward, who made the paper self-sustaining; Woodward was the maternal grandfather of Darcy McKeough, the future Ontario cabinet minister — and in those days, the McKeoughs were still Liberals. The paper occupied three successive homes in old Chatham: the Boyd Block (just east of the Bank of Nova Scotia, in the former Chatham Hydro building), the building where Boys and Heard later operated, and the Fourth Street building erected in 1913. It remains, by its own account, one of Chatham-Kent's oldest businesses still in operation, now working from its King Street offices.

The modern ownership era runs through the consolidations of Ontario's regional press: the paper was overseen by the Osprey Media Group, the regional chain that Quebecor's Sun Media division took over in 2007; following the sale of Sun Media in 2015, the Chatham Daily News came under the control of Postmedia Network, where it operates as part of Sun Media Community Newspapers. Its sister paper, Chatham This Week — a tabloid weekly launched in February 1991 with controlled circulation to about 19,400 homes — shares the newsroom and extends the paper's reach across the municipality.

Content and Sections

The modern Chatham Daily News is built around the municipality. Council coverage anchors the news pages — Chatham-Kent's council governs a territory larger than many counties, and the paper tracks its decisions on budgets, policing, planning, infrastructure and the services spread across dozens of communities. Agriculture receives sustained attention reflecting the regional economy: the cash crops, the greenhouses, the food-processing plants and the farm organizations of Kent County. The courts beat covers the region's legal community; health reporting follows the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance; education coverage spans the school boards and St. Clair College's Thames campus.

Sports coverage follows the region's deep hockey culture — the Chatham Maroons of the GOJHL, minor hockey across the municipality — alongside baseball, soccer and community athletics. Opinion pages carry editorials, columns and letters from across Chatham-Kent, and feature sections cover arts, food, homes, health and community life. Chatham This Week complements the daily with community news, events listings and features delivered free to households.

Coverage and Audience

The Daily News serves the Municipality of Chatham-Kent — about 100,000 people across the city of Chatham and the towns and rural communities of the former Kent County. Its audience is the region's farmers, manufacturing workers, health-care professionals, small-business owners and the families of one of Ontario's most agriculturally productive regions.

The paper's weekly circulation was reported at 37,680 total as of 2013, and its digital audience was measured at about 114,000 monthly uniques in late 2021. As the municipality's only daily newspaper, its civic role is central: the primary source of sustained accountability journalism for one of Ontario's largest municipal governments. It competes for readers' attention with a lively field of weeklies — the Chatham Voice, Wallaceburg Courier Press (also Postmedia), Blenheim News Tribune, Ridgetown Independent News, Tilbury Times and Wheatley Journal — but remains the only daily voice of Chatham-Kent. Its archives, reaching back to the 1850s Kent Advertiser, document the agricultural settlement of southwestern Ontario, the railway age and the making of the modern municipality. Few Ontario community dailies can claim so deep and continuous a documentary record of their region.

Ownership

The Chatham Daily News is owned by Postmedia Network Inc., Canada's largest newspaper chain, which acquired it in 2015 as part of its purchase of Sun Media from Quebecor; the paper's lineage runs through Osprey Media and the Sun Media Community Newspapers division. Within Postmedia, the paper shares national content, digital platforms and corporate services with the chain's other papers while maintaining its Chatham newsroom and editorial identity.

Postmedia itself is publicly traded and majority-owned by the U.S. investment firm Chatham Asset Management. Like its sister community dailies, the Daily News has experienced newsroom reductions — the three-reporter newsroom described in the J-Source report is emblematic of the pressures on small-city dailies — even as it has maintained daily publication.

Digital Presence

The paper's digital edition carries the Daily News' journalism online: breaking news, e-edition access, newsletters, photo galleries and community features, serving readers across Chatham-Kent and the region's diaspora. The site operates on Postmedia's shared digital infrastructure, offering digital subscriptions and e-editions.

On social media the paper distributes breaking news and community stories to a following concentrated in southwestern Ontario. As of 2026, the Chatham Daily News continues to publish as the municipality's only daily newspaper — more than 170 years after the Kent Advertiser first appeared, and still, by its own account, one of Chatham-Kent's oldest businesses in operation.

From the Kent Advertiser of the early 1850s to today's Daily News, the paper has been Chatham-Kent's record through the railway age, the automotive plants, the agricultural transformation. As the municipality's only daily — a community of 100,000 stretching from Lake Erie to Lake St. Clair — it remains the region's essential newsroom.

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