Longtime readers of the Valley News will notice that, in the last few days, their favorite local daily newspaper has taken on a new appearance. We’re about 2 inches slimmer and half an inch taller (just like the big guys, including The New York Times and The Boston Globe) and we have a new design with new fonts and typography that we hope will make reading us even easier.
Making these changes has not been easy. There have been hard decisions to make, which we’ll get to in a moment, and there will be bugs to work out. But we believe these changes will help us do the most important thing of all, and that is to continue to serve as the premier source of news and information for the Upper Valley, as we have since the first edition of the Valley News rolled off the presses on June 9, 1952.
We have noted a number of times since the summer — on our website, in a Sunday Valley Newsstory by business writer John Lippman and in several notes to our readers from publisher Dan McClory — that the newspaper industry is facing tremendous challenges, and the Valley News is feeling them. These challenges, which include rising production costs and declining advertising revenue, are particularly acute for smaller local newspapers with less-deep pockets. Some newspapers, even big ones, have closed up shop or gone 100 percent digital. Others have been snapped up by hedge funds, vulture capitalists and private equity groups interested only in siphoning off a property’s profits or assets, not serving readers or their communities.
The Valley News, and its family-owned parent company, Newspapers of New England, have decided on a different approach.
The company has made a $4 million investment in a new printing facility in Penacook, N.H., where the Valley News is now printed and where its sister newspapers, the Concord Monitor and the Peterborough, N.H.-based Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, will be printed in the future. (In Massachusetts, Newspapers of New England also publishes the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Greenfield Recorder, Athol Daily News, Valley Advocate,Amherst Bulletin and The Summit.) The new printing plant will give the company a chance to boost revenue by printing other companies’ publications, and the new press will offer increased color capacity and options such as labeling, “wrap-around” advertising and sticky notes while at the same time significantly cutting production costs.
The potential benefits of these changes have not rendered them painless.
On Wednesday night we watched the final run of our venerable flexographic press, a bright blue, three-story, 220-ton behemoth that has dominated the back of our building since we acquired it from a newspaper in Copenhagen in 1990. Our deadlines are now earlier to accommodate the drive from Concord, which means some late news — scores from West Coast games, for example, or some Town Meeting and election tallies — won’t make it into the next morning’s print edition. (We will provide updates to late-breaking local stories and scores on our website and, in most cases, follow up in the next day’s edition.)
And there have been job losses, including three in the production department when the advertising design process was outsourced in July. The seven full-time members of our press crew and five full-time distribution personnel all were offered jobs at the new Concord printing facility, along with 18 part-time press and distribution staff. But given the 60-mile commute, just six have chosen to stay on board.
Losing a job is tough. So is watching friends and colleagues, some of whom spent decades at the Valley News, lose theirs. It is cold comfort to them, we know, but this process has inspired a determination in those of us who remain working at our office in West Lebanon — the reporters, photographers and editors, the advertising, customer service and administrative staff — to continue to cover the events and tell the stories that are important to you, to continue to provide you with the news, context and perspective you need, to continue to hold the powerful accountable and give you a platform to share your opinions with friends and neighbors. We know that the Valley News knits the Upper Valley together in ways no other organization can, and we promise to continue to bring to all of our readers, every day, the best newspaper — and the best website — we can produce.
Just the other day, Columbia Journalism Review published a story headlined “A brutal week for American journalism.” Before that, Editor & Publisher reported that “Gannett Lays Off Journalists Across the Country.” Earlier this month, the American Press Institute shared a Poynter Institute report titled “Did we just experience the hardest decade in journalism?” And let’s not forget, the president of the United States has labeled the press “the enemy of the American people.”
Yes, these are challenging times — even brutal times — for journalism in general and for small daily newspapers in particular. But for the journalists, advertising reps and other staff members of the Valley News, there’s nothing we’d rather be doing, and there’s no place we’d rather be doing it.
Thank you for reading, and thank you for supporting us with your subscription and advertising dollars. We look forward to continuing to serve you and the Upper Valley for many years to come.