GTR Enters 26th Year
By FORREST CAMERON, Ph.D.
Editor and Publisher
ISSUE #1, 1993
Greater Tulsa Reporter Newspapers is celebrating its 25th birthday with the publication of this January 2018 issue.
Thank you to readers, advertisers and all who have been employed by over the years for making this longevity possible. Also, kudos to my co-publisher Sharon Cameron, who has been with from the beginning!
As written previously, I founded the company with the purpose of targeting the Union Public Schools area, which at that time was starting to grow from southeast Tulsa to west Broken Arrow.
I was raised in Tulsa in the 1950s near Edison Junior and Senior high schools. While growing up, what is now the Union School District was mostly farmland with scattered housing.
Our family moved from Tulsa to Kentucky in 1974 and returned home to Tulsa in 1985. In 1987, we moved to the Minshall Park neighborhood, which borders 71st to 81st streets and Yale and Sheridan avenues. The southern part of Minshall Park is in the Union School District, while the northern part is in the Tulsa School District. To the west across Yale Avenue lies the Jenks School District.
Upon our return to Tulsa, I was amazed at how much the Union area had grown. Having a long history of interest in journalism and newspapers, I began asking people in the Union district if they would like to have their own newspaper. One-hundred percent of the Union residents whom I spoke with said, “Yes.”
Therefore, in 1992, I started work to publish the first Union Boundary, which published in January 1993.
By 1995, we realized that we needed to expand our newspapers to increase overall readership. Options for expansion included dropping the Union Boundary name and having one paper for all of Greater Tulsa.
One day, I was discussing this idea with a Union resident and advertiser who said, “We put you in business. You can’t drop the Union Boundary!”
That was enough reason for me to decide to maintain our expansion into school district areas.
Therefore, in 1995, we expanded into the Jenks School District with the Jenks District Gazette and into the Tulsa School District with the Tulsa Free Press (later renamed the Midtown Monitor).
We also added Greater Tulsa Reporter as the overall company and publishing name.
In 1998, expanded again, this time into Broken Arrow and Owasso with the Broken Arrow Express and the Owasso Rambler, followed by the Bixby Breeze in 2002.
Interestingly, in the mid-1990s, we started seeing a technological change taking place in journalism. When we started publishing in 1993, all of our articles were produced on typewriters. The papers were laid out on boards, not computers, and there were no emails.
Almost overnight, it seemed, computers were taking over.
All of our production began taking place on computers, and newspapers started publishing their content online.
was quick to go online in 1996 with gtrnews.com. As far as I know, we were the first publication in Greater Tulsa to go online.
Technology continues to impact not only all forms of journalism outlets such as newspapers, television and radio, but also retail stores and many other sectors of society.
We will continue our quest to keep up with all forms of modernization in our efforts to provide quality, local news to our audiences.
Again, thank you to ’s loyal readers and advertisers!
Updated 01-27-2018
READER COMMENTS
