About Scranton Tribune

Scranton Tribune

The Scranton Tribune was a morning daily newspaper published in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the anthracite coal city of Lackawanna County. It was founded in 1891 and, through a long sequence of mergers, sales and revivals, its name survived, with interruptions, for more than a century, until the Tribune was merged with its sister paper, the Scranton Times, to form The Times-Tribune on July 27, 2005. Along the way the Tribune shared a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting in 1959, served for decades as the Republican morning voice against the Democratic afternoon Times, and twice died and was revived before its final absorption.

Few American newspaper names had a more complicated biography. The Tribune was merged away in 1910, restored in 1936, merged away again in 1987, closed in 1990, relaunched the same year under new owners, and finally merged away a third time in 2005. To write the history of the Scranton Tribune is therefore to write the history of Scranton's whole newspaper market, of which the Tribune was, for most of a century, the morning half.

Founding and First Character, 1891 to 1910

The Scranton Tribune began publication on June 20, 1891, issued by the Tribune Publishing Company as a daily except Sunday, with Claude G. Whetstone recorded as an early editor. The paper was four pages long and eight columns wide, sold for two cents, carried Associated Press national and international reports, opinion and heavy local advertising, and printed no photographs. Its Sunday companion was The Scrantonian, founded in 1897.

The Tribune prided itself on an educated and prosperous readership and described its own outlook, in editorials and in a self-congratulatory tenth-anniversary publication, as holding progressive opinions in defence of Republican principles of government. It made a particular effort to serve Scranton's Welsh population, then the largest Welsh community in the world outside Wales itself, running articles about the Welsh homeland, its people, culture and literature, occasional Welsh poetry, and, on October 30, 1897, a local Republican campaign piece printed in the Welsh language.

Circulation Struggle Against the Times

For all its pride, the first Tribune struggled commercially. Its great rival was the Scranton Times, an afternoon paper older than the Tribune that had itself struggled under a succession of owners until E. J. Lynett bought it in 1895. Lynett, whose family published the Times for the next one hundred and twenty-eight years, cut a deal that let him use the Tribune's printing and typesetting machinery, a sign of how weak the morning paper's independent economics already were.

The contrast in the following years was stark. The proudly Democratic Times, championing the cause of the working man in a coal-mining city, climbed from a circulation of about 3,000 to more than 40,000. The Tribune's circulation stood at about 5,000 in a city whose population had passed 100,000. Unable to make a decent profit, the Tribune was put into receivership and sold in 1908. Scranton's other Republican paper, the Republican, was foundering at the same time, and the two papers saw little choice but to combine their resources.

The Tribune-Republican Merger, 1910 to 1936

The first incarnation of the Scranton Tribune ended in 1910, when it merged with The Morning Republican, Scranton's first newspaper, to create a combined paper that took the name Scranton Republican. The Tribune's name disappeared from Scranton newsstands for a generation, although the merged paper carried forward its plant, its Republican allegiance and much of its readership.

The combined Republican was sold in 1934 by Louis A. Watres and Laurence Hawley Watres. Two years later, in 1936, the new owners restored the old name, and the paper became the Scranton Tribune once again. The revival began the Tribune's second and longest incarnation, the period in which it established the reputation on which its later history rested: the morning Republican paper of northeastern Pennsylvania, owned separately from the Lynetts' Democratic Times, and edited for a readership of mine owners, merchants, professionals and Republican voters across the Lackawanna Valley.

The Goodman-Little Era

In 1938 Richard Little, the owner of Scranton's Sunday paper, The Scrantonian, teamed with Morris L. Goodman to buy the Tribune as well. The Goodman-Little family partnership, joining the daily Tribune to the Sunday Scrantonian under common ownership, continued for almost half a century, the longest stable ownership in the Tribune's history.

Under the partnership the Tribune and the Scrantonian operated as the morning and Sunday counterweight to the Lynett family's afternoon Times and, later, its Sunday Times. Scranton settled into the classic two-owner American newspaper pattern: competing newsrooms, competing editorial voices, a Republican morning paper and a Democratic afternoon paper, dividing the city's readers by party, by habit and by the hour of the day at which they took their news. The arrangement endured because anthracite Scranton, even as coal declined, remained a dense, literate, intensely local city that rewarded two distinct editorial identities.

The 1959 Pulitzer Prize

The Tribune's finest hour came in 1959, when it shared, with The Scrantonian, the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, No Edition Time. The prize went to reporter John Harold Brislin of the Scranton Tribune and the Scrantonian, for a four-year campaign against labour violence in his home city.

The Pulitzer citation credited Brislin with courage, initiative and resourcefulness in his effective reporting campaign, as a result of which ten corrupt union officials were sent to jail and a local union was emboldened to clean out its racketeering elements. It was the classic mid-century local-reporting prize: not a single story but years of sustained, personally risky coverage of corruption in the reporter's own community, where the targets knew where the newspaper office stood. The award placed the Tribune and the Scrantonian on the national honour roll of American journalism and remained the paper's proudest credential for the rest of its life. The Scranton Times had won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1946, which meant rival Scranton could claim, unusually for a city of its size, Pulitzer honours on both sides of its newspaper divide.

Sale, Merger and Closure, 1986 to 1990

The Goodman-Little partnership ended in stages. In 1986 Richard Little III sold his family's interest to the Goodmans, leaving the Goodman family in sole control. Only a year later, in 1987, Media One Corporation, a company unrelated to the cable operator of a similar name, bought out the Goodmans and merged the Tribune and The Scrantonian into a single seven-day morning paper, the Scrantonian-Tribune.

Media One could not turn the combined paper around. The anthracite economy that had sustained two Scranton dailies for a century had contracted for decades, advertising followed readers to Wilkes-Barre media, television and suburban shopping, and the morning paper's economics no longer worked. In 1990 Media One closed the Scrantonian-Tribune, and for the second time in its history the Tribune name came off Scranton's streets, this time, it seemed, for good.

The Lynett Relaunch, 1990 to 2005

The Tribune was saved by its oldest rival. In 1990 the Lynett family's Scranton Times bought the remains of the Scrantonian-Tribune, including its nameplate and other assets, and relaunched the paper as the Scranton Tribune. The revived Tribune carried much of the same content as the Times, apart from timely editing for its morning cycle, so that Scranton once again had a morning and an afternoon paper, although for the first time both belonged to the same family company, Times-Shamrock Communications.

The arrangement preserved the forms of the old competition without its substance, and it lasted fifteen years. The revived Tribune kept a separate name, a separate morning identity and its own circulation, reported in 2004 at 32,745 copies daily, actually ahead of the afternoon Scranton Times at 26,443 for the same audit period. Readership habit, more than ownership logic, kept two mastheads alive in one building.

The Final Merger into The Times-Tribune

By 2004 it was obvious that Scranton could no longer support separate morning and afternoon papers. The Lynetts announced that the Times and the Tribune would merge into a single morning paper, The Times-Tribune. George V. Lynett, publisher of the Times, called the decision a difficult one, since his grandfather E. J. Lynett had founded the family's publishing era by buying the Times more than a century before. The company cited dwindling readership among younger readers and the short shelf life of an afternoon paper, and said it expected savings, although the decision was not financially driven in its account.

The Times-Tribune first rolled off the presses on July 27, 2005, and the Scranton Tribune ceased separate publication after one hundred and fourteen years, counting from its 1891 founding. The combined paper expanded by four pages, and the company invested in its printing facility. The Tribune name survived inside the merged title, in second position, a permanent memorial to the morning paper in the masthead of its successor.

Aftermath and the End of Local Ownership

The merged Times-Tribune remained the Lynett family's flagship until August 2023, when Times-Shamrock Communications sold it, with three other Pennsylvania dailies, to MediaNews Group, a subsidiary of Alden Global Capital, ending one hundred and twenty-eight years of Lynett ownership. Members of the Lynett family who had run the papers opposed the sale and said the buyer's owner did not share the business principles they associated with the stewardship of a newspaper. The Tribune's old rival and rescuer thus passed out of local hands almost two decades after the Tribune itself had ceased to exist.

The Tribune's own record survived in the archives. Its issues from 1891 to 1910 were digitised in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection, its later runs were preserved in commercial newspaper archives holding tens of thousands of scanned pages, and its bibliographic records, under the Tribune, Republican, Tribune-Republican and Scrantonian-Tribune titles, documented each turn of its complicated life for researchers.

Legacy

The Scranton Tribune's legacy was persistence. Founded in a coal city in 1891, out-sold eight to one by its afternoon rival within a decade, merged away twice and closed once, it kept returning because Scranton readers, advertisers and owners repeatedly decided that a morning Republican paper was part of what the city was. Its 1959 Pulitzer Prize proved that a small-city morning daily could do accountability reporting of national prize standard against corrupt power in its own streets.

When the name finally disappeared into The Times-Tribune in 2005, the event marked more than one paper's end. It marked the moment when Scranton, which had supported competing morning and afternoon dailies since the nineteenth century, became a one-paper city, joining the long national procession of American communities whose second newspaper survives only as the second half of a hyphenated name.