The Arizona Daily Orb Archive

The Bisbee Daily Review emerged in 1896 as the Weekly Orb, an Independent paper that ran until 1898, when it became the Arizona Daily Orb, with Alvan W. Howe and G. M. Porter as acting editor and publisher. This was only the beginning of several more title and editorial changes as well as two political transitions before the paper would find its feet firmly planted.

The publication’s masthead changed to the Cochise Review and Arizona Daily Orb on May 3, 1900, at which time it also became a Republican paper. Soon after, it became the Cochise Review and then the Bisbee Daily Herald. Mastheads were not sticking during this time period because the July 2, 1900 issue read the Cochise Review and Bisbee Daily Herald; a month later the paper was once again the Cochise Review. On August 20, 1901, the Review became a Democratic publication.

When William Kelly bought the Cochise Review in November 1901, it ran as a weekly for about six months before becoming the Bisbee Daily Review. The paper provided “mining news from every county in Arizona” and was “published in the best mining city on earth.” In 1903, William and his father, “Major” George Kelly formed the Consolidated Printing Company. In addition to the Bisbee Daily Review, they also bought and eventually owned all the dailies in Arizona’s southeastern mining districts.

William Kelly had come to Bisbee at the invitation of Walter Douglas of the Phelps-Dodge Corporation, a New York company that traded metal and owned the Copper Queen mine in Bisbee as well as other Arizona mines in Morenci and Jerome. James Brykrit in Forging the Copper Collar: Arizona’s Labor Management War of 1901-1921 claimed that the corporation “intimidated editors, threatened ministers, bought sheriffs, seduced lawmakers and bullied union leaders” and “completely reversed the direction of Arizona politics and destroyed the liberal in the state.” In 1909, Phelps-Dodge started buying up the mining district newspapers the Kellys had run. By 1925, the corporation owned all of them--including the Bisbee Daily Review. According to William H. Lyon in Those Old Yellow Dog Days, Frontier Journalism in Arizona 1859-1912, Phelps-Dodge wanted to ensure “that nothing reflecting unfavorably on the company would appear in newsprint.”

The Bisbee Daily Review ran as a daily from 1901 to 1971, when William Epler purchased the newspaper from Phelps-Dodge and changed it back to a weekly. In 1974, the Wick family bought the Review from Epler and ran the paper until 1976 when it merged into the Daily Herald Dispatch, which was also published by the Wick family. After various title changes, two periodicals eventually emerged from this joint effort and are still in publication today: the Sierra Vista Herald [and] Bisbee Daily Review, published out of Sierra Vista; and the Bisbee Daily Review [and] Sierra Vista Herald published out of Bisbee.