Thursday, February 14, 2008 – Having recently made some fairly significant changes to the format of the Gazette, we’d like to give our readers some insight into why those changes were made, and what they mean for the future of this paper. As is so often the case, some knowledge of the past will be necessary in order to understand the future.
The current editor acquired the ownership rights to of this paper nineteen years ago this spring, in what would best be described as an unusually hostile takeover. At that time the identity of the New Hampshire Gazette had been merged with that of the daily Portsmouth Herald for nearly thirty years. The management of the Herald, however, carelessly let the registration of the Gazette’s trade name lapse. Learned of this oversight, the editor immediately filed papers to register the trade name.
On May Day, 1989, the state issued this certificate, and the newspaper founded two centuries earlier by his third cousin, five times removed, was his.
That, and not much else — resources were scarce. For the next nine years the paper was published episodically, in a very small format, with a small press run, on a sheet-fed press, in Hillsboro, New Hampshire. It wasn’t until 1999 that we resumed periodical publication, fortnightly, on newsprint, here in Portsmouth.
For several years the page count ranged between eight and twenty. Five or six year ago it settled down at sixteen pages. Measuring 11 inches wide by 15 inches high, it weighed 1.6 ounces. At that weight and those dimensions, mailing by First Class postage would have been prohibitively expensive, so we used what the U.S. Postal Service calls Presorted Standard Mail. It was affordable, but deathly slow, particularly for the more far-flung subscribers.
For years the editor harbored the hope that we could maintain the same size, increase revenue by attracting more subscribers, hire enough help to reduce the burden of laying out 1.4 pages every day, and improve delivery time by haranguing the U.S. Postal Service into granting us the right to mail at the Periodical Rate. The editor finally concluded that before those conditions were met he would be older than the newspaper is now.
Friday, February 8 marked the first publication of the paper in its new 8-page, 17-inch-tall format. With its weight trimmed to just under one ounce, and mailed First Class, we’re sure most of our subscribers received it days ago. Some may still be waiting for the previous paper.
The editor, meanwhile, is beginning to get used to the idea that his page layout workload has been reduced to .57 pages per day. This should presumably free up his time and enable him to devote more energy to what he is best at: sedition.
Change is never easy. The hardest part of this change was cutting out some features of which we were quite proud. But it was the only way forward, and we had to take it.
As a result of this change, a few people have expressed concern about the future of the paper. The time to be concerned was before this change was made.
We have always been convinced that because of its history and its freedom from corporate control – its cosmic lever and fulcrum – this paper had the potential to do something all out of proportion to its size. We may have just eliminated one of its last remaining obstacles.