History
David S. Cutler, a former reporter for The Patriot Ledger and son of the publisher of the weekly Duxbury Clipper, started the Marshfield Mariner weekly in 1972 and expanded his holdings to include 17 weekly newspapers -- including several startup Mariners—by 1989.
He sold the company that year to Capital Cities for an estimated US$7 or US$8 million. Fidelity Investments bid for the papers at that time but was unsuccessful.
In 1993, the company bought the competing Hingham Journal, founded in 1827, and folded it into the Hingham Mariner.
In 1994, Capital Cities announced it would sell all 74 of its newspapers in New England, including the Mariner chain.
Fidelity, always considered a strong contender to buy Mariner, bought another large suburban chain of weeklies, News-Transcript Group, in late 1994, fueling speculation that a deal for Mariner was close behind. At the same time, The Boston Globe was said to be interested in buying the South Shore weeklies.
The deal was not struck until early 1995, however. Fidelity's subsidiary, Community Newspaper Company, purchased Mariner for an undisclosed sum. At the time, CNC chairman William Elfers said Mariner "sort of fills out the map," giving CNC an uninterrupted belt of papers surrounding Boston, from Cape Cod through MetroWest to the Massachusetts North Shore. The Mariner purchase raised CNC's weekly circulation to 1,018,000.
Mariner Group was dissolved in early 1996, when CNC realigned its operating units by geography. The Mariners became the core of the new South Unit.
Read more about this topic: Mariner Group
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