(Host) A week after the Claremont Eagle Times closed suddenly and filed for bankruptcy, people are wondering who will fill the void, and why the end came so suddenly.
VPR’s Susan Keese reports.
(Keese) Six months ago Mary Ellen Applequist left a paper in Connecticut for a job as Managing Editor of the Eagle Times and its three weeklies. She says she asked about the paper’s finances while interviewing for the job and was told that it didn’t have any debt.
Applequist also liked the paper’s emphasis on local coverage. She worked with Harvey Hill, the paper’s owner, and the staff to strengthen that. She said there was a feeling of excitement.
(Applequist) We made our A section primarily local and began a lot of new projects to really open up the dialogue between ourselves and our readers through posting their comments to our online stories and publishing our readers’ submitted photos and people loved it.”
(Keese) Many subscribers were angry when they learned last Friday that the issue they were reading was the Eagle’s last.
…People like John, a reader from Springfield.
(John) about two to three weeks ago I got a thing in the mail asking me if I would subscribe… so I says… five weeks, sure. Today I read the paper. We’re shut down! No notification or nothing.
(Keese) But Applequist says no one at the paper knew before a 3 pm e-mail from Hill on what turned out to be their last day of work.
Applequist says Hill met later that afternoon with his managerial staff and apologized profusely for the news and the way it was broken.
In his brief message to readers published the next day he said he and his wife had put in well over a million dollars personally to support the paper’s losses. Since then he hasn’t responded to requests for interviews.
New Hampshire State Senator Tom O’Dell says the paper had often been a bit thin of late.
(O’Dell)As an observer and a daily reader certainly I noticed there were times when there was very little advertising and I think we all know that advertising is important.
(Keese) The paper and its weeklies served a wide swath of towns on both sides of the Connecticut River. O’Dell says the Eagle’s demise has left a big hole.
(O’Dell) I think most importantly of the community events and what’s happening in the local towns, the daily obituaries.. the yard sales, and the scores for the various sports teams, the baseball teams this summer.
Julia Lloyd Wright has covered Weathersfield for the Eagle for years. She’s heard a lot of anger as her neighbors realize what they’ve lost.
(Wright) "How do you rent an apartment?The farmers now a lot of them have pick your own. They can do a certain amount by putting a notice on the streets. But they can’t get to a wide area with an ad in the paper that goes from Newport out to Londonderry. "
(Keese) But back on the streets of Springfield a cashier at a local store illustrates what newspapers are up against. Twenty-something Raven Buehler says it was mostly middle-aged people who bought a paper when they stopped at her store.
Buehler says it’s too bad, but that she didn’t really read the Eagle-Times much anyway.
(Buehler) "I tend to get my news on line more…. I tend to feel you get better information from a newspaper than on line, but it’s just not as easy."
(Keese) Some former staffers of the Eagle Times say they’re trying to develop an alternative to the newspaper.
For VPR News, I’m Susan Keese.