Community Newspaper Company

Last updated
Community Newspaper Co.
Company typeDivision of publicly held company
Industry Publishing
FoundedJanuary 1991 (1991-01)
Defunct2011 (2011)
Headquarters254 Second Avenue,
Needham, Massachusetts 02494, United States
Area served
Eastern Massachusetts
Products Daily and weekly newspapers
Parent Gannett
Divisions Cape, Metro, North, Northwest, South, West
Website WickedLocal.com

Community Newspaper Company, or CNC, was the largest publisher of weekly newspapers in eastern Massachusetts in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century. It also published several daily newspapers in Greater Boston.

Contents

The company's properties were assembled by Fidelity Investments in the 1980s; Fidelity founded the company and then sold it to the Boston Herald in 2001. Five years later, the chain was purchased by, and immediately became the largest single component of, GateHouse Media. GateHouse gradually phased out CNC branding in favor of "WickedLocal.com", the company's website, and GateHouse Media New England; this process was complete by 2011, when staff email addresses dropped the "@cnc.com" domain. [1]

Holdings

CNC's flagship publication was The MetroWest Daily News , based in Framingham, Massachusetts. In 2011 it also published The Milford Daily News . It had also published, and closed, three other daily newspapers: The Daily News Transcript , The Daily News Tribune and the Enterprise-Sun .

The GateHouse purchase in mid-2006 included CNC as well as Enterprise News Media, publisher of two dailies and several weeklies that competed with CNC's South Shore holdings. The weeklies were incorporated into CNC and the company also forged close ties with its new sister dailies, The Enterprise and The Patriot Ledger , although they—and later GateHouse Media Massachusetts acquisitions The Herald News and the Taunton Daily Gazette —retained their own editorial hierarchy, however, and were not considered part of Community Newspaper Company.

CNC's holdings, as well as its Massachusetts sister papers and The Bulletin in Connecticut, now constitute GateHouse Media New England.

Weeklies

CNC published more than 100 weeklies, semiweeklies and monthly publications. Each publication was classified in one of five or six semi-autonomous units (Cape, Metro, North, Northwest, South, West), each with its own editor-in-chief, covering distinct geographic areas of eastern Massachusetts and named for its location with respect to Boston.

The West Unit included oversight over all the daily newspapers, in addition to most of the CNC weeklies that complement them; at times, the Cape Unit properties were considered part of the South Unit.

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Cape Cod Publishing Company, based in Orleans, Massachusetts, United States, was a publisher of weekly newspapers in the 1990s. It was created by Fidelity Investments as a holding company for newspapers acquired on Cape Cod, and eventually folded into Fidelity's Community Newspaper Company. CNC is now owned by GateHouse Media.

Norfolk Newspaper Company, based in Mansfield, Massachusetts, United States, founded three weekly newspapers in the suburbs south of Boston before being bought by Fidelity Investments in 1990 and dissolved into Community Newspaper Company six years later.

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References

  1. Mathis, Gregory (August 2, 2011). "For the Record: A Wicked Important Change". Halifax-Plympton Reporter. Retrieved May 26, 2012.