| Type | Daily newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Broadsheet |
| Owner | Dow Jones Local Media Group (News Corporation) |
| Publisher | John Tabor |
| Editor | Howard Altschiller |
| Headquarters | 111 New Hampshire Avenue, Portsmouth, New Hampshire 03801 USA |
| Circulation | 9,768 daily as of Aug. 2010. [1] |
| Official website | Seacoastonline.com |
The Portsmouth Herald (and Seacoast Sunday) is a seven-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.
News Corporation acquired The Herald when it bought former owner Dow Jones & Company 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.[1]
Unlike most New England daily newspapers, The Herald has a higher circulation today than six years ago. Its editors in 2001 credited the newspaper's resurgence with the introduction of the "Wow! factor" -- front-page stories on controversial or sensational topics that appeal to younger readers.[2]
On October 31, 2010, Seacoast Media Group announced plans to charge online users nearly $69.00 per year to access the previously free content. The fee took effect November 16, 2010.
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The Herald and its sister weekly newspapers in New Hampshire and Maine form the Seacoast Media Group, a subsidiary of Dow Jones Local Media Group, itself a division of News Corporation. It was acquired for Ottaway by Dow Jones & Company, which formerly owned the chain, December 1, 1997,[3] in a newspaper swap in which Thomson Corporation gained The News-Sun of Sun City, Arizona.[4]
During the tail end of Thomson's ownership of The Herald, it was seen as corporate and out-of-touch with the local community. Several weekly newspapers sprang up to challenge it in Portsmouth and surrounding towns.[5]
Years before buying The Herald, Ottaway started a weekly newspaper, the Portsmouth Press, in 1987. For six years, that paper competed with the daily. Its publisher, John Tabor, eventually became publisher of The Herald.[3]
The Herald's strongest daily competitors are Foster's Daily Democrat in nearby Dover, New Hampshire, and the statewide New Hampshire Union Leader. In the late 1990s, the Geo. J. Foster Company launched Foster's Sunday Citizen, to compete with Herald Sunday and the state's largest Sunday paper, the New Hampshire Sunday News. Around the same time, The Herald's Ottaway managers announced they would begin distributing Herald Sunday outside of the daily newspaper's coverage area, into the Exeter and Hampton areas, where Seacoast Media Group publishes weeklies.[3]
The paper also faces hometown competition from an alternative newsweekly, The New Hampshire Gazette. The original Gazette, the oldest newspaper in New Hampshire, was published as the Sunday edition of The Herald from the 1890s to 1960, when the Sunday paper began carrying the name Herald. In 1989, a descendent of the Gazette's founder began publishing an alternative newspaper under that name.