Herald News

For other similarly named newspapers, see The Herald News (disambiguation).

Herald News
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner(s)	North Jersey Media Group
Editor	James McGarvey
Founded	1872 (as Passaic City Herald) 1988 (as North Jersey Herald & News)
Headquarters	One Garret Mountain Plaza CN 473 Woodland Park, NJ 07424-3318 United States
Website	NorthJersey.com

The Herald News is a daily broadsheet newspaper published by North Jersey Media Group, which also publishes its sister paper, the Hackensack, New Jersey-based broadsheet The Record. The paper is published in Woodland Park (formerly West Paterson), New Jersey, and focuses on the Passaic County, New Jersey area. The Herald News has a daily circulation of nearly 50,000 and a Sunday circulation over 40,000.^[1] Today's Herald News is descended from several papers, but did not come to be until two Passaic County papers out of Passaic and Paterson merged in 1988.

North Jersey Herald-News

One of the two papers that merged to form the now-Herald News was the North Jersey Herald-News, which grew from the mergers of several papers in the Passaic-Clifton metropolitan area, and for many years was known as the Passaic Herald News. The paper was headquartered at the intersection of Main Avenue and Highland Avenue in Passaic, just over the border with Clifton. In the 1970s, the paper became known as the North Jersey Herald-News and was owned by the Drukker family, with former Congressman Dow Drukker founding the paper and relative Austin Crane Drukker owning and publishing the paper by the early 1980s; by this time the Drukker publishing interests had gone beyond just the North Jersey Herald-News and included other papers in the area, including The Dover Advance, a small daily in Dover, New Jersey, now defunct.

Paterson Evening News

Beginning publication in 1890, the Paterson Evening News was one of several daily papers that called the county seat of Passaic county home. The paper's chief competitor was the Paterson Morning Call, which eventually grew and absorbed the Paterson Morning News to become the Paterson News and Call. By the 1970s the News and Call and Evening News were the two remaining papers in Paterson. The two eventually merged in 1980, operating out of the headquarters of the Evening News on 16th Avenue, and became simply known as The News. At the time, the paper was owned by Allbritton Communications Company.

Merger

In 1985, MediaNews Group bought The News from Albritton. Shortly thereafter, the Drukker family sold control of the Herald-News to a MediaNews affiliate. MediaNews continued to operate both The News and the Herald-News out of their respective plants in Paterson and Passaic while beginning to plan a merger. In July 1987, the weekend editions of The News and North Jersey Sunday (the name for the Sunday Herald-News) were merged. Then, in September, MediaNews finalized the merger of the daily editions and the paper became known as The North Jersey Herald & News. Following the merger the former Evening News headquarters were closed, and publishing operations were moved to the old Herald-News headquarters in Passaic. The Evening News building is now used by a Paterson elementary school.

For its new combined paper, MediaNews developed the slogan "FIRST with the news...everyday!" and designed an accompanying rising sun logo. The logo and slogan were printed on signs that were placed in establishments that carried the new Herald & News and also on decal stickers. Those stickers were used to rebrand the papers' street box machines; prior to the merger the Herald-News was sold in yellow machines with blue tops and The News was sold in white machines with navy tops. The decals were simply placed over the papers' old logos where possible. The Herald & News started to phase these machines out in the mid-1990s in favor of white street boxes with the rising sun logo on them. All of the remaining machines were again affixed with new decals after the Herald & News changed its logo again toward the end of the 1990s and were used until the merger with The Record, when new boxes were ordered; the Herald News street boxes are now painted green.

Further history

In 1997 the Herald & News began publishing the local Clifton paper Dateline Journal out of its Passaic headquarters and added a sign with the Dateline Journal's logo to its outside wall. The same year, MediaNews sold the paper to the Borg family, owners of The Record. In 2000, North Jersey Media Group was formed as a holding company for the Borgs' assets, including the Herald News.

Early in the 2000s, the paper dropped the ampersand from its name, and later would drop "North Jersey" as well, just being called the Herald News. Shortly thereafter, the operations of both The Record and the Herald News were merged. North Jersey Media Group set up a new headquarters in Woodland Park and moved the entire operation of the Herald News, as well as the Wayne, New Jersey-based Record Passaic County bureau and some of its operations, to the new building. The Record has also consolidated its operations there as well. The Dateline Journal operations were moved back into Clifton and the paper became known as the Clifton Journal, and the Passaic building was permanently closed; the building has since been demolished and a Passaic middle school now sits on the site. In recent years, the two papers have operated largely as a single entity, sharing many stories and editorials.

The Herald News' primary area of concentration is in Passaic County, while also covering news in the suburbs of the county (areas of Bergen, Essex, and Morris Counties) as well.

References