The Chanute Times Archive

The Chanute Times of Neosho County, Kansas, was founded on January 1, 1897, after new owner Charles S. Nation purchased the Chanute Vidette-Times and desired that the paper be "restored" to its original name. Nation stated that "the greater portion of the paper will be devoted to the news of the day, the politics will remain republican." Albert H. Turner took over as editor and publisher by July 1898 after Nation left to open a real estate, loan, and insurance office in Chanute. Turner remained at the helm of the Times until its end in 1913. In his first issue, Turner declared: "We are for the Republican ticket, not because of any particular, personal friendship for the men that chance to be thereon, but because of our deep convictions of the right aed [sic] justice of the underlying principles upon which the party is founded." The Chanute Times remained Republican in affiliation throughout its lifetime.

Both Nation and Turner boasted that the Times enjoyed the highest circulation rate of any newspaper in Chanute.  However, the Times faced heavy competition from two other Republican papers, the Chanute Weekly Tribune and Chanute Daily Tribune, and none of them provided consistent circulation statistics during this period. As best as can be determined, the Chanute Times averaged about 1,500 and the Chanute Weekly Tribune about 1,100 subscribers. Local news, birth and death notices, marriages, political matters, high school and society notes, and fiction pieces were often featured.

The Chanute Times was published weekly until June 1913 when it changed to a daily publication. This new schedule only lasted a short time, however, as the Tribune Publishing Company - publishers of the Chanute Weekly and Daily Tribune - purchased the Times on July 19, 1913, adding its subscription list to the Weekly Tribune's. The latter had been making a "vigorous and very successful effort to build up the subscription list of its weekly issue" since January 1913, and believed that adding the Time's subscriptions would make "the Weekly Tribune an advertising medium that no up-to-date Chanute merchant can overlook" ("Tribune Buys Times," Chanute Daily Tribune, August 7, 1913). Despite a number of name changes and consolidations throughout the last century, the Chanute Tribune is still published today.