Originally established circa around 1945 as a four-sheet, letterhead-size tabloid by the daughter of Mrs. Allen Goddard of , the Perry Township Weekly began as a high school paper for Beech Grove High School. It was not until 1953, when it was purchased by Beech Grove businessman Louis A. Lukenbill and his wife, Clara, that it became a full-scale community newspaper.
The Lukenbills operated from a small back room behind a gas station at Fifth and Main streets. They later moved to larger quarters behind the Driskolis Restaurant, also on Main Street. In 1963, they built their long-time home at Third and Main streets, making it one of the first structures in the Midwest to be built exclusively for a community newspaper. Circulation reached over 40,000 each Thursday. Coverage extended to on the east side, South Meridian Street on the west, on the south, and Raymond Street on the north. It was the largest free circulation newspaper in Indiana.
The Lukenbills sold the paper to Jerry Sargent, Joe Cline, and Ernie Lester in April 1968. It changed hands again in April 1982, when it was purchased from Jerry and Frances Sargent by the Reporter-Times, Inc., publisher of several papers. After several years in the early 1980s as , the newspaper returned to the name in January 1987.
The newspaper underwent two more major changes. The first change occurred in 1999 when its name changed to The Southside Times. In March of 2006, Brian Kelly, the CEO of Times Leader Publications, LLC, and Rick Myers purchased The Southside Times. The newspaper’s operations moved to US 31 South in Indianapolis in 2012. The second major change occurred in January 2013 when Kelly and Myers changed the broadsheet format publication to a tabloid. Since 2019 The Southside Times‘ parent company has been Grow Local Media, LLC, still under the ownership of Kelly and Myers.
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