Type | Daily newspaper |
---|---|
Format | Broadsheet |
Owner(s) | Gannett |
Publisher | Peter Meyer |
Editor | Lynne Sullivan |
Founded | February 4, 1850, as Daily Evening Standard |
Headquarters | 25 Elm Street, New Bedford, Massachusetts 02740, United States |
Circulation | 9,617(as of 2018) [1] |
ISSN | 0745-3574 |
OCLC number | 22392728 |
Website | southcoasttoday |
The Standard-Times (and Sunday Standard-Times), based in New Bedford, Massachusetts, is the largest of three daily newspapers covering the South Coast of Massachusetts, [2] along with The Herald News of Fall River and Taunton Daily Gazette of Taunton, Massachusetts.
Like the Cape Cod Times , which is the only larger newspaper in Southeastern Massachusetts, The Standard-Times is owned by Gannett. Together with the weekly newspapers of Hathaway Publishing, which also cover Fall River and several other suburban towns, The Standard-Times is part of the South Coast Media Group.
The Standard-Times's coverage area includes Acushnet, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, Fall River, Freetown, Lakeville, Marion, Mattapoisett, New Bedford, Rochester, Wareham, and Westport, Massachusetts.
The Standard-Times's main daily competitor is The Herald News of Fall River. Other rivals include The Boston Globe , the Taunton Daily Gazette and the Providence Journal .
The Standard-Times's print circulation has fallen over 30% since 2006. E-sales, while increasing, have not offset this decline in circulation. Daily (Monday through Saturday) circulation for The Standard-Times averaged 31,629 in mid-2006, down slightly from the 33,047 reported earlier that year. By September 2010, circulation had fallen sharply to 24,723 and 26,521 for daily and Sunday circulation respectively. As at May 2014, circulation had continued to fall, with daily print circulation down to 18,100 (20,482 Sunday circulation) and daily e-sales of 2,176 (836 Sunday circulation). [3]
Publisher William T. Kennedy came under fire for New Bedford boosterism again in the 2000s, as critics alleged that his support for building a multimillion-dollar aquarium—he served on the board of directors for the waterfront "Oceanarium"—was skewing The Standard-Times's coverage of cost overruns and delays. [4]
The Standard-Times formed from the 1934 merger of The New Bedford Standard and The New Bedford Times. [5] The Standard had been in operation since being founded as an evening newspaper in 1850. [6]
The Cape Cod Times was originally known as The Cape Cod Standard-Times, an edition of the New Bedford paper. It split off in the 1970s.
O Jornal, a Portuguese-language weekly newspaper now owned by GateHouse Media, was purchased by The Standard-Times in 1993 from Kathy Castro and was sold in 1998 in a deal with two Fall River residents, Robert and James Karam, after Ottaway threatened to close it during staff cuts late in 1998. [7] The weekly eventually was sold to Journal Register Company, then the owner of The Herald News of Fall River.
The use of the titles "Mr.," "Mrs.," "Ms." and "Miss" before the last names of people cited in the newspaper, still in use in sections other than sports at the start of 2007, is the legacy of longtime Standard-Times editor James M. Ragsdale, who died in 1994. Ragsdale was also credited with publishing drug and prostitution cases separately from other court news, in running features called Drug Watch and Prostitution Watch. [8] The features included photos of drug and prostitution suspects taken during arraignment and published before their cases were adjudicated.
The front-page nameplate of The Standard-Times displays its home city's name in small print and trumpets a regional identity, "Serving the SouthCoast Community." It was The Standard-Times under Editor-In-Chief Ken Hartnett, that in the 1990s most loudly championed the name South Coast to designate the Fall River-New Bedford metropolitan area. [9] [10]
The "Standard-Times" has done well in regional news competitions for many years. Most recently it was named the New England Newspaper & Press Association Newspaper of the Year for both 2012 and 2013. It won NENPA's First Place Award for Local Election coverage for 2012, '13 and '14. It won the New England Associated Press News Executives Association's Deadline News Coverage First Place Award for its coverage of Tropical Storm Irene in 2012 and was NEAPNEA's First Place winner for its Overall Website in 2012.
Following a series of lay-offs between 2008 and 2009, the Standard-Times placed a paywall on its website on January 12, 2010. [11] Unregistered visitors are able to view three articles per month, with free registration increasing the number of articles to 10 per month. Following the introduction of the paywall, site visitors fell. [12]
Amid a general decline in newspaper circulation, the ownership of the Standard-Times and its parent media groups has changed multiple times in the 21st century.
News Corporation acquired The Standard-Times when it bought Dow Jones & Company, Dow Jones Local Media Group Inc.'s parent, for US$5 billion in late 2007. Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp., reportedly told investors before the deal that he would be "selling the local newspapers fairly quickly" after the Dow Jones purchase. [13]
On September 4, 2013, News Corp announced that it would sell the Dow Jones Local Media Group to Newcastle Investment Corp.—an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group, for $87 million. The newspapers will be operated by Fortress subsidiary GateHouse Media, the owner of The Standard-Times' rival The Herald News . GateHouse Media has also expressed interest in purchasing fellow Standard-Times rival The Providence Journal. [14] News Corp. CEO and former Wall Street Journal editor Robert James Thomson indicated that the newspapers were "not strategically consistent with the emerging portfolio" of the company. [15] GateHouse in turn filed prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 27, 2013, to restructure its debt obligations in order to accommodate the acquisition. [16]
Freetown is a town in Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 9,206 at the 2020 census.
New Bedford is a city in Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States. It is located on the Acushnet River in what is known as the South Coast region. Up through the 17th century, the area was the territory of the Wampanoag Native American people. English colonists bought the land on which New Bedford would later be built from the Wampanoag in 1652, and the original colonial settlement that would later become the city was founded by English Quakers in the late 17th century. The town of New Bedford itself was officially incorporated in 1787.
Local Media Group, Inc., formerly Dow Jones Local Media Group and Ottaway Newspapers Inc., owned newspapers, websites and niche publications in California, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania. It was headquartered in Campbell Hall, New York, and its flagship was the Times Herald-Record, serving Middletown and other suburbs of New York City.
The Diocese of Fall River is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory, or diocese, of the Catholic Church in southeastern Massachusetts in the United States. It is a suffragan diocese in the ecclesiastical province of the metropolitan Archdiocese of Boston.
The Times Herald-Record, often referred to as The Record or Middletown Record in its coverage area, is a daily newspaper published in Middletown, New York, covering the northwest suburbs of New York City. It covers Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties in New York. It was published in a tabloid format until March 1, 2022, when it began being published like most other newspapers, in a broadsheet format. The newspaper left its long-time main office in Middletown in 2021 and moved into a small office nearby in the Town of Wallkill. The newsroom had 120 full-time equivalent employees in the 1990s, but as of July 2023 it had one news reporter and one sports reporter.
The South Coast of Massachusetts is the region of southeastern Massachusetts consisting of the southern part of Bristol and Plymouth counties, bordering Buzzards Bay, and includes the cities of Fall River, New Bedford, the southeastern tip of East Taunton and nearby towns. The Rhode Island towns of Tiverton and Little Compton, located in Newport County, are often included within the South Coast designation due to regional similarities with adjacent communities.
The Yankee Quill Award is a regional American journalism award that recognizes a lifetime contribution toward excellence in journalism in New England. The award is bestowed annually by the Academy of New England Journalists, and administered by the New England Society of Newspaper Editors. It is considered the highest individual honor awarded by fellow journalists in the region.
The Fairhaven Advocate is a community newspaper serving the communities of Acushnet, Massachusetts and Fairhaven, Massachusetts, United States. Introduced in 1979, it was later operated by local newspaper company Hathaway Publishing, owned by Local Media Group.
The Middleboro Secondary is a railroad line owned by MassDOT in the U.S. state of Massachusetts. The line runs from Attleboro to Middleborough via Taunton.
The smaller of the two main newspapers in Massachusetts' South Coast, The Herald News is a daily newspaper based in Fall River, Massachusetts. Its coverage area includes Fall River and the nearby towns of Dighton, Freetown, Somerset, Swansea and Westport, Massachusetts; as well as Little Compton and Tiverton, Rhode Island.
Hathaway Publishing was a subsidiary of The Local Media Group Inc. Hathaway published five weekly newspapers in the South Coast region of Massachusetts.
The Portsmouth Herald is a six-day daily newspaper serving greater Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Its coverage area also includes the municipalities of Greenland, New Castle, Newington and Rye, New Hampshire; and Eliot, Kittery, Kittery Point and South Berwick, Maine.
The Barnstable Patriot is a weekly newspaper published in and for the town of Barnstable, Massachusetts, United States. Although it bills itself as "an independent voice since 1830", The Patriot has been owned, since 2019, by Gannett.
South Coast Rail is a project to build a new southern line of the MBTA Commuter Rail system along several abandoned and freight-only rail lines. The line will restore passenger rail service between Boston and the cities of Taunton, Fall River, and New Bedford, via the towns of Berkley, and Freetown, on the south coast of Massachusetts. It includes passenger service to some of the southern lines of the former Old Colony Railroad and the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad.
The Taunton Daily Gazette is a daily newspaper founded in 1848. Based in Taunton, Massachusetts, its coverage area also includes Berkley, Rehoboth, Dighton, Lakeville, Norton, and Raynham.
East Taunton station is an under-construction MBTA Commuter Rail station in East Taunton, Massachusetts adjacent to the interchange between the Route 24 expressway and County Street. It is planned to open in 2025 as part of the first phase of the South Coast Rail project.
Middleborough station is an under-construction MBTA Commuter Rail station in Middleborough, Massachusetts. It is expected to open in May 2025 as part of the South Coast Rail project, replacing Middleborough/Lakeville station for regular service. The station will have a single side platform located inside the wye between the Middleborough Main Line and the Middleboro Secondary.
Mary Ann Tripp was the first American woman to visit China and also the first American woman to circumnavigate the Earth. She also visited the Philippine Islands during this historic trip. She then went on to travel the globe and visit China two more times before settling into a long life in Massachusetts.