The Inquirer and Mirror

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Inquirer and Mirror
Type Weekly newspaper
Format Broadsheet

Owner Ottaway Community Newspapers
(a News Corporation subsidiary)
Publisher Marianne Stanton
Editor Marianne Stanton
Founded 1821
Headquarters 1 Old South Road, Nantucket, Massachusetts 02554 USA
Circulation 30,000 "in-season"[1]

Website: Ack.net

The Inquirer and Mirror, also called The I&M, is the weekly newspaper of record on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts. Formerly owned for 30 years by the Giffin family (of which Marianne Stanton, the current publisher, is the daughter), The I&M was sold to Ottaway Community Newspapers, a division of Dow Jones & Company, now a News Corporation subsidiary, in 1990.[2]

News Corp. bought Dow Jones & Company for US$5 billion in 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.[3]

[edit] Sisters and competitors

Although Ottaway also owns the Cape and Islands' daily newspaper, the Cape Cod Times, The I&M is run independently of its sister newspapers, which also include The Standard-Times and its associated weeklies on the mainland, and the weekly The Barnstable Patriot on the Cape.

A former weekly competitor, the Nantucket Beacon, went out of business in the mid-1990s after winning several awards soon after its 1988 founding. The Beacon had been criticized for sensationalism, but critics of The I&M said competition made the long-dominant paper try harder.[4]

[edit] Trivia

At the time of the newspaper's sale in 1990, its circulation was given as "about 8,500 copies most of the year, and nearly 11,000 in summer."[2]

The Nantucket Historical Association claims that the original "Nantucket" limerick was published in The I&M of February 7, 1903. It was a "clean" version -- the racier ones, historians said, came later. The full original verse was:

There once was a man from Nantucket,
Who kept all of his cash in a bucket,
But his daughter, named Nan,
Ran away with a man,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.[5]

The I&M Website, http://www.ack.net, takes its name from the IATA code of the island's only airport, ACK.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Ack.net: Advertising, accessed January 14, 2007. "In-season" refers to the summer.
  2. ^ a b Hanafin, Teresa M. "Ottaway Chain Buys Nantucket Newspaper." The Boston Globe, March 16, 1990
  3. ^ "Ottaway Papers Might Be Sold, Including 16 in N.E.". NEPA Bulletin (Boston, Mass.), December 2007, page 3.
  4. ^ McGrory, Brian. "Nantucket Papers in Uncivil War." The Boston Globe, August 13, 1994.
  5. ^ Parks, Vanessa. "There Once Was a Man from Nantucket ..." The Boston Globe, September 24, 2000.