In the spring of 1925, a former school teacher named Harriet Vaughan walked into a vacant storefront on Douglas Street with a typewriter, a hand-cranked press, and a single conviction: that Lee's Summit — then a town of barely 4,000 — deserved a paper of its own. The first issue of the Lee's Summit Tribune rolled off her press that April. It was four pages long, cost three cents, and led with a story about a new water main on 3rd Street.

A century later, we're still here. Still on Douglas Street. Still owned by the same family — Harriet's great-granddaughter James Vaughan is our publisher today. And still leading, when it matters, with stories about water mains. We're not embarrassed by that. The plumbing of a town tells you everything about a town.

What we cover

The Tribune covers Lee's Summit, Missouri and the immediate communities that share our schools, our roads, and our concerns: parts of Jackson and Cass counties, and the unincorporated areas along Highway 50 and Highway 291. Our reporting beats are the ones that affect daily life — the city council, the R-7 School District, the three high schools, the police and fire departments, small business, the courts, and the people who live here.

We do not cover national politics. We do not run wire stories. If it happens here, we cover it. If it doesn't, we trust other excellent publications to handle it.

“A town without a newspaper is a town that's already forgotten itself.” — Harriet Vaughan, founding editor, in her first column, April 1925.

How we're funded

The Tribune is privately held by the Vaughan family and supported by three things: subscriptions, advertising from local businesses, and direct reader contributions. We are not part of a chain. We do not have outside investors. No editorial decision has ever been overridden by an advertiser in 100 years, and our editorial firewall is published in full in our ethics policy below.

The Tribune adheres to the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics. The four principles below guide every story we publish.

1. Seek truth and report it

We verify before we publish. We attribute every fact. We correct errors quickly, prominently, and without spin. A running list of corrections is published in every Saturday edition.

2. Minimize harm

We do not name minors involved in non-fatal crimes. We do not publish photographs of grieving families without their consent. We weigh the public's right to know against the real human cost of a story — and when those are in tension, we err on the side of restraint.

3. Act independently

No member of our newsroom may accept gifts, payments, free travel, or favors of any kind from a source. Our advertising and editorial departments operate behind a firewall; advertisers see no editorial content before publication and have no influence over story selection. Our publisher does not direct news coverage.

4. Be accountable and transparent

We sign our names to our work. We answer reader emails personally. Our editor-in-chief holds an open office hour every Wednesday at the Mid-Continent Library — anyone can sit down and ask anything about how we cover this town.