Word: mccraken
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...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...
...Party Press? McCraken got his first newspaper training as a newspaper delivery boy in Evanston, Ill. His father died when he was a child and McCraken worked after school in a wide variety of jobs, such as making handles for caskets and stays for corsets. He started as a part-time reporter in high school in Illinois, worked his way through the University of Wyoming working on the local paper. During World War I, he was an infantry lieutenant, came back and got his first taste of Democratic politics as secretary to the state's Democratic Governor William...