During Bowles' lifetime, and subsequently, the
Republican office was a sort of school for young journalists, especially in the matter of pungency and conciseness of style, one of his maxims being: "put it all in the first paragraph". The Republican launched the careers of several prominent journalists and novelists.
I. E. "Sy" Sanborn, longtime Chicago sportswriter and one of the original organizers of the
Baseball Writers' Association of America in 1908, began his career at
The Republican. Radio's "poet laureate"
Norman Corwin was a reporter for
The Republican in the 1930s. Novelist
Tom Wolfe was a reporter for
The Springfield Union in the late 1950s. The title "Ms." was first suggested by an anonymous 1901 letter to
The Republican. The letter read, in part, "To call a maiden Mrs. is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title Miss. Yet it is not always easy to know the facts... The abbreviation 'Ms.' is simple, it is easy to write, and the person concerned can translate it properly according to the circumstances." In 1915,
Samuel Bowles, who had been dead for nearly four decades, was compared to
William Rockhill Nelson, publisher of
The Kansas City Star, who died that year. "Of course,
The Star was William R. Nelson even more than
The Springfield Republican was
Samuel Bowles," wrote the
Chicago Post in a tribute. During the 1920s, Sherman Bowles, son of Samuel Bowles IV, constructed a modern printing plant at 32 Cypress Street in Springfield and launched the hostile takeover of three competitors. His newspaper monopoly controlled a combined circulation of 280,000. He died on March 3, 1952, of a heart attack at the age of 61. In 1960, Advance Publications, owned by the Newhouse family, purchased a 40 percent stock interest in the Republican Company, Inc., holder of
The SpringfieId Union,
The Springfield Sunday Republican and
The Springfield Daily News. The Newark, New Jersey–based company had an agreement with the Bowles heirs to purchase their 45 percent stock holdings in the Springfield companies on Sept. 1, 1967. The purchase was opposed by the editors of the newspapers and a prolonged legal battle ensued. An organization called the Springfield Newspapers became the local division of the Newhouse family empire with David Starr, a vice president for Advance, serving as publisher. The
Springfield Daily News and the
Morning Union merged operations in the 1970s, operating as separate papers, even endorsing different candidates for the same offices. The circulation for the
Morning Union was reported at 128,041 on October 8, 1972. The
Springfield Daily News circulation stood at 92,342 on September 30, 1972. Eventually the two newspapers were combined into
The Union-News (a morning paper) in 1988, with
The Sunday Republican published on Sundays. Larry McDermott served as publisher for a decade beginning in 1999 and the newspaper reverted to its historical, pre-
Union-News name of
The Republican around 2003. At the start of McDermott's tenure, circulation for the
Union-News was 90,555. By September 2005, it had slipped by less than 5 percent to 86,359. With McDermott's retirement in December 2009, George Arwady became publisher of
The Republican. He was previously publisher of
The Newark Star-Ledger, where he had threatened to shutter that newspaper amid financial crises. In 2019, the New England Newspaper Association awarded
The Republican its Newspaper of the Year as a daily, and among Sunday newspapers, for its investigative reporting on the Springfield Police Department controversies earlier that year. Longtime editor and Yankee Quill winner Wayne E. Phaneuf retired in 2020 and was succeeded by Cynthia G. Simison and later Larry Parnass. As with many daily newspapers,
The Republican has seen its advertising base erode and circulation shrink in recent years. Its reported daily circulation was down to 8,593 in September 2025, a tenth of where it stood one quarter of a century earlier. The newspaper marked its 200th anniversary on September 8, 2024. ==Images==