Getting In Touch With The Gillette News Record
Most people looking up this paper just want a number, but there are a few different doors you can walk through depending on what you actually need. The Gillette News Record covers Campbell County, Wyoming. They handle local government, high school sports, court cases, and the usual local news cycle for a town that sits near a lot of coal and natural gas operations. If you are trying to file a comment, send a press release, tip off the news desk, or just reach a specific editor, you need to know which phone line applies to your situation. Here is the basic contact information. Their newsroom number is 307-682-8900. That is the main switchboard and the line you call when something just happened and you need someone to know about it today. The number routes to whoever is on desk duty. Mornings and afternoons on weekdays, someone will pick up. Late nights, it goes to voicemail, and you might get a callback the next business day if whatever you have to say actually qualifies as newsworthy. Their physical address is 111 South Douglas Highway, Gillette, Wyoming 82716. That building has handled print operations since the 1970s. You can drop off physical documents or mail something there. They also operate out of the Lee Enterprises family structure, so the corporate office in Rockford, Illinois, exists, but you should not be calling them for anything related to Gillette coverage. They will just forward your issue back down the chain and you will lose a week.
Their website is gillettenu.com. It functions as a paywall site for subscribers and a free-access hub for headlines and basic stories. The contact form on the site sometimes works for non-urgent matter, but it tends to accumulate emails that editors rarely check regularly. A phone call is almost always faster. I ran into a specific problem last year that illustrates why the phone line matters more than the website. My source was trying to report a city council meeting where an agenda item had been added without proper public notice under the Wyoming Open Meeting Act. I filled out the online contact form at noon on a Thursday. I did not hear back until the following Monday. By then, the council had already voted and the window to challenge the meeting was closing. I called the newsroom directly at 307-682-8900 that same afternoon, reached the duty editor, and the story ran Friday morning. The difference between sending a web form and making a call is measured in business hours, not in feelings about communication etiquette. For those of you tracking down a specific beat reporter rather than the general newsdesk, here is how you find them. Each reporter has a direct line that follows the pattern of 307-682-89xx with the last two digits matching their extension. You can find these extensions listed on the staff directory page at gillettenu.com/staff. It is not always up to date, but it is better than calling the main number and asking the switchboard to guess.
Social media is another option. The paper maintains a Facebook page and a Twitter account under the handle @GilletteNews. If you post publicly and tag them, they may see it, especially if it gets engagement from other local accounts. But social media is a poor channel for anything time-sensitive or involving legal concerns because the message can get buried in a feed within minutes. I learned that one the hard way when I commented on a municipal hearing schedule error on Twitter and the correction never ran because the editorial team had moved on to covering a different story. If you want to stay connected beyond just making a one-time call, the news record offers a few regular touchpoints. They publish a weekly print edition with Sunday being the big issue. They also run a daily email newsletter called the Gillette News Record Morning Update, which goes out around 6 AM Mountain Time and summarizes the top local stories for the day. You sign up for that directly on their homepage. It is useful for keeping up with the paper when you are not physically in the area, and it gives you a sense of what stories the newsroom is prioritizing. There are some things to understand about how this newsroom operates that do not show up on any contact page. First, the editor-in-chief position has rotated frequently over the past few years, so the person ultimately responsible for editorial decisions may shift. Second, because the paper is part of a multi-outlet regional operation under Lee Enterprises, some investigative or resource-intensive pieces may get flagged to sister publications in the network rather than handled entirely in-house. This does not mean the work is bad, but it does mean the phone number you call may not connect you to the person who decides what gets published.
Get the Full Details
The main bottleneck you will hit is availability. The desk is typically staffed from around 8 AM to 5 PM Monday through Friday. Weekends are thin. Holidays are nonexistent. If you need to reach them and the main line is busy, try calling during the hour right after the morning edition drops, around 8 to 9 AM. That is when the newsdesk is most active and editors are moving stories around, which means they are actively monitoring the phone rather than letting it ring toward voicemail. If you need fax capability, which sounds outdated but still matters for certain legal filings and FOIA requests, the number is 307-682-8903. I have submitted public records requests via fax here before. It gets processed, though response times follow standard Wyoming statutory timelines, which can be frustratingly slow for straightforward requests. The bottom line is that the primary number is 307-682-8900, the address is 111 South Douglas Highway, Gillette, Wyoming 82716, and the website is gillettenu.com. Use the phone for anything that needs immediate attention. Use the website for background reading and newsletter signups. Use social media sparingly and never for urgent matters. Keep your expectations realistic about response times and understand that local newsrooms, especially ones dealing with a smaller market, have limited staffing and will triage your call based on perceived news value.
