The South Bend Tribune

Weekly from 9 March 1872; daily from 28 May 1873; the city's newspaper of record since

The run: the Tribune was founded as a weekly by Alfred B. Miller and Elmer Crockett, two Union veterans who had worked together on Schuyler Colfax's Register; the first four-page weekly appeared on Saturday evening, 9 March 1872, from the Tribune Printing Company at 127 West Washington Street. On 28 May 1873 it became the city's first daily. In 1887 it bought the St. Joseph Valley Register itself, name and equipment, and outlasted every rival; the Miller family's Schurz Communications held it for more than 146 years, until the sale to GateHouse Media in 2019 — announced 28 January 2019, effective 1 February 2019; the Gannett name reached the paper only with the GateHouse–Gannett merger of 19 November 2019. Howard's press chapter, Brown's chapter IX, and the Notre Dame Scholastic's welcome of June 1873 ("an enterprise worthy of the thriving little city") are the early record of it, and the paper's own account of itself agrees with them on the dates that matter here.

Where the archive lives: in four places, behind four different doors. The Tribune's own digital archive, served through Newspapers.com, is a paywall — the day-of coverage of the Merchants National Bank robbery of 30 June 1934 sat behind it, and the Bank Robberies file carried the Associated Press figure instead. ProQuest carries the paper, and the Libraries and Serial Killers legs read it there, article by article — a 2007 interview, a 2001 debate, the 2007 manhole coverage. The complete run exists in one digital place: in April 2024 the Hesburgh Libraries announced the acquisition, from NewsBank, of the full-text searchable Tribune archive, 1873 to 2018, page images as printed — a university resource, complete in a way no route open to this build was. And the paper run itself stands on microfilm at the St. Joseph County Public Library, catalogued 1872–2020, beside the photograph archive the paper gave the library in 2019 (the archives entries below).

The gap, stated as the Crime leg found it: a complete archive existing is not the same as a searchable one, and the depth problem is this history's single largest press limitation. The Crime file's thinnest stretch is the mid-century — cases from 1945 to 1992 rest on a Tribune archive and superior court files that are, for a researcher working from digital sources, effectively un-digitized — and the late nineteenth century routes the same way, to the Tribune backfile from 1873 on microfilm. The files built from the open record carry that thinness printed in them; it is a property of the archive's doors, not of the city's history, and the next checker with reading-room access to the Hesburgh run or the microfilm will fatten those files first.

Sources:

1. Howard (1907), press chapter; Brown (1920), chapter IX and chronology table — the founding dates, the first daily, the 1887 purchase.
2. Building South Bend (University of Notre Dame), Tribune Building entry — the 1872 weekly, the daily of 28 May 1873, the Register purchase, the News-Times competition.
3. Hesburgh Libraries / Notre Dame news release, 2 April 2024 — the NewsBank acquisition, the full archive 1873–2018; the prior access it replaced (post-2018 scans, an incomplete 1966–1971 microfilm run, text from 1994).