The Eagle-Tribune

Daily newspaper in Massachusetts and New Hampshire

The Eagle Tribune (and Sunday Eagle Tribune) is a seven day morning daily newspaper covering the Merrimack Valley and Essex County, Massachusetts, and southern New Hampshire. It is the largest circulation daily newspaper owned by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., and the lead property in a regional chain of four dailies and several weekly newspapers in Essex County and southern New Hampshire. Although The Eagle Tribune is historically tied to Lawrence, Massachusetts, the largest city in its circulation area, it has been based since the 1960s in suburban North Andover, Massachusetts, and has not included "Lawrence" in its nameplate since the late 1980s.

Despite being a small town publication, The Eagle Tribune has run some extremely notable stories publicizing scandals inside and outside politics. During the late 1980s, The Eagle Tribune ran nearly 200 articles on Michael Dukakis and the Massachusetts prison furlough program, with a special focus on Willie Horton. The series was widely credited for ending furlough for first degree murderers in Massachusetts, and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. During the 1990s, The Eagle Tribune ran a series of articles titled Cracking the Ice: Intrigue and Conflict in the World of Big Time Hockey, interviewing nearly 400 current and former players and officials, uncovering corruption inside the NHL, its players' association, and Hockey Canada, which would lead to the conviction, disbarment, and resignation from the Hockey Hall of Fame of former NHLPA president Alan Eagleson. The newspaper's sports editor, Russ Conway, who led the investigation, was a nominated finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Beat Reporting for his work and earned the Elmer Ferguson Memorial Award in 1999. The newspaper’s staff was also a nominated finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Reporting in 1996, for coverage of the Malden Mills fire and its impact on the community. The paper won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for its coverage of the drowning deaths of four Lawrence boys in the Merrimack River. In the late 1980s through the 1990s, The Eagle Tribune was consistently named New England Newspaper of the Year and earned a reputation for quality journalism.

Before its 2005 sale to CNHI, The Eagle Tribune and its predecessors had been owned by the Rogers family for more than 100 years, dating back to the purchase of the Lawrence Daily Eagle (founded as a morning paper in 1868) and Evening Tribune (founded in Lawrence in 1890) by Eagle reporter Alexander H. Rogers in 1898. Rogers passed the role of publisher to his son, Irving E. Rogers Sr., in 1942; he passed it along to his son, Irving Jr., 40 years later. In 2005, the Rogers family, which had owned The Eagle Tribune for generations, sold the newspaper and its subsidiaries—including three other Massachusetts dailies and several weeklies—to Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc. of Alabama, for an undisclosed amount of money. Rogers initially stayed on as publisher, but was replaced as publisher later that year. The paper went through a minor labor dispute in January 2006, after several staff members attempted to start a union. As part of a move to beef up The Eagle Tribune's presence in New Hampshire, the paper reassigned several staff members to a satellite bureau in Derry, New Hampshire – days after a union vote. Some of the workers said they were being punished for being on a union organizing committee; they said other members of the committee were switched to less desirable night beats. Spokesmen for CNHI said the moves were unrelated to the union vote, which failed. March 2006 brought the daily paper's conversion from an afternoon to a morning newspaper.