The Times-Reporter

About The Times-Reporter

The Times Reporter is the daily newspaper of New Philadelphia, Ohio, and the leading news source for Tuscarawas County in northeastern Ohio. Formed in 1968 through the merger of The Daily Times of New Philadelphia and The Daily Reporter of Dover, the two cities that anchor its coverage area, it is today a property of Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the United States, operating within the company's USA TODAY Network. Its lineage is far older than the 1968 merger suggests: its corporate ancestor, the Iron Valley Reporter, began publication in Canal Dover, as Dover was then called, in May 1872. The paper covers the twin cities of New Philadelphia and Dover and the surrounding Tuscarawas County communities, with some reporting extending into Carroll, Coshocton, Harrison, Holmes, and Stark counties. Its website, timesreporter.com, publishes local news continuously alongside regional and national content from the Gannett network, while the print edition remains a morning broadsheet published for subscribers across the county. With deep roots in the community, a strong emphasis on high school sports, and the backing of one of the largest regional newspaper clusters in Ohio, the Times Reporter occupies a central place in the civic life of a county of more than 92,000 people.

History

Newspaper publishing in Tuscarawas County began in the early nineteenth century. The Tuscarawas Chronicle appeared in New Philadelphia from 1819 to 1834, followed by the Tuscarawas Advocate, published from 1834 to 1911, and the Ohio Democrat, which circulated from 1840 to 1900. In Canal Dover, the predecessor of modern Dover, the Iron Valley Reporter began publication as a weekly newspaper in 1872; the Library of Congress dates its founding to May 18, 1872, and Ohio archival records show it being printed in Canal Dover through the end of the nineteenth century. Its owner and editor in the 1800s was William W. Scott, a Canal Dover native who later became a postmaster. The Iron Valley Reporter served as the forerunner of the Daily Reporter, which was published in Canal Dover and then Dover from 1903 to 1968. On the other side of the Tuscarawas River, in the county seat of New Philadelphia, the Daily Times was published from 1903 to 1968. The two dailies, serving the twin cities that have shared a rivalry and a common commercial life for more than a century, merged in 1968 to form The Times-Reporter, which has been published continuously ever since, a span of more than half a century under a single masthead.

The merged paper spent its middle decades as a property of Copley Press, the Illinois-based chain founded by Ira Clifton Copley that at one time owned dailies across Ohio and Illinois, including the Aurora Beacon-News, the Elgin Courier-News, and the Springfield State Journal-Register. In April 2007, GateHouse Media acquired nine publications from Copley Press in northeastern Ohio and central Illinois, a transaction that included the Times-Reporter. GateHouse, the Fairport, New York-based consolidator that was rapidly assembling one of the largest collections of community newspapers in the country, then brought the Times-Reporter into a growing Ohio cluster alongside its other northeastern Ohio properties. In 2019, GateHouse merged with Gannett in a deal that created the largest newspaper company in the United States, and the Times-Reporter became a Gannett paper. The company has more recently adopted the name USA Today Co. for its publishing operations, which is how the current owner is listed in public reference sources. Through each change of ownership, the paper has retained its identity as the daily of the New Philadelphia-Dover market, serving a readership that older circulation records show numbered well above 18,000 daily copies in the early 2010s.

Ownership and leadership

The Times-Reporter is owned by Gannett, which acquired the paper in April 2007 when its predecessor, GateHouse Media, bought nine Copley Press publications in northeastern Ohio and central Illinois. GateHouse subsequently merged with Gannett in 2019, placing the paper inside the country's largest newspaper chain. Public reference listings identify the current publisher as Chris White and the owner as the USA Today Co., the operating name under which Gannett now conducts its publishing business. The paper works within Gannett's Center for Community Journalism, a structure through which roughly a dozen regional newsrooms collaborate, allowing the best work of the Times-Reporter newsroom to reach audiences beyond its own market. This network model means that while the paper's local reporting staff focuses on Tuscarawas County, editorial planning, production, printing, and back-office functions are shared with the company's other Ohio properties, a common arrangement across Gannett's community papers that replaced the standalone management structures of the Copley era.

Editorial approach

The Times-Reporter practices a community-first style of journalism typical of Gannett's smaller dailies, with a pronounced emphasis on high school sports. The paper has sought reporters to cover high school athletics in and around Tuscarawas County, a market where Friday night football and the long-standing Dover-New Philadelphia rivalry, described by the company as one of the oldest high school rivalries in the nation, are community-defining events. The reporting brief extends beyond game coverage into enterprise journalism: deep stories on the rigors of student-athlete life, coach compensation, team travel, and the recruitment of college athletes from a small-market area. The paper's broader local coverage follows the familiar community-daily template of government and school board meetings, crime and courts, business openings and closings, and community events. Through the Center for Community Journalism, its stories are produced to network standards for digital presentation, with metrics guiding how coverage is packaged for web, mobile, and social audiences, and with strong performers amplified across the dozen collaborating newsrooms.

Coverage and regular sections

The paper's core coverage area is the twin cities of New Philadelphia and Dover, the county seat and its largest neighbor, along with the Tuscarawas County communities of Baltic, Bolivar, Dennison, Gnadenhutten, Newcomerstown, Strasburg, Sugarcreek, Tuscarawas, Uhrichsville, and Stone Creek, plus selected coverage of Carroll, Coshocton, Harrison, Holmes, and Stark counties. The website organizes content into News, Sports, Entertainment, Life, Business, Opinion, Trending, and Shopping sections, supplemented by national and network material from USA Today and sister papers. Sports coverage is anchored by high school athletics, including recognitions such as the state's Mr. Football award and coverage of OHSAA football finals, alongside community sports features like seasonal lists of area student-athletes to watch. Obituaries are a central feature, as at most community dailies, serving as the paper of record for deaths across the county. Local news coverage includes public safety, such as crash reporting on county roads, community traditions like the candlelighting ceremony at Roscoe Village, weather forecasting for the county, and local business stories. The opinion section carries editorial positions, letters, and syndicated commentary, while the life and entertainment pages track dining, events, and seasonal activities such as Christmas tree farms in the county.

Readership and circulation

The Times-Reporter serves Tuscarawas County, whose population was 93,263 in the 2020 census and was estimated at 92,373 by the Census Bureau in July 2025, making it one of the larger single-paper counties in northeastern Ohio. The county seat of New Philadelphia and the neighboring city of Dover anchor the New Philadelphia-Dover micropolitan area, which is itself part of the Cleveland-Akron-Canton combined statistical area. The paper's circulation has followed the industry's familiar downward trajectory. Audited figures from March 2012 showed average circulation of 18,132 daily and 18,659 on Sundays, while a Gannett investor filing put the figure at 9,719 as of 2018, a decline of roughly half in six years. No current, publicly verified circulation figure could be found during research, as Gannett no longer releases per-title circulation in its public filings. The county's demographic profile, predominantly white, with about 22 percent of residents over 65 and a strong base of owner-occupied housing, resembles the core print-newspaper audience that community dailies have historically served, while the paper's digital audience reaches younger readers and former residents through its website and mobile platforms.

Print edition and distribution

The Times-Reporter is published as a morning broadsheet, issued daily for subscribers across Tuscarawas County and the surrounding coverage area. The paper's historic home was on Wabash Avenue Northwest in New Philadelphia; public listings now place its headquarters in Canton, Ohio, reflecting the consolidation of Gannett's northeastern Ohio operations around the larger Canton market and the offices of its sister paper, The Repository. Like other Gannett dailies, the print edition is produced at a regional printing facility rather than on a local press, and distribution combines postal delivery with traditional carrier routes. The company's subscription terms, consistent across its Ohio titles, provide for non-print days and premium special editions that are billed as part of the subscription, a practice disclosed in customer-facing materials for 2025 and 2026. Customer service for delivery, billing, and account questions is handled through a dedicated help portal and service lines operated by the regional group, rather than through a walk-in office in New Philadelphia.

Digital presence

The paper's digital home, timesreporter.com, is a continuously updated news site built on the USA TODAY Network template shared by Gannett papers nationwide. The homepage blends locally produced stories with network content from USA Today and sister Ohio papers, covering everything from high school football honors to national political news and seasonal shopping guides. The site includes a digital replica eEdition of the print paper and is available through Gannett's mobile apps, giving subscribers page-for-page access to the printed edition alongside the continuously updated web feed. Social media distribution is a standard part of the paper's publishing workflow, with stories, photos, and video promoted to build audience and engagement, consistent with the Center for Community Journalism model of metrics-informed publishing. Reader services, including obituary submission, classified advertising, and subscription management, are handled online through the site and its linked help portal, which provides customer service hours on weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

Sister media concerns

The Times-Reporter sits within one of Gannett's densest regional clusters in Ohio. Its closest sister papers are The Independent of Massillon and The Repository of Canton, both dailies, and The Suburbanite, a weekly serving southern Summit County, all of which came into the GateHouse fold around the same 2007 era as part of the company's northeastern Ohio assembly. The proximity of Canton, roughly 35 minutes from New Philadelphia and home to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, makes The Repository a natural content partner, and the papers routinely share regional reporting, sports coverage, and opinion content across the USA TODAY Network. This clustering gives Times-Reporter readers access to reporting from larger newsrooms while allowing the smaller papers to pool resources for coverage of shared interests such as Stark and Tuscarawas county high school sports. The relationship also extends to operations, with printing, customer service, and back-office functions organized at the regional level.

Challenges and outlook

The Times-Reporter's challenges mirror those of the American community press as a whole: print circulation that has fallen sharply over the past decade, the migration of advertising to digital platforms, and the consolidation of newsroom and production functions into regional hubs. The shift of the listed headquarters from New Philadelphia to Canton is itself a marker of this consolidation, as is the reliance on a regional customer-service operation rather than a staffed downtown office. At the same time, the paper retains structural advantages. It is the only daily newspaper published for Tuscarawas County, giving it a near-monopoly on the county's print news habit and on the obituary and legal-notice functions that sustain community papers. Its high school sports coverage, centered on one of the nation's oldest rivalries, produces the kind of intensely local content that national outlets cannot replicate, and its position within Gannett's Ohio cluster gives it access to state and national reporting its own staff could never produce alone. The outlook depends on the same question facing every Gannett community paper: whether digital subscriptions and network efficiencies can support the local reporting that remains the Times-Reporter's reason for existing, a century and a half after its founding as the Iron Valley Reporter.