Save That Paper   

Small New Hampshire daily shuts down, but is reborn as a weekly.

By Ananda Shorey
From AJR, May 2001
RESIDENTS OF BERLIN, New Hampshire, started suspecting something was awry when the president of one of their two daily newspapers began showing up at town meetings and events, notebook in hand.
Howard James was already working 100 hours a week as publisher and editor of the Berlin Reporter after most of his employees moved on to bigger papers at about the same time. Now he was also filling in as a reporter.
But not for long.
His wife, Judith , owner of the 108-year-old Reporter, says she cared about her husband more than the paper. So although "he really put his heart and soul into it," she told him they had to shut it down.
"There was an uproar in the community when we decided to close it," says Howard James, who won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting when he worked at the Christian Science Monitor . "For me, it is extremely painful. I am an extremely competitive person who loves the business and who couldn't imagine doing anything else."
But readers barely had time to mourn before the Reporter was publishing again. Four days after the couple closed shop in late March, David Cutler and John Coots , owners of the Meredith, New Hampshire-based Salmon Press, made a handshake deal to buy the paper (they won't disclose the price). A week later, on April 4, the Reporter was back on the streets.
"We are going to return the paper to its roots," Cutler says. They've gone back to publishing weekly--the Jameses went to six days a week in 1992--and dropped the wire services. "Local weeklies should concentrate on what happens in their backyard and their front yard," Cutler says. With just 12,000 people, Berlin is too small for two competing dailies, he says, especially when the Berlin Daily Sun is free.
And because Salmon Press owns seven other New Hampshire weeklies and a tourist publication, it can centralize some of the Reporter's business functions.
The Jameses agree with the decision to drop the daily editions. "I believe that the Salmon Press is going to put out a good paper," says Howard James, who still owns two papers in Maine, the Advertiser Democrat in Norway and the Rumford Falls Times . But, he adds, "it is not going to be easy for us after 30 years to give up running the paper."