About Us

Introduction

With circulation of about 8,800 daily, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle is Wyoming's second-largest daily newspaper and its largest locally owned newspaper.

Headquartered in Cheyenne, our paper is distributed throughout southeast Wyoming, and into western Nebraska, with the majority of our circulation within Laramie County.

The newspaper is a labor- and capital-intensive business with around 100 full-time employees and 30 part-time employees. Each year we invest a great deal of time and money in keeping our facility on the front lines of technology, to produce the area's best up to date source of news and information.

The Wyoming Tribune Eagle is striving more than ever to better our community, staying involved in community events and activities and donating money and in-kind support to various community organizations.

Associations

Our newspaper is part of the Wyoming Newspaper Group, an affiliation of newspapers with joint ownerships and interests, along with the Laramie Daily Boomerang, the Rawlins Daily Times and the Rock Springs Daily Rocket-Miner.

We are also an active supporter and participant in the Wyoming Press Association, a statewide trade organization representing all of the state's daily and weekly newspapers, and members of two national trade groups, the Newspaper Association of America and the National Newspaper Association. These associations serve as a resource for training and information affecting our industry, as well as tracking legislative issues affecting newspapers.

The newspaper also belongs to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, an organization that audits our circulation figures, to ensure accurate and reliable records for our advertisers.

History

On September 19, 1867, Nathan Addison Baker published Vol. 1, No.1 of The Cheyenne Leader, the Tribune's earliest predecessor, in the boomtown of Cheyenne. Baker's Leader recorded Indian massacres, activities of the vigilantes who took the law into their own hands and the great fire of 1870, which burned much of the town.

After Baker, the Leader changed hands a couple of times before being sold to Col. Edward Archibald Slack in the mid-1890s. Slack was the owner, publisher and editor of the competing Cheyenne Daily Sun, which he had founded on March 3, 1876. He had become one of the most influential editors in the Wyoming Territory, and was an advocate of water, sewer and electric street lighting systems for Cheyenne and higher salaries for public school teachers. Slack is also considered by many to be the father of Cheyenne Frontier Days. Slack sold his newspaper in 1904, and it subsequently went through more ownership changes.

The year before Slack combined the Sun and Leader, a new newspaper had entered Cheyenne's publishing scene, The Wyoming Tribune, started in 1894 and owned by J.M. Carey. In 1904, one of its most successful editors and managers, William C. Deming, organized a company that purchased the Tribune, which became the state's largest newspaper. Deming, with the powerful and Republican-oriented Tribune as his base, took over the Leader and in March of 1921 consolidated the two papers, renaming the newspaper the Wyoming State Tribune.

Meanwhile, The Wyoming Eagle was a financially struggling weekly and was the only newspaper in the state with a Democratic editorial policy. The Eagle was published in a small office above Roedel's Drug Store on West 17th Street. U.S. Sen. John B. Kendrick persuaded an energetic young newspaperman, Tracy S. McCraken, to consider taking the Eagle over. Using $3,000 he had borrowed, Tracy became owner and manager of the Eagle on June 13, 1926. By early spring of 1927, Tracy was operating in the black. By the fall, both he and the Eagle were out of debt.

In 1937, Deming, in ill health, sold his paper to Alfred G. Hill of Fort Collins, a seasoned and successful newspaperman. By August 1, 1937, Tracy had worked his Republican opposition into a merger under which each retained a half interest in the two papers. Tracy assumed publishing control over both, however, the Eagle and Tribune each retained their political postures, and the staffs of the newspapers remained separate.

In 1939, Tracy and Speidel Newspapers Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif. bought Hill's stock in the enterprise, and then Tracy and a group of business associates bought the Speidel interests in the paper, bringing it under local ownership. Tracy's son, Robert S. McCraken, took over the role of publisher in 1957, and in 1985 moved the newspaper to its current location.

Mike McCraken, joined the newspaper staff in 1987 as promotions manager, after working in various newspaper industry jobs. Robert served as president and publisher until his death on August 21, 1989. In July 1990, Mike assumed the positions of executive editor and member of the newspapers' Executive Committee, before becoming publisher in January 1991.

In April 1994, the Tribune and Eagle were merged into one newspaper, the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, which is owned primarily by the McCraken family, with a few non-family members owning shares in the company. The McCraken family is responsible for the longest continuous ownership in the history of the company, dating back to the Eagle in 1926 and the Tribune in 1937.

In October 2015, The McCraken family sold the Wyoming Tribune Eagle to APG Media of the Rockies.