Grant Tribune-Sentinel
The Grant Tribune-Sentinel is a weekly newspaper serving Grant, Nebraska, the county seat of Perkins County, and the surrounding High Plains communities of southwestern Nebraska near the Colorado border. Published from Central Avenue in downtown Grant, it is the county's newspaper of record, covering the Perkins County government, the Grant city council, Perkins County Schools, agriculture and the social record of a county of fewer than three thousand people. The paper spent forty-four years, from 1977 to 2021, in the hands of the Johnson family of Johnson Publications, and since December 2021 it has been owned by the Mullen brothers' High Plains News North company, part of the Mullen Newspaper Company group.
Grant and Perkins County
Grant is a city of 1,197 people, according to the 2020 census, and it is both the county seat and the largest community in Perkins County, whose total population was 2,858 in the same count. The county covers some 884 square miles of arid, gently rolling High Plains — about 3.2 people per square mile — and its western boundary is the Colorado state line. It is the easternmost Nebraska county to observe Mountain Time, a reflection of its orientation toward Colorado as much as toward the rest of Nebraska. Grant was platted in 1886 when the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad was extended to the point, and the city was named for Ulysses S. Grant, the eighteenth president of the United States.
Perkins County was organised in 1887, divided from Keith County after settlers farming the High Plains south of the Platte River petitioned for a county of their own, distinct from the Sandhills ranching country to the north. It is believed to have been named for Charles E. Perkins, president of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. Grant competed with the townsites of Madrid and Lisbon for the county seat, and after a series of contested elections and a legal challenge, Grant was confirmed in the role — a status that has anchored the town, its courthouse and its newspaper ever since. The county economy runs on irrigated row-crop farming, mainly corn, wheat and soybeans grown under centre pivots, and on cattle, supported by the grain elevators and farm businesses of Grant.
A town that began with a store and a newspaper
Newspapering in Grant is as old as the town. The Nebraska Association of County Officials' history of Perkins County records that Grant began with a store and a newspaper, and that when the first Burlington train pulled into Grant for a Fourth of July celebration the year after the town was founded, a steady influx of settlers followed; by the autumn of 1887 Grant boasted three banks and many additional businesses. A newspaper was not an ornament in such a settlement — it was infrastructure, carrying land and legal notices, railroad and market news, and the booster case for the townsite itself.
The early press scene in Perkins County was crowded. The historical newspaper holdings catalogued for the county at the Hastings Memorial Library list a long succession of titles: the Grant Tribune Sentinel in its several name forms, the Perkins County Herald Sentinel, the Perkins County News, the Perkins County Pioneer, the Perkins County Sentinel and the Perkins County Tribune, alongside papers in the county's smaller towns — the Leader and the Elsie Leader at Elsie, the Madrid Era, Madrid Herald and Madrid News at Madrid, and the Venango Argus and Venango Union at Venango. Most of those titles disappeared as the county's population thinned, and the Tribune-Sentinel in Grant emerged as the survivor. Digitised archives of a Grant paper under the Tribune Sentinel name run from 1911 onward and total nearly twenty-three thousand scanned pages, a measure of the depth of the record the town's press accumulated.
The Johnson family era, 1977–2021
The modern history of the paper is dominated by one family. Johnson Publications began with Loral Johnson, who joined the staff of The Imperial Republican in neighbouring Chase County in 1952. Loral and his wife Elna — who worked as a linotype operator at the Republican before their family grew — purchased the Imperial paper on January 1, 1968. In 1977 they expanded: Johnson Publications Inc. was officially organised that year when the Johnsons purchased The Holyoke Enterprise in Holyoke, Colorado, and The Grant Tribune-Sentinel. A third phase of growth added The Wauneta Breeze in 1982.
The second generation took over on April 1, 1999, when the Johnsons retired and their daughters' families — Brenda Brandt and her husband Bob, based in Holyoke, and Lori Pankonin and her husband Russ, based in Imperial — purchased Johnson Publications after twenty-two and a half years of involvement in the business. Russ and Lori Pankonin had joined the family operation in 1982 as co-editors of the Wauneta Breeze; Brenda Brandt had started as news editor of the Holyoke Enterprise in 1979 and became its publisher. Across the three papers, the family made community commitment its stated identity, and the Grant paper was published as part of that small, cross-border group for more than four decades in total. As America's Newspapers summarised the sale that ended the era, the Johnson name had been linked to area newspapers for sixty-nine years, counting from Loral Johnson's start in 1952.
Sale to the Mullen brothers, 2021
In December 2021 the Johnson family sold its three weekly newspapers — The Holyoke Enterprise, The Imperial Republican and The Grant Tribune-Sentinel — to brothers Jesse and Lloyd Mullen, doing business as High Plains News North LLC. The sale included the three office buildings housing the newspapers. The broker for the Johnson family was Dave Gauger of Gauger Media Service. The Mullens, like the Johnsons, grew up in a newspaper family; Jesse Mullen's career started as a delivery boy at the Sioux City Journal, and he and his wife Sasha already owned and operated four newspapers in Montana and Idaho when the Nebraska and Colorado purchase was made. The brothers described themselves as honoured to be the new caretakers of the three newspapers, and the Johnson family said it was pleased to pass its publishing interests to owners who shared its appreciation of commitment to community in local journalism.
The purchase fitted the Grant paper into a larger structure, the Mullen Newspaper Company, founded by Jesse Mullen in 2018 with the purchase of two Montana papers. The company grew through acquisitions in Montana, Idaho, Colorado and Nebraska, and in December 2021 its purchase of the Johnson group was recorded among its defining expansions; by the middle of the decade it operated some twenty publications across six states. In May 2023 Jesse Mullen stepped down as chief executive and was replaced by Alex Barta. For Grant, the practical change was one of ownership rather than identity: the Tribune-Sentinel continued as the town's weekly under owners based outside Nebraska for the first time, but within a company built specifically around small community papers.
What the paper covers
The Tribune-Sentinel's coverage is the standard portfolio of a county-seat weekly, adapted to a High Plains farm county. It reports the Perkins County Commissioners and the Grant City Council, carries the county's legal and public notices, and follows Perkins County Schools — the district centred in Grant, whose high school serves as the county's school hub — including its sports teams, the Plainsmen. Agricultural news is central: crop and irrigation conditions, farm programmes, 4-H and FFA activity such as the Perkins County Trail Riders 4-H Club, the county fair, and the business of the elevators and implement dealers on which the local economy depends. Community coverage takes in church and club news, anniversaries, reunions, art shows and community gatherings, and the obituaries and memorials through which a small county records its generations.
Reference listings for the paper have put its weekly circulation at approximately one thousand copies — a substantial reach in a county of 2,858 people — with advertising sold by the column inch at rates typical of small Nebraska weeklies. The paper maintains a web presence at granttribune.com, extending its print coverage to former residents and family members who have left Perkins County, a readership that small-county papers have always served through mail subscriptions and now serve online.
Office and publication details
The Tribune-Sentinel's office is on Central Avenue in downtown Grant — directory listings place it at 325 and 327 Central Avenue, Grant, NE 69140 — within the Grant Commercial Historic District, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The paper's telephone number, (308) 352-4211, has been published consistently across directories, along with a fax line. Its building was one of the three newspaper office buildings included in the 2021 sale to High Plains News North, so the paper continues to work from its own premises in the centre of the town it covers, one block's remove from the courthouse business that forms a large part of its weekly news.
Working with its sister papers
For most of its modern life the Tribune-Sentinel was not produced in isolation. Under Johnson Publications it formed a three-paper group with The Imperial Republican, some thirty miles east in Imperial, and The Holyoke Enterprise, across the state line in Holyoke, Colorado, and the family's second-generation owners divided their work across the group: Lori Pankonin handled much of the business side and wrote a popular personal column that ran in all the papers, while Brenda Brandt served as sales team manager for Johnson Publications, coordinating the multiple special sections on which the newspapers collaborated. Joint special sections — agricultural editions, graduation and fair supplements, and advertising features sold across the three towns — were the economic glue of such groups, letting a Grant advertiser reach Imperial and Holyoke readers in the same buy. That structure passed intact to the Mullen brothers in 2021, when the three papers and their three office buildings were sold as a single package, and the Tribune-Sentinel continued to be published as one of a matched set of High Plains weeklies rather than as a standalone operation.
The paper's place in Perkins County
Perkins County has lost most of the newspapers it once had. The Madrid, Elsie and Venango titles catalogued in the county's historical holdings are gone, and the Tribune-Sentinel is the publication that remains, published from the county seat that Grant fought to become in the 1880s. Its history runs through the classic stages of the American rural weekly: a frontier townsite paper founded alongside the town's first store, consolidation into a surviving title, four decades of family ownership under the Johnsons, and absorption into a modern small-group publisher that specialises in keeping such papers alive. For a county of fewer than three thousand people spread across 884 square miles of irrigated High Plains, the weekly paper remains the one institution that writes down, every week, what the courthouse did, what the school teams did, what the crops are doing and who has died — the working memory of Perkins County.
