Business news north of the border begat WBR

When Christopher Wood and Jeff Nuttall launched their Northern Colorado Business Report 15 years ago, the two young co-publishers already had their sights set on covering business north of the border, too.

Their vision of a unified business community along the Northern Front Range of Colorado extended north on Interstate 25 to Cheyenne and northwest to Laramie, and five years later their dream became the Wyoming Business Report.

Almost exactly 10 years ago, we launched WBR as a quarterly newspaper dedicated to covering news and trends in Wyoming business and industry. “A new voice for Wyoming business” declared our front page headline, and that’s what we have become.

But let’s go back to the beginning, when NCBR first hired me to cover southeastern Wyoming and perhaps expand that coverage into something more.

It was the day after I left my job as news editor of KTWO-TV’s Cheyenne Bureau when Chris Wood called to see whether I’d be interested in doing some stories for his monthly newspaper. My TV gig was a short one, following longer-term assignments as Gov. Mike Sullivan’s press secretary and Associated Press correspondent in Cheyenne, but the opportunity to pursue a new career in business journalism was enticing.

Plus, I was impressed with the entrepreneurial spirit of these two (relatively) young guys, who had given up their secure jobs to follow their newspaper dreams. In all my years in journalism, I had always worked for somebody else, so the opportunity to go out on my own as a freelancer held some attraction.

So I made my debut in the March 1996 issue of NCBR with a hurriedly written story on the Wyoming Colorado Tour Association. Soon I was covering stories up and down the Front Range in both Colorado and southeast Wyoming, and I discovered that Chris and Jeff’s theory was right – there is a tremendous synergy between Northern Colorado and southeastern Wyoming.

We started a Wyoming column called “Wyoming Business,” and W. Dale Nelson, another old AP hand from Laramie, joined the team. Most of the stories were about events and businesses fairly close to home in Cheyenne and Laramie, but we had some stories about state tax policy, economic development and the dominant mineral industry. I used to joke that the miners came to Colorado in the 1800s and left ghost towns, but in Wyoming they developed a world-class energy industry that has become a national leader.

Start with special sections

Then we started occasional “Cheyenne Business” or “Laramie Business” special sections, and by the late 1990s, the boys had decided to push ahead with a bona fide Wyoming business journal. We had a couple of trial runs with “Wyoming Business” sections that were well received in Wyoming.

The first, in June 1999, featured a photo of then-Gov. Jim Geringer and Wyoming Business Council CEO John Reardon on a downtown Cheyenne roof, surveying the business scene and hoping it would become more robust under the new economic development entity created by the Legislature a year earlier.

After a separate trial run that fall, the quarterly Wyoming Business Report was born.

Our first issue appeared in April 2000 after a rocky state legislative session, featuring a David Badders illustration of the Wyoming State Capitol with the headline, “Business Council Survives.”

WBR survived, too, becoming a monthly after just four issues, but I won’t pretend it was always easy. No sooner had we launched than the national economy veered toward recession, and Wyoming followed. Since then we’ve been through a big boom and now another recession, but we’re still moving forward.

Wyoming didn’t face the same crowded publishing environment that existed in Northern Colorado, but we were afraid we might, so we launched WBR as soon as we could to head off potential competitors. The strategy apparently worked – or maybe our potential competitors were figments of our imagination.

Our presence caused some local dailies to beef up their weekend business sections and increase the number of business stories in their daily pages, but nobody joined us trying to cover the entire state with one part-time editor and a few part-time sales people.

Then and now, we relied heavily for help from our colleagues at NCBR and from some dedicated freelancers. We didn’t find our niche instantly, but as the months passed, we found there was an appetite in Wyoming, like Northern Colorado, for news about individual businesses, people in business and industry trends, and for effective business-to-business advertising.

We’re celebrating our 10th anniversary, as NCBR celebrates its 15th, with a renewed commitment to our readers, news sources and advertisers to become even better over the coming decade. As Chris Wood said at the very beginning, “Always keep improving.”

Dennis E. Curran is the publisher of the Wyoming Business Report and can be reached at dcurran@wyoming.com or 307-638-3200.

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