Worland Northern Wyoming News
The Worland Northern Wyoming News, published online at wyodaily.com as the Northern Wyoming Daily News, is the newspaper serving Worland and Washakie County in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin. Based at 201 North 8th Street in Worland, the paper traces its lineage to the Worland Grit, founded in 1905, and has described itself as serving northern Wyoming for more than a century. In a sparsely populated agricultural county where Worland is both the county seat and the principal trading center, the News functions as the community's daily record — covering city and county government, schools, farming and ranching, energy, courts and prep sports for readers in Worland, Ten Sleep and the surrounding irrigated valleys and rangeland.
Unlike Wyoming's many weeklies, the Worland paper developed as a daily, a reflection of Worland's role as a processing and distribution hub for the southern Big Horn Basin. Its pages and website carry the ordinary but essential traffic of a county seat: meeting agendas and decisions, water and irrigation news, sugar beet and cattle market concerns, school schedules, obituaries, public notices and the classified advertising through which a rural economy finds workers, equipment and services.
From the Worland Grit of 1905 to a Daily News
The paper's own account dates its service to 1905, when the Worland Grit began publishing in the new railroad town on the Bighorn River. Library of Congress directory listings, summarized by Chronicling America, confirm the sequence: the Worland Grit published from 1905 to 1938, the Wyoming News from 1935 to 1938, and a combined Worland Grit and Wyoming News in 1938 and 1939, before the Northern Wyoming Daily News emerged in 1939 and continued to the present. That lineage — a gritty frontier weekly maturing into a small daily — mirrors Worland itself, which grew from a stage stop into an incorporated agricultural town within a single generation.
The Grit's early decades covered a community under construction: irrigation canals dug by horse teams, the arrival of the Burlington Railroad in 1906, the physical relocation of the original town across the frozen Bighorn River to meet the rail line, and the campaign to create a new county. When the Wyoming Legislature established Washakie County on February 9, 1911, with Worland as its seat — the county formally organized in 1913 — the local paper became the record of a new government as well as a growing town, publishing its proceedings, notices and elections.
Worland and Washakie County: The Coverage Area
Washakie County was named for Chief Washakie, the Eastern Shoshone leader known for diplomacy and alliance with the United States, and it remains the only Wyoming county named for a Native American. Worland itself takes its name from Charles H. "Dad" Worland, who operated a bar, store and stage stop on the west bank of the Bighorn River around 1900, serving travelers before the railroad arrived. Today the county's population is under ten thousand, concentrated in Worland, with Ten Sleep — named for a ten-night journey in Native travel reckoning — anchoring the eastern end beneath the Bighorn Mountains.
The News serves this whole county and reaches into the wider Big Horn Basin. Its readers include irrigated farmers along the Bighorn River, ranch families on the dry grazing lands, oilfield and plant workers, teachers, health-care staff and Main Street merchants. Because the next cities are an hour or more away, the paper's role is unusually comprehensive: for many households it is simultaneously the local government bulletin, the school newsletter, the farm paper and the sports page.
Agriculture, Sugar Beets and Irrigation
No beat matters more in Washakie County than agriculture. Irrigation transformed the Bighorn River valley from sagebrush to farmland beginning with projects such as the Hanover Canal in 1902, dug by hand and horse power at heavy cost, and farming has defined the county ever since. Sugar beets are the signature crop, processed in Worland by the Wyoming Sugar Company, the farmer-owned cooperative founded in 1916 whose plant on South 1st Street anchors the local economy. Growers in Washakie, Big Horn, Fremont and Park counties deliver beets to Worland, and the harvest — its weather, yields and prices — is front-page news.
The News has covered that industry through good years and disasters alike. When heavy fall rains and a hard freeze devastated the beet harvest in the mid-2010s, the paper's reporting on Wyoming Sugar's request for nearly $5.7 million in emergency disaster loans through the Wyoming Business Council was picked up by the Associated Press — a typical example of how Worland reporting becomes the primary source for statewide coverage of Basin agriculture. Malt barley, corn, alfalfa, beans and cattle round out the farm economy the paper follows season by season, alongside the irrigation districts and water decisions on which every crop depends.
Energy, Industry and the Worland Economy
Beyond the beet fields, Worland's economy includes oil and gas production in the Big Horn Basin, bentonite mining, food and beverage manufacturing and regional distribution. Admiral Beverage operates a major facility in Worland, and Crown Cork and Seal has manufactured cans there, tying the town to national supply chains in a way unusual for a community of its size. Health care, anchored by Washakie Medical Center, and education are among the county's largest employers, and the News tracks all of them as business news with direct consequences for local families.
Energy coverage in the Basin means following drilling activity, oil prices, pipeline and plant decisions, and the state revenue questions that follow Wyoming's mineral economy into every school budget and road project. The paper reports these developments not as abstract commodities news but as payroll news — who is hiring, which projects are proceeding, and what county and city governments can expect in tax receipts for the year ahead.
City, County and School Government
As the county seat's paper, the News covers the Worland City Council, the Washakie County Commission, Washakie County School District No. 1 in Worland and District No. 2 in Ten Sleep, along with courts, law enforcement and special districts. Water and sewer projects, street repairs, airport operations at Worland Municipal Airport, hospital district affairs and county road work all pass through its pages, as do elections for offices from school board to the Wyoming Legislature.
The paper also serves as a vehicle for public and legal notices in Washakie County, publishing the official notifications through which governments inform residents of hearings, bids and proceedings. In a county where the newspaper remains the common source nearly every household can consult, that notice function is a piece of civic infrastructure, and the News's continuity since 1905 gives its archive unusual weight as the county's institutional memory.
Schools and Warrior Sports
Worland High School's Warriors and Lady Warriors are a central institution in Washakie County life, and prep sports coverage is a core part of the News's identity. The paper follows Worland teams in football, volleyball, cross country, basketball, wrestling, soccer, track, golf and swimming, as well as Ten Sleep's Pioneers, covering conference play and state tournaments and recording the achievements of local athletes for families across the Basin. School news — board decisions, bond and facilities questions, concerts, academic honors and graduation — receives the same sustained attention.
That emphasis reflects the structure of small-town Wyoming, where the high school gym is a community hall, the coaching staff are neighbors, and a state championship run becomes a county event. By printing rosters, results and photographs week after week, the News builds the scrapbook record that distinguishes a hometown paper from every other source of information available to its readers.
Ten Sleep, the Bighorns and Rural Life
The News's coverage extends east to Ten Sleep, the ranching town at the mouth of Ten Sleep Canyon, where a working cattle economy coexists with a nationally known sport-climbing scene in the canyon's limestone walls and with tourism on the scenic highway over the Bighorn Mountains. Ten Sleep's Fourth of July rodeo and parade and its summer music festival are fixtures of the county calendar that the paper chronicles, alongside ranch news, brand inspections, hunting and fishing, and the weather and road conditions that govern rural life.
Features on ranch families, veterans, churches, clubs and volunteers fill out the paper's picture of Washakie County. Obituaries and death notices, published both in print and online, are among its most-consulted services, connecting current residents with former ones who follow hometown news from elsewhere in Wyoming and beyond.
Digital Publishing at wyodaily.com
The News publishes online at wyodaily.com, where readers find current local news, sports, obituaries, classifieds and public notices, and it maintains a Facebook presence under its Northern Wyoming News name for sharing stories between editions. The website extends the paper's reach to former residents, to Basin readers outside Washakie County, and to the growing number of subscribers who read primarily on phones and computers rather than in print.
That digital shift has changed production without changing the underlying assignment. The stories that matter in Worland — a county commission vote, a beet harvest forecast, a Warriors playoff game, a water call on the Bighorn River — still require a reporter in the room and a photographer at the field, and the paper's value rests on supplying reporting that exists nowhere else because no one else is positioned to gather it.
The Paper in Wyoming's Media Landscape
Wyoming is the least populous state in the nation, and its press is correspondingly local: a handful of dailies, a strong tradition of community weeklies, and public and statewide outlets layered on top. Within that landscape the Worland paper is notable for sustaining daily publication in a town of roughly five thousand people — a model that has become rare in rural America. Its longevity, from the Worland Grit of 1905 through the Northern Wyoming Daily News of 1939 to today's print and digital operation, places it among the continuous newspaper lineages of the Big Horn Basin, alongside papers in Basin, Greybull, Lovell, Cody and Thermopolis.
Its reporting is also regularly the first record on which others build. Wire services and state outlets citing Washakie County developments — from sugar beet disaster relief to water disputes involving Boysen Reservoir outflows and downstream crops — have repeatedly drawn on the News's local coverage, underscoring how a small daily's work underpins the information supply of an entire region.
The News Today
Today the Worland Northern Wyoming News continues to publish for Washakie County and the Big Horn Basin from its office in downtown Worland, in print and at wyodaily.com. It covers the city council and county commission, the schools and their teams, the beet fields and irrigation districts, the oil patch and Main Street, and the births, milestones and obituaries that mark a community's passage through time. More than one hundred and twenty years after the Worland Grit first appeared, the paper remains what it set out to be: the place Washakie County turns to find out what happened, what is being decided, and what comes next.
