Pine Bluffs Post
The Pine Bluffs Post is a weekly community newspaper serving Pine Bluffs, Wyoming, and eastern Laramie County. Its masthead describes it as eastern Laramie County's community newspaper since 1908, and directory listings give the precise starting date of April 3, 1908. Published every Thursday, the Post covers the town of Pine Bluffs and the neighbouring eastern Laramie County communities of Burns and Albin, together with the ranching country, school districts and small towns along Wyoming's eastern border with Nebraska and near the Colorado line. It is a small weekly in the classic Wyoming sense: locally edited, printed on a set day, sold at a cover price of one dollar, and read as the record of its community.
Pine Bluffs is the eastern gateway town of Wyoming on Interstate 80 and the Union Pacific line, a historic railroad and agricultural community named for the pine-topped bluffs at the edge of town, with a population of 1,129 recorded at the 2010 census. Eastern Laramie County is wheat, cattle and railroad country, closer in daily life to Kimball, Nebraska, and to the farms of Weld County, Colorado, than to distant parts of its own state. The Post's subscription rates have reflected exactly that tri-state reality, with a local rate including Kimball and portions of Weld County, a tri-state rate for Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado, and a national rate for readers who have moved away.
Founded on April 3, 1908
The Post dates its founding to April 3, 1908. Library of Congress catalogue data used by genealogy and newspaper-directory services list The Pine Bluffs Post from 1908 to the current day, with the Library of Congress control number SN92066914 and OCLC number 25321466. The Wyoming Digital Newspaper Collection preserves Post issues from April 3, 1908, to September 29, 1921, within Plains to Peaks Historic Newspapers, the combined historic newspaper database of Colorado and Wyoming — so the paper's first thirteen years can be read and searched online by anyone tracing eastern Laramie County families or land.
A newspaper founded in Pine Bluffs in 1908 was founded in a young agricultural town. The community had grown with the railroad and with homesteading and dryland farming on the High Plains, at the junction of cattle trails from Texas and the transcontinental line — a heritage the town still presents in its Texas Trail Museum and in the monuments where the Texas Trail cattle route met the Union Pacific Railroad. The Post's early columns would have served settlers proving up claims, ranchers shipping cattle, merchants on Main Street and families whose nearest other newspaper was in Cheyenne, some forty miles west. Even without attributing specific stories to specific early issues, the function of a new weekly in such a place is clear: land notices, stock and crop reports, railroad and market news, school and church items, and the personal news by which isolated farm families stayed connected.
Publication Pattern, Office and Staff
The Post is published every Thursday by its publishing company — for many years Stevenson Post, Inc. — and entered as periodical matter at the United States Post Office at Pine Bluffs, with the U.S. Postal Service publication number USPS 433-120 recorded in its masthead. Its office address has been listed as 201 East 2nd Street, Pine Bluffs, WY 82082, with a mailing address of P.O. Box 68, Pine Bluffs, WY 82082-0068, telephone (307) 245-3763 and fax (307) 245-3325. Yearly subscription rates published in the paper in the early 2020s were forty-two dollars for the local rate including Kimball and portions of Weld County, forty-eight dollars for the tri-state rate and fifty-eight dollars nationally, with a student rate of thirty-four dollars also listed in an earlier issue.
Masthead information from the paper's Stevenson years names the working structure of the weekly: owners Gary W. and Sue Stevenson; Penny Merryfield as publisher and advertising manager (and in one issue publisher and managing editor, with production by Dave Clark); reporter Karen Lipska, whose byline appears across Post coverage of Burns and Pine Bluffs government and community news; columnist Bill Sniffin, a well-known Wyoming newspaper figure whose columns ran statewide; and secretary Jo Radcliffe, with Charlene Smith also listed as a reporter in an earlier masthead. A staff list of that shape — an owner couple, a publisher, one or two reporters and office support — is the real organisational chart of a rural weekly, in which the same people sell the advertisements, attend the council meetings, photograph the school events and lay out the pages.
What the Post Covers
The Post's coverage, visible across its print issues and its website at pinebluffspost.com, is the government and community life of eastern Laramie County. It reports the Pine Bluffs Town Council and the Burns Town Council, including swearing-in of mayors and council members, appointments, utility and infrastructure business and the ordinary votes that keep small towns running. It covers Laramie County School District 2 schools — Pine Bluffs Elementary and Pine Bluffs Junior/Senior High School, Burns Elementary and Burns Junior/Senior High School, and Albin Elementary — with sports, awards, graduations and school news. It publishes a community calendar, church and club items, senior centre news from the Pine Bluffs Senior Center, obituaries, letters to the editor, an opinion and editorial page, agricultural news for a wheat and cattle readership, and items from the smaller communities of Burns, Albin, Carpenter and the surrounding farm country.
Local colour in the Post is genuine rather than decorative. Its pages have carried stories such as a Pine Bluffs café displaying the town's photographic history on its walls, the history of the Burns post office building, veterans and recreation board meetings at the Albin Community Center, and the arrival of a new large-animal veterinarian at the Bluffs Veterinary Clinic — the sort of service news that matters intensely in a ranching community and appears in no other publication. Front-page volume numbering tells its own story of continuity: volume 110 in August 2018, volume 113 in June 2021, volume 114 in March 2022 and volume 117 in March 2025, an unbroken count from 1908 through changes of owner and technology. The paper has also carried the designation of a 2023 award-winning newspaper and a Wyoming Press Association membership mark in its pages.
The Stevenson Years
For more than thirty years the Post belonged to Gary and Sue Stevenson, Wyoming newspaper operators whose holdings grew from a single purchase into a multitude of newspapers in several states. Gary Stevenson, a University of Wyoming graduate, got his start in the industry as an advertising representative at the Cody Enterprise under publisher Bruce McCormack. Gary and Sue Stevenson bought the Saratoga Sun in 1994 in partnership with Loren “Teense” Wilford and his wife Sandy, and went on to own many community newspapers. Accounts of the Stevensons' purchases describe them, together with partners, as owning wholly or in part some twenty-nine titles across Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Colorado, South Dakota, New Mexico, Michigan, Idaho and Washington, focused on weekly and small daily community newspapers, with each paper operated as its own entity reflecting its own community rather than as a cookie-cutter product.
The Post was presented in those years as a Stevenson Newspaper, published by Stevenson Post, Inc., with the Stevenson philosophy visible in its local staffing and its eastern Laramie County focus. Gary Stevenson also owned the Saratoga Sun and, with Robb and Jen Hicks of Buffalo, purchased the Northern Wyoming Daily News in Worland, after the McCraken family's seventy-five years of ownership there — a transaction in which Stevenson explained that each of their newspapers operates as its own entity. Pine Bluffs readers therefore had a paper that was part of an experienced Wyoming weekly group yet edited in Pine Bluffs, by staff whose names and faces were local.
Sale to the Adelman Family in 2025
In 2025 the Stevenson family sold four newspapers — the Sidney Sun-Telegraph in Nebraska, the Saratoga Sun, the Pine Bluffs Post and the Western Nebraska Observer in Kimball, Nebraska — to the Adelman family and Blazing Trails Media, LLC, according to an announcement by John Cribb of Cribb & Associates, who represented the Stevenson family; the terms were not disclosed. Gary Stevenson said the family was proud of the quality work its employees had produced, called the ownership a ride of over thirty years, and said the Stevensons believed the newspapers would be in good hands with Matt and Lisa Adelman and their family, noting that Matt Adelman runs the Douglas Budget and the Glenrock Independent well.
Matt Adelman's background, as given in the sale announcement, is that of a career Wyoming newspaperman: raised in Casper, a graduate of the University of Utah with a degree in mass communication with a journalism emphasis, he returned to Wyoming and worked at newspapers in Casper, Thermopolis, Torrington, Douglas and Cody before settling with his family in Douglas more than thirty years ago. He and Gary Stevenson had worked together at the Cody Enterprise in their early years and remained friends. The sale therefore kept the Post in the hands of a Wyoming family newspaper operator rather than a distant chain — a transition from one Wyoming weekly tradition to another, with the Burns, Albin and Pine Bluffs coverage continuing under new ownership.
The Community Setting: Bluffs, Trails and Farms
The Post's territory has a depth of history unusual for a town of its size. The Pine Bluffs area preserves an archaeological site interpreting more than twelve thousand years of human activity, from early hunters to Plains tribes; the Texas Trail Museum presents homesteading, ranching and railroad material; and the town's recreation area offers trails around the bluffs themselves. The Post reports the modern version of that landscape: Interstate 80 and Union Pacific traffic passing the bluffs, wheat harvests and cattle operations, school consolidations and bond questions, town water and streets, county fair results at the Laramie County Fair in Cheyenne, hunting seasons, and the doings of a senior centre, a golf course and small churches and clubs. A weekly in such a place is not competing with metropolitan media; it is producing the only detailed written record of eastern Laramie County life.
That record matters beyond the county line. Former residents subscribe nationally, researchers consult the 1908–1921 digital run for homestead-era evidence, and the paper's obituaries and announcements are used by families across the tri-state area. Its classified and display advertisers — implement dealers, veterinary clinics, cafés, feed and fuel suppliers, churches and the towns themselves — map the economy its readers actually live in, on both sides of the Wyoming–Nebraska line.
Place Among Wyoming Weeklies
Wyoming, the least populated state, sustains a notable number of community weeklies relative to its population, because distances are long and county communities are distinct. The Post belongs to that company of papers — alongside titles in Saratoga, Douglas, Glenrock, Torrington and other towns in its owners' orbits — that are judged by their neighbours chiefly on whether they show up: to the council meeting, the school board, the funeral, the fair and the Friday night game. Its Wyoming Press Association membership and its recognition as an award-winning newspaper in 2023 place it within the state's professional community of such papers, whose members compete in peer contests and share the practical problems of printing and delivering news across a rural state.
Digital Presence and Continuing Publication
The Post maintains a website at pinebluffspost.com, through which current issues and articles are published and archived as paginated electronic editions, a Facebook page, and a company presence on LinkedIn. Print remains the anchor product: one dollar a copy, published on Thursdays, entered at the Pine Bluffs post office, and organised by volume and number as it has been since 1908. The pairing of a traditional Thursday print weekly with a searchable online archive of both recent and century-old issues is the practical settlement most surviving Wyoming weeklies have reached, and the Post exemplifies it.
More than a century after its first issue on April 3, 1908, the Pine Bluffs Post continues as eastern Laramie County's community newspaper — founded in a homestead-era railroad town, carried for three decades by Gary and Sue Stevenson as a stand-alone local paper within their Wyoming group, and transferred in 2025 to Matt and Lisa Adelman's Blazing Trails Media. Its subject remains what it has always been: Pine Bluffs, Burns, Albin and the farms and ranches between the bluffs and the state line, written down every Thursday.
