Wyoming newspapers weigh the cost of publishing police blotter laughs

The police blotter was once the “second front page,” the thing people talked about at coffee shops and backyard barbecues. Now some Wyoming papers say the laughs and entertainment aren’t worth the potential downsides.

On March 1, the Wyoming Tribune Eagle in Cheyenne stopped publishing its crime blotter entirely, joining a growing movement of newspapers reconsidering whether the humor is worth the lasting damage to individuals.

The paper explained that booking sheets from the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office—the blotter’s source material—are frequently incomplete and sometimes contain misspelled names, inaccurate arrest times and wrong charges.

In an interview with Editor & Publisher magazine, crime reporter Ivy Secrest said the paper had already seen consequences. “This week we had a man call us and tell us that his booking sheet incorrectly designated his charge as a felony and our publishing of that, prior to this policy, caused him to lose his job.”

The Tribune Eagle’s parent company published a policy stating that blotters “are also not followed up with a compiled list of arraignments, trial results or sentencings, and thus do not fairly indicate whether or not the subject was convicted.” Publishing that information before the legal process concludes “can cause undue harm, leading to lifelong consequences, such as impacting employment or social status.”

The decision came after staff participated in a Poynter Institute course encouraging newsrooms to shift from sensationalized crime reporting to public safety journalism.

Few readers have complained. “Now that it’s gone it doesn’t seem to be missed,” Secrest noted.

Its sister paper, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in Montana, quietly stopped publishing police reports as well. The Chronicle’s blotter was once so popular it published a book titled “We Don’t Make This Stuff Up,” featuring entries like “A group of women flagged down an officer because a newlywed had to cross ‘flirt with a cop’ off her bucket list.”

But Editor-in-Chief Jeff Welsch said the reports “just haven’t had the juice they once did.” Since stopping, they’ve had only a handful of complaints.

The Cody Enterprise has no plans to ditch its blotter. Editor Victoria O’Brien said she understands the Tribune Eagle’s reasoning but lacks the manpower for the in-depth courts reporting that would replace it.

“Having a designated courts, justice and government reporter is a huge ask for us,” O’Brien said. She acknowledged the blotter’s heyday may have passed, attributing some decline to social media platforms where “things kind of catch fire and go around really quickly—naming and shaming.”

O’Brien said she’s heard from readers that the blotter isn’t as entertaining. “I recently had a reader say to the effect of, ‘Well, they used to be funny.’ I said, ‘Well, if we get the blotter and the blotter’s not funny, we can’t make it funny.'”

She also understands the limits of humor when an account of someone’s low point winds up in print. “Everybody loves a little bit of water cooler gossip. But depending on what the situation is, it might be somebody’s worst day. I don’t want to make a joke about that.”

The conversation is part of a broader industry reckoning about the lasting digital footprint of crime coverage—what some call “the right to be forgotten.” Newspapers including the Boston Globe and The Oregonian have begun deleting or de-indexing old crime stories.

As a recent Cody Enterprise blotter entry demonstrates, not every call involves crime: “A silver Volvo sedan was driving erratically on Highway 120 North—all over the road, drove off the road twice while on 911, southbound towards Cody, varying speeds, driving into oncoming traffic.” The driver pulled over and turned out to be “not impaired, just elderly.”