Gallup Sun
The Gallup Sun is a weekly newspaper published every Friday in Gallup, New Mexico, serving McKinley County and distributing across Cibola County, New Mexico, and Apache County, Arizona. Published by Gallup Sun Publishing, LLC, from offices at 1983 State Road 602, it is an alternative-weekly-style paper covering local issues, arts, culture and events in a city of about 22,000 on the edge of the Navajo Nation. Its role changed fundamentally on January 31, 2026, when the Gallup Independent published its final issue: the Sun became Gallup's remaining weekly newspaper, and the city's only local print newsroom publishing on a regular schedule.
A Friday weekly across three counties
The Sun's basic facts are stated on its own About page and in the New Mexico Press Association's member directory: it publishes its weekly newspaper every Friday, and its newspapers are distributed in McKinley, Cibola and Apache counties — a footprint that follows Gallup's real trade area, west across the Arizona line and east toward Grants. Its mailing address is P.O. Box 1212, Gallup, NM 87305, its office is at 1983 State Road 602 in Gallup, and its listed phone is (505) 722-8994. Office hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday to Friday, closed on holidays.
The three-county distribution is significant. Gallup is a regional hub whose shoppers, patients, students and workers come from the Navajo Nation, the Zuni area and communities along Interstate 40 in both states. A Gallup weekly that stopped at the city limits would miss most of its audience; the Sun's circulation map matches the hub-and-spoke geography of northwestern New Mexico.
What is known of its history
The Sun's documented history is shorter and thinner than that of the daily it outlasted, and this profile reports only what the record supports. The paper was operating by late 2015, when photographer and journalist Shepherd Waldenberger worked with the Gallup Sun in late 2015 and early 2016, capturing images and writing stories for editions then browsable at gallupsun.com. A later personal memoir of Gallup newspapering describes the present Sun as following another weekly publication that had existed in Gallup from 2002 to 2015. The Sun is published by Gallup Sun Publishing, LLC, and is listed among the New Mexico Press Association's member newspapers.
By the 2020s the Sun was an established part of the state's independent press landscape: ProgressNow New Mexico's survey of more than fifty independent local newsrooms in the state lists the Gallup Sun for western New Mexico, characterizing it as alt-weekly-style coverage of local issues, arts and culture, and events. A sample of its print product survives in a journalist's portfolio: a March 11, 2022 edition running to at least 55 pages, with arts coverage that included Gallup's New Deal art heritage — a substantial weekly package by any small-city measure.
How the Sun works
The Sun's About page, updated with a staff directory for the week of June 8, 2026, shows a working weekly's machinery. Letters to the editor and guest columns are accepted by email only, addressed to the managing editor — listed in 2026 as Molly Howell — and must carry the writer's full name and city or town; pen names are not allowed, identification is required, and all submissions are subject to the editor's approval. Operations in 2026 were directed by Alyssa Begay, to whom applications for the paper's Friday delivery-driver position were directed — the Sun hires independent contractors to deliver the paper each Friday across its territory.
Its reader services are priced in print-era fashion: past hard copies more than two weeks old sell for $2.00 per issue, and a flip-book edition of the newspaper can be bought online for $1.50 per issue. A 2022 recruitment notice for an editorial assistant gives another glimpse inside: a fast-paced pre-production editing role, at least 25 to 30 hours a week and often more, working at the direction of the publisher toward the moment the paper is published on Friday, with the possibility of growing into the managing editor's job.
The city it serves: Gallup
Gallup, whose Navajo name is Naʼnízhoozhí, is the county seat of McKinley County, with a population of 21,899 at the 2020 census. Founded in 1881 as a railroad town on the line that became the Santa Fe Railway, it is the most populous city between Flagstaff and Albuquerque along historic U.S. Route 66, and stands on the Trails of the Ancients Byway. A substantial percentage of its population is Native American, with residents from the Navajo, Hopi and Zuni tribes; the city is known as the Heart of Indian Country, sitting on the edge of the Navajo reservation near the Zuni Pueblo, and its economy has long run on trade with the surrounding Native nations — including the Native American jewelry trade, in which the price of silver is a live economic fact for local merchants.
The surrounding terrain made Gallup a popular location for Hollywood Westerns in the 1940s and 1950s, and its best-known gatherings — the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial and the Red Rock Balloon Rally — draw the region to town each year. For a weekly newspaper, Gallup offers an unusually rich beat: a county seat, a rail and Interstate 40 corridor town, a border community of the Navajo Nation, and an arts and trading center, all in one small city.
Coverage: issues, arts and culture
ProgressNow's one-line description — local issues, arts and culture, and events, in an alternative weekly style — fits what the Sun itself displays. Its sampled editions give generous space to the arts: the 2022 issue in the portfolio record carried museum and gallery material on Gallup's New Deal art collection, including a bronze sculpture donated by Anna Hyatt Huntington in 1941 and held at the public library. An alt-weekly sensibility in Gallup means covering the ceremonial and gallery scene, the trading-post economy, city and county government, schools and the social life of a tri-cultural city — a different emphasis from a traditional daily's government-and-sports core, and a complementary one while the two papers coexisted.
The Sun also presents itself socially where its readers are: it invites readers to follow it on Facebook and Instagram, with X and TikTok announced as coming, while the print Friday edition and its paid flip-book version remain the core product.
January 2026: the Independent closes
The Sun's position was transformed by its competitor's end. The Gallup Independent — Gallup's multi-day paper, published from 1911 and run for its last 62 years by John Zollinger and his son Bob — published its final issue on Saturday, January 31, 2026. The Independent had peaked at a circulation of 18,000 in 2006; its last run was a little under 5,000. Its publisher attributed the closure to an economic collapse in the area, with the rise of social media, the COVID-19 pandemic, tariff impacts on newsprint, sharply decreased advertising, and the rising price of silver stalling the Native jewelry economy all cited as factors.
Source New Mexico's reporting, carried across the state's press, stated the consequence directly: the Independent's departure left the area with only a weekly newspaper, the Gallup Sun, along with a monthly human-interest magazine and local radio stations. The closure also eliminated a crucial printing facility, and was cited in coverage of New Mexico's new tax-credit law supporting local journalism as a painful example of the state's news-desert problem — journalists in New Mexico having fallen by roughly sixty percent over a decade, with six counties lacking any local news outlet at all.
Gallup's remaining weekly
That context defines the Sun's present importance. The Independent had covered local government, schools, health care and high school sports four times a week; its readers now turn to a paper that publishes once a week, on Fridays, with a small staff and contractor delivery. The Sun's June 2026 hiring notice for a Friday delivery driver — requiring a dependable vehicle, local knowledge, a clean driving record and a background check — is a small but telling artifact: in the new Gallup news economy, getting the weekly physically to three counties is itself part of the journalism infrastructure.
The Sun is also, notably, still hiring and still publishing on schedule — an operating newsroom in a state where the trend has run the other way.
Place in New Mexico's press
The Gallup Sun belongs to the surviving tier of independent New Mexico journalism catalogued by the state press association and by statewide newsroom surveys: locally published, print-first, community-scaled. Its peers in the northwest include the Navajo Times and the Cibola Citizen; its distinct position is Gallup itself, the largest community on the Navajo border. In a region where the nearest metropolitan papers are in Albuquerque and Phoenix, the Sun is the local record for a city whose significance — as a trading, rail and cultural crossroads — is far larger than its population.
The Sun after the daily
The Gallup Sun began its documented life in the shadow of a century-old daily, as the city's alternative weekly. It enters its second decade as something else: Gallup's only newspaper. Every Friday, from its office on State Road 602, the Sun publishes for McKinley, Cibola and Apache counties — government and arts, events and argument — carrying alone a local news tradition in Gallup that dates to 1911. Whether a weekly can hold a daily's territory is the open question of Gallup journalism; that the Sun is there to try is the fact this profile records.
