Bingham News Chronicle
The Bingham News Chronicle is a weekly newspaper published in Blackfoot, Idaho, owned by Adams MultiMedia. Its name, adopted in 2020, joins the two halves of its ancestry: the Blackfoot news tradition that began with the Evening Bulletin in 1917, and the Bingham County Chronicle that Adams Publishing Group launched in 2019. After a pandemic-era hiatus that began in 2022, the paper resumed print publication as a weekly in 2025, restoring a hometown newspaper tradition in the Bingham County seat that stretches back more than a century.
Founded as the Evening Bulletin in 1917
The paper's founding is dated to 1917, when W. A. McVicar established the Evening Bulletin in Blackfoot. The new paper entered a crowded local field: Blackfoot readers of that era were also served by papers including the Idaho Republican, founded by Byrd Trego, and the Blackfoot Optimist, which became the Bingham County News in 1918 before being absorbed by the Idaho Republican in 1930. McVicar ran the Bulletin for nine years. In 1926 he sold it to John L. Brady, a former editor of the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello.
Three years after Brady's purchase, in 1929, the Evening Bulletin merged with the Blackfoot Republican to form the Daily Bulletin. The combination set the pattern for the paper's next ninety years: a Blackfoot daily, under a succession of owners, carrying a succession of names, but continuously rooted in the same community.
The Brady years and a line of owners
Brady died of a heart attack in 1933. His widow, Mrs. Lee Crittenden Brady, operated the Daily Bulletin together with Trego until 1939, when they sold it to Edwin H. Paysen and John L. Rider. In 1942 the buyer was W. R. Twining, publisher of the Crockett Signal in California, who then closed the Signal. Harold H. Smith, formerly the owner of the Northside News at Jerome, Idaho, bought the Blackfoot paper from Twining in 1947.
Smith sold in 1957 to Drury R. Brown, who had been business manager at The Hutchinson News in Kansas. Under Brown the paper made two of its defining changes. In 1960 it switched from evening to morning publication, and around that time its name changed from the Daily Bulletin to the Blackfoot News. In 1981 it was renamed The Morning News; its circulation at that point was reported at 6,700.
From local ownership to the chains
Brown died on April 1, 1986. Three months later his widow, Catherine Brown, sold The Morning News to Gloucester Suburban Newspapers Inc. of New Jersey, a company co-owned by Peter Bernhard and William Dean Singleton and affiliated with MediaNews Group. The chain era had arrived in Blackfoot. In September 1987, American Publishing Company, a subsidiary of Hollinger Inc., bought the paper. At some later point The Morning News passed to Horizon Publications Inc.
By the 2010s the paper was struggling. In 2018, KIFI-TV reported that the Morning News was plagued by production problems and that nearly a dozen employees had been fired or had quit. Bingham County's wider local coverage had also thinned: the Shelley Pioneer, another Adams paper serving the county's north end, had closed in 2017, leaving communities such as Shelley, Firth, Aberdeen and Fort Hall with reduced reporting.
Adams launches the Chronicle, 2019
Adams Publishing Group answered that gap directly. In March 2019 it launched the Bingham County Chronicle, a new five-day-per-week newspaper published Tuesday through Friday and Sunday, with a website at bcchron.com. The first edition, dated March 5, was delivered to all residents and businesses in Bingham County; later editions went to subscribers, at ten dollars a month, with a choice of the Post Register of Idaho Falls or the Idaho State Journal of Pocatello included at no extra cost. The Chronicle started with a six-person staff of reporters, advertising staff and an office manager.
Adams' regional president and publisher Travis Quast framed the launch to the Post Register as partly a return — the company going back, in a broader range, to where it had been — and partly a growth bet on a county of nearly 50,000 people situated between Pocatello and Idaho Falls, with economic development to match.
Merger into the Bingham News Chronicle
The two Blackfoot papers became one in 2020. That year Adams acquired the Blackfoot Morning News and merged it with the Bingham County Chronicle to form the Bingham News Chronicle — the 1917 lineage and the 2019 start-up under a single masthead, owned by the company now known as Adams MultiMedia. The merger ended a brief period in which Blackfoot, a city of well under 20,000 people, had supported competing local papers, and it reunited the historic Bulletin-Morning News readership with the newer Chronicle operation.
The combined paper's headquarters have been listed at 305 S. Arthur in Pocatello, reflecting the structure of Adams' eastern Idaho group, in which the Blackfoot paper is produced alongside its larger sister dailies rather than from a standalone Blackfoot plant.
Hiatus and the 2025 return
The merged paper's first run was interrupted in 2022, when it went on hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic period. For roughly three years Blackfoot was again without its own print newspaper. In 2025 the Bingham News Chronicle resumed print publication as a weekly — the frequency under which it is now published.
Coverage of the return, carried in the sister Standard Journal of Rexburg in October 2025, described a paper rebuilt around community sponsorship and subscription support. Retired attorney Dwight Baker and Premier Technology stepped forward as founding sponsors of the relaunch. The paper's representative, Fennell, credited that sponsorship with making the return possible, and stressed that sustaining the paper would require broad participation — print, digital and combined subscriptions, and advertising from local businesses, which were offered weekly distribution throughout the Blackfoot area and an online presence at BinghamNewsChronicle.com.
What the returned paper covers
The relaunched Chronicle stated its editorial promise in plain terms: from Friday night football to city council meetings, from harvest reports to new business openings — if it is happening in Blackfoot, it is in the Chronicle. Its opinion page was set aside for columns from well-known local voices, and the Blackfoot Chamber of Commerce was given a weekly column on business news and community development.
That agenda reflects Bingham County's economy and institutions: an agricultural county known for potatoes, with county government, schools and small businesses generating the week's news. The paper also benefits from its place in Adams MultiMedia's East Idaho group, sharing reporters with the Post Register in Idaho Falls and the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello, so that regional and state stories reach Blackfoot readers with the resources of two dailies behind them.
Blackfoot and Bingham County
Blackfoot is the county seat and largest city in Bingham County, a Snake River Plain county of nearly 50,000 people at the time of the Chronicle's launch, lying between the larger media markets of Idaho Falls and Pocatello. The county's communities — Blackfoot, Shelley, Firth, Aberdeen and the Fort Hall area — are exactly the places that regional dailies cover lightly and that a dedicated county paper exists to serve. The Fort Hall presence, home of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and the farming towns along the Snake River give the paper a wider beat than the city limits suggest.
A century of names, one tradition
Evening Bulletin, Daily Bulletin, Blackfoot News, The Morning News, Bingham County Chronicle, Bingham News Chronicle: the mastheads changed with owners, mergers and economics, but the thread from McVicar's 1917 start-up to the weekly that returned to print in 2025 is continuous. The Bingham News Chronicle today is a weekly owned by Adams MultiMedia, headquartered with its sister papers in Pocatello, publishing for Blackfoot and Bingham County in print and online — and carrying, in its compound name, the full history of Blackfoot journalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
