Over the span of 101 years, nine weekly newspapers served Sumner’s citizens. A couple of the nine were just a change in name; the ownership stayed the same. Some papers had a very long life, some ran for only a few years.  For 41 years  Sumner enjoyed two local weekly papers at the same time.  

From the turn of the century to the mid 1920’s the local weekly was the freshest source of reading material in most households.  This was an era when most farmers and many small town residents did not subscribe to daily papers from nearby large cities.

The earlier Sumner papers carried some world and  national news but most of that coverage was short human interest stories from large services that provided the same pre-written,  typeset, ready to print articles to local papers.

The local area news was gathered, written, typeset and printed by the editor, sometimes with the help of a partner, family or an employee. The workload limited the size of the paper from four to eight pages each week.

Over time, improved printing technology allowed Sumner's papers to grow larger but they still left national news to the local dailies and focused just on the Sumner and valley area.

The last wholly local newspaper was the Sumner News Review, it ended its run in 1990.