Like most small towns Beloit at
one time had several newspapers competing for a slice of the
available readership. Beloit had as many as four newspapers on
the street at one time. The first was the Beloit Messenger published
in 1846, but due to lack of interest it didn’t last long.
The Beloit Journal was the second paper to be published making
its appearance in June of 1848 as a weekly. It was the great-grandfather
of today’s Daily News. As was the case with early papers
the driving force behind them was politics, and the Journal was
politically aligned with the Whig party, soon to evolve into
the Republican party.
A weekly Democratic newspaper called The Herald was started in
1857, and shortly after that The Beloit Times, a Republican paper,
made its appearance. The two publishers, De Lorma Brooks and
N. O. Perkins, respectively, made an arrangement whereby the
Democratic Herald was printed on one side of the sheet, and the
Republican Times was printed on the other. Mr. Perkins eventually
bought out Mr. Brooks interest in the paper and changed the name
to the Beloit Courier.
The market was too small, however, to support two Republican
papers, so the two were consolidated under the name Journal and
Courier. Then in 1864 the publisher Mr. A. Paine announced that
the paper would not be allied to any political party, and the
paper reappeared as the Beloit Journal.
In February of 1866 Chalmers Ingersoll founded the Beloit Free
Press as a daily. That same year Ingersoll bought the Beloit
Journal. Over the next several years ownership of the paper alternated,
and the name similarly changed from the Free Press to the Journal
and back to the Free Press.
The 1870s saw several papers come and go: The spring of 1870
saw the publication of the semi-weekly 
Register,
but it didn’t last; in 1872 Henry Hobart published the quarterly
Beloit Crescent for about a year until he joined the Free Press
as associate editor; the Democratic weekly the Graphic made its
appearance in 1877; July 1, 1878, Charles Guernsey and David
Welch began publishing the Daily Herald, an evening paper; in
August of 1878 the Free Press began issuing a daily paper dubbed
the Phonograph, and in 1879 Hobart continued this with the Daily
Free Press.
Soon after Julius Truesdell became associated with the Free Press
in 1879 , he founded a weekly paper called The Outlook. Around
1886 this evolved into the Daily Citizen, and after changing
hands a couple of times it ended up in the hands of C. W. Metzger,
who renamed it the Daily News.
January 1, 1897, D. B. Worthington took over the business and
editorial management of the Beloit Daily News, coming from the
staff of the Chicago Times-Herald. The Daily News was Democratic
in politics, but due to the dominance of Republicans in Beloit
the paper was unsuccessful. It was taken over by two young men
who changed its name to the Morning News, and it survived under
that name for a few months. Just as it was about to go under,
Mr. Worthington again took it over, restored its original name,
and made it an afternoon and politically independent newspaper.
In the ensuing years Worthington of the Daily News and Ingersoll
of the Free Press enjoyed a lively competition. After Ingersoll
died in 1908, the Free Press was run by a group of Beloit men,
and finally in 1915 it was taken over by the Beloit Daily News.
This ended the era of multiple newspapers in Beloit, and the
same Daily News continues to be published to this day.
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