For more than 70 years, The Daily Item has provided news for its hometown of Sunbury and the Valley as a whole. On July 1, 1937, The Daily Item was born as a result of the merger of The Sunbury Daily and the Evening Item. Though both newspapers had been in existence since the mid to late 1800s, they had to merge after a flood in 1936 changed their outlooks. The Sunbury Daily was the city's first daily newspaper and it had been in existence since 1872 when Jacob Eichholtz and William L. Dewart began publishing it. The Evening Item had been in existence since 1893.