The Press: Wyoming's Mr. Big

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In his home state of Wyoming, Publisher Tracy S. (for Stephenson) McCraken, 60. is Mr. Big. Publisher McCraken (rhymes with taken) not only puts out seven of Wyoming's ten dailies; he also controls three radio stations, is the main stockholder of Cheyenne's best-known hotel, the Plains, is a bank director, vice president of the University of Wyoming board of trustees, and a Democratic National Committeeman.

Last week Publisher McCraken, one of the most successful small-newspaper owners in the U.S., spread his influence even further. In Cheyenne he put into operation the state's first television transmitter.

McCraken's monopoly position in the state is often a target for critics, but he has a ready answer. "No one is entitled to any market," says he, "unless he can put out the best product." In Wyoming his product is indisputably the best. His Northern Wyoming Daily News in Worland (pop. 4,202) is one of the few newspapers in the U.S. with a larger circulation (4,276) than the population of the town in which it is published.

Feature Bait. McCraken built his statewide empire on an ingenious newspaper stunt. Twenty-eight years ago, he borrowed $3,000 and bought Cheyenne's sickly weekly, the Wyoming Eagle. He converted it into a daily, made it the area's first tabloid and began giving it away free. But later only paid subscribers got a special section of features (comics, serial fiction, etc.). By starting new features first in the free section of the paper, then moving them to the supplement for paid subscribers, he got more and more paid subscribers, finally stopped giving the paper away altogether. The plan worked so well that eleven years after he started, McCraken's upstart Eagle bought its entrenched competitor, the 60-year-old Cheyenne Wyoming State Tribune, and moved from its own grubby offices into the Tribune's modern plant. Later he repeated the same trick with other papers he took over, pepped them up with wider wire-service coverage, broadened local-news coverage for such successful small papers as the Rock Springs Rocket (circ. 5,935), Sunday Miner (5,900) and Laramie Bulletin (3,003).

No newsman himself, McCraken leaves the editorial side to his editors, believes that first of all a newspaper is a business enterprise. Although he is a lifelong Democrat, his Laramie Republican-Boomerang (circ. 2,904) and Cheyenne Wyoming State Tribune (10,413) are pro-Republican because that is what they were when he took them over. Each of McCraken's publishers has come up from the ranks, gets a big stock share in the paper he bosses. McCraken's community-minded dailies (five of them tabloids) rarely crusade, avoid sensational stories.