Newport Mercury

The Newport Daily News

Front page of the inaugural edition of the Newport Daily News (1846).
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner(s)	Edward A. Sherman Publishing Co.
Publisher	William F. Lucey
Editor	Sheila L. Mullowney
Founded	1846
Headquarters	101 Malbone Road, Newport, Rhode Island 02840 United States
Circulation	13,000 daily, 14,000 Saturday
Website	newportdailynews.com

The Newport Daily News is an independent six-day daily newspaper serving Newport County, Rhode Island. It publishes in the mornings on weekdays (Monday through Friday) and in the morning on Saturdays. The Daily News is the state's largest family-owned newspaper.

The Daily News has been locally owned since it was founded in 1846. It was named Newspaper of the Year by the New England Newspaper Association in 1991, 2001 and 2004.

Edward A. Sherman Publishing Company, the family-owned publisher of the Daily News, also prints three free weekly newspapers in southern Rhode Island: Mercury, a Wednesday alternative weekly covering Bristol, Newport and Washington counties; the Friday Newport Navlog, the U.S. Navy's oldest base newspaper (founded 1901), covering Naval Station Newport; and Ocean State Independent, mailed to non-Daily News subscribers on Aquidneck Island.

The Mercury, another publication of the Daily News, traces a lineage as one the oldest newspapers in the country. The history of that publication dates back to 1758, when the widow and son of James Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's brother, established the Newport Mercury as a weekly publication, making Ann Franklin the first woman in the Colonies to publish and edit a newspaper.

The Mercury was published regularly up to the time the British landed in Newport, when the press and types were buried. (The press, also used by Solomon Southwick to print copies of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, can be seen in the Museum of Newport History in downtown Newport.) After the Revolutionary War, the Mercury was issued again.