The pages of Cheyenne’s daily newspaper no longer include a police blotter. That and other changes to covering crime and public safety at the Wyoming Tribune Eagle are the result of a nearly year-long internal review. Ivy Secrest is the paper’s criminal justice, public safety and education reporter and has been in that role since 2024. She talked about the changes with Wyoming Public Radio’s Nicky Ouellet, starting with how even the document that the police blotter is based on can lead to errors in the paper.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Ivy Secrest: The booking sheet is a court document. It's the compiled information from when an officer brings someone into the jail, and that booking room is really hectic. And so mistakes get made.
That's not a huge deal in terms of addressing the crime. Those details get corrected through the court process and don't necessarily impact the final result of a case. What it does do, though, is impact our blotter
I think the two best examples of how misleading it can be is two of the booking sheets we received [on] two separate instances had the crime listed as manslaughter, and the crime was attempted manslaughter. That attempted language is in the affidavit. They are being charged for attempted. But if we go based on the booking sheet, that's a very different crime. In one case, someone has passed away, and in another, they haven't.
Frankly, there are real life impacts for non errors that slip through. We had one woman when we announced that we were ceasing to use the blotter, she was very frustrated in our Facebook comments and alluded to the fact that her address was included in her arrest, which is something we don't do anymore. But we did do [it] for a long time. She claimed that she had a stalker that had used that information. So there are impacts outside of the specific crime that we're reporting on that can have negative impacts on someone's life.
We also could have just not published it in the first place.
Nicky Ouellet: You were working with the Poynter Institute and several other news outlets to re-envision how you do crime coverage. Can you talk a bit about what that program entailed?
IS: Over the course of roughly nine months, we looked at how we were doing crime coverage, what the impact was and how we could do better.
A lot of that is content analysis, looking at what court cases had we covered versus not covered, had all of those cases gotten beginning to end coverage. Also, looking at: Are there areas of crime that we don't typically cover? Juvenile cases came up in that discussion.
We really looked at where are the gaps in coverage? What are we missing? How are we covering what we already do? And then also, what's feasible to achieve and what's not, because our crime and public safety team is me.
There also were a few other policies that came out of that, including how do we treat vulnerable sources when we're talking to people that have a lot to lose, talking to the press. Or just explaining how we cover breaking news, making sure that we give some sort of clear communication that this is an ongoing story and the details can be updated.
NO: How will people see this playing out in your articles?
IS: One of the big things with getting rid of the blotter, we are inherently taking something away. What we're doing instead is more coverage of those individual crimes or trends of crimes that impact our community here in Laramie County. Right now, I think an example would be burglaries. I have not been able to do a lot of coverage on the amount of burglary cases that we see in Cheyenne. My hope is to do more coverage there.
[Also,] more detail around violent crimes that we see in Cheyenne, drug related crimes, and really digging into not only the individuals who might be key players in our community, but also the larger trend. Why we see those drug related activities here, those kinds of things.
The other thing, too, is seeing a little more consideration for the impact that our stories have.
NO: Your paper, the Tribune Eagle, is owned by Adam's Publishing Group, which owns several more papers in the state – the Laramie Boomerang, the Rock Springs Rocket Miner, Rawlins Daily Times. How supportive has Adam's been with you taking this training and shifting your angle, and do you think any of the other group’s papers will make some similar changes?
IS: Instead of putting all of Adam's papers through this training multiple times, what we did was we shared our resources with them. They did not have to use these. But these policies have been shared with those editors for them to use as they see appropriate for their communities.
NO: What have you been hearing so far from your readers about these changes?
IS: Initially, we had an incredibly mixed response. We had people who were very upset that we were getting rid of the blotter for different reasons.
I will take a moment to dispel some rumors.
We had people who thought that this was under pressure from our local law enforcement agencies. This absolutely was not the case. They had nothing to do with it. We still receive the booking sheets, so we still have access to all that information.
We had people who thought that it was automatically generated, so why bother getting rid of it? It's not. It is emailed PDFs from our sheriff's department that I receive, and then I have to print up and type out. I can't even copy paste them.
And then we had people who were really supportive. We had a few people who talked about how warrants for not appearing on a crime that had happened prior made it look like they had multiple offenses, or how they had cleaned up their life since that shoplifting charge when they were 22. If that had never been published, it would've been a lot easier for them to get a job.
Since we've stopped publishing, we haven't heard any complaints about it being gone.
NO: Is there anything that you were hoping that we would talk about that we haven't?
IS: I just wanna reiterate that we as the press have a lot of power in naming people in association with crimes and that can really lead the public to believe that someone is guilty before they've had due process. That doesn't mean that we don't report on arrests. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't release the names of suspects in major cases that resulted in a death or included violence. That doesn't mean that if the police are looking for someone, we wouldn't release their mugshot.
But it does mean that we have to be really cognizant about what crimes we cover in depth and what crimes do a lot more harm reporting on than good.
