The Cocoa Tribune and Cocoa News: a small-town Florida newspaper rivalry, 1890s through 1920s
Cocoa had two competing weekly newspapers for most of the 1900s and 1910s, the Cocoa Tribune (founded 1908) and the older Cocoa News (founded 1893). Both ended up consolidated by 1923. The microfilm record is the principal documentary source for everything Cocoa did before 1940.
Cocoa supported two competing weekly newspapers for most of the period between 1900 and 1923, the Cocoa Tribune (founded 1908) and the Cocoa News (founded 1893). Both were small operations, four to eight pages weekly, hand-set type until the 1910s, runs of perhaps 800-2,000 copies, distribution by mail subscription to grove owners and by counter sales at downtown stores. They are the principal documentary record of mainland Cocoa during the citrus era. Most of what is known about the Porcher operations, the 1894-95 freeze response, the 1925 land bust, and dozens of other specific events comes from contemporary coverage in these two papers.
The Cocoa News folded in 1923 after being absorbed by the Tribune through a combination of advertiser consolidation and direct sale. The Cocoa Tribune continued publishing as the principal Cocoa-area weekly until it was acquired by the Florida Today chain in 1966, which converted it into a Cocoa-area edition of the broader Brevard County daily. The Tribune name was discontinued in the 1970s.
The Cocoa News, 1893-1923
The Cocoa News was founded in 1893 by W.S. Norwood, a printer who had relocated from Ocala. The first issues were produced on a hand-press in a small shop on Brevard Avenue. The paper was a typical late-19th-century small-town Florida weekly: four pages, mostly local notes and advertisements, with occasional reprinted national wire-service material for non-local content.
The News served Cocoa from 1893 through 1923. Editorial perspective was generally booster-ish, promoting Cocoa’s commercial development, supporting the citrus industry, advocating for civic improvements (the 1894 county-seat fight, bridge construction, road improvements). The paper was politically Republican-leaning, consistent with the broader Brevard County political pattern of the era.
Norwood operated the News until 1907, when he sold to a partnership of local businessmen led by A.J. Doolittle. Under Doolittle the News added a Saturday edition for several years and expanded its commercial-job-printing business as a revenue supplement to the newspaper itself.
The decline of the News through 1918-1923 was driven by the rise of the competing Tribune and by the consolidation of national wire-service advertising contracts. The Tribune captured most major local advertisers by 1920, leaving the News with declining revenue. The 1923 absorption by the Tribune was a quiet commercial transaction.
The Cocoa Tribune, 1908-1966
The Cocoa Tribune was founded in 1908 by Wallace Bowden, a newspaperman who had previously edited papers in Tampa and Sanford. The Tribune was, from its founding, a slightly more ambitious operation than the News, it had a small linotype machine (the News still used hand-set type), more pages (typically six to eight), and a more aggressive local-coverage approach.
The Tribune’s first decade was a struggle to displace the established News. Bowden ran the Tribune at thin or negative margins through 1908-1912, with several rumors of imminent closure that the paper itself denied in editorial columns. By 1915 the Tribune had achieved profitability through a combination of advertising-rate aggression, commercial-job-printing diversification, and the addition of a small bookstore at the Tribune office.
Bowden sold the Tribune in 1919 to Walter Hopkins, who would edit and own the paper through 1938. The Hopkins era was the Tribune’s peak, coverage was comprehensive, advertising was strong, the paper was a real civic institution for mainland Cocoa.
The Tribune’s editorial perspective was civic-promotional, similar to the News, but with a slightly more progressive bent on some issues. The Tribune was an early advocate for the 1917 Indian River bridge, supported the post-WWI civic infrastructure investments, and editorialized on the 1924-25 land-boom era with more skepticism than most Florida small-town papers (Hopkins ran several editorials warning against speculation in 1925-26 that read prescient in retrospect).
The Hopkins family sold the Tribune in 1947 to a regional newspaper chain. The Tribune continued through the 1950s and into the 1960s but was gradually overshadowed by the rise of the Brevard Sentinel (founded 1958, becoming Florida Today in 1966). The Tribune name continued for several years as a Cocoa-area edition of the regional daily before being absorbed entirely.
What the papers covered
The combined run of the Cocoa News (1893-1923) and the Cocoa Tribune (1908-1966) provides the documentary backbone of Cocoa history. The papers covered:
Citrus economy. Grove operations, packing-house volumes, freeze damage, fruit-fly quarantine effects, the Indian River brand premium, specific shipper performance.
Civic affairs. City council and county commission meetings, school and library operations, the bridge debates, the courthouse controversies.
Social events. Weddings, funerals, society notes, social-club meetings, the standard small-town newspaper content that documents who lived in Cocoa, who married whom, and who died when.
Business news. Store openings, real-estate transactions, bank financial reports, advertising for Travis Hardware and other local businesses.
Sports. Cocoa High School athletics (from the 1925 founding of the high school onward), baseball teams, hunting and fishing reports.
Weather. Hurricane warnings, freeze warnings, daily-weather summaries. Cocoa Tribune coverage of the 1926 hurricane, the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, and the 1940 freeze is the principal local-impact documentary record.
What the papers didn’t cover
Both papers operated under the Jim Crow social structure that limited coverage of Cocoa’s Black community (the freedmen piece addresses this in more detail). Black weddings, Black church events, Black school operations, Black business openings, these received minimal or no coverage in the white press of the era. The Black-press documentation of Cocoa-area Black community life is thin, partly because Brevard County did not develop a sustained Black newspaper of its own; the closest analogue would be The Florida Star (Jacksonville) and The Florida Sentinel (Tampa), neither of which covered Brevard County in detail.
The papers also covered women’s activities through the lens of the “society pages” rather than as substantive civic or economic actors, consistent with the era’s journalism conventions. Women’s club meetings, household notes, and church-ladies events appear; women’s economic roles in the citrus economy (packing-house labor, grove management, domestic service) are largely absent from coverage.
Where the microfilm lives
The principal access to the Cocoa News and Cocoa Tribune is through microfilm:
- Brevard County Library System maintains the most complete local microfilm collection. The Cocoa Public Library has reading machines and the principal local archive.
- University of Florida Digital Collections has digitized some Florida small-town newspapers and is gradually expanding coverage; partial Cocoa Tribune runs may be available digitally.
- Library of Congress Chronicling America project digitizes newspaper microfilm from across the United States; Florida coverage is uneven, with much pre-1923 material still in physical microfilm rather than digital form.
- Florida State University Microfilm Collection holds some Cocoa-area newspapers.
The pre-1923 microfilm record has some gaps, physical newspapers were not always preserved, microfilm capture was incomplete in some periods, and some years are missing or fragmentary. The post-1923 Cocoa Tribune record is substantially complete on microfilm.
What this means for Cocoa history
A serious historian of mainland Cocoa works through the Cocoa News and Cocoa Tribune microfilm. Almost every substantive historical claim about 1890s-1960s Cocoa traces back to coverage in these papers. The combination of Florida Times-Union (statewide coverage), Indian River Advocate (Titusville-based regional coverage), and the two Cocoa weeklies is the documentary foundation for everything that happened in mainland Brevard during the era.
This is why every article on Old Cocoa cites the Cocoa Tribune or Cocoa News somewhere in the Sources block. These were not great national newspapers. They were good small-town weeklies that documented what happened in Cocoa for sixty-plus years. That’s an enormous historical service.
Sources
- Cocoa News, 1893-1923, weekly editions on microfilm via Brevard County Library System.
- Cocoa Tribune, 1908-1966, weekly editions on microfilm via Brevard County Library System.
- Indian River Advocate (Titusville), 1888-1925, microfilm via University of Florida Digital Collections.
- Library of Congress Chronicling America, Florida newspaper microfilm collection.
- University of Florida Digital Collections, Florida newspaper digitization.
- Florida Historical Society, Florida Historical Quarterly, articles on Florida small-town newspaper history.
- Brevard County Library System, microfilm catalog and collection notes.
- Patricia Field, Florida’s Country Press: A History of Small-Town Newspapers in the State (academic thesis, University of Florida, 1985).