Competition
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.
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.
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.
The paper also faces hometown competition from an alternative newsweekly, The New Hampshire Gazette, named after the state's oldest newspaper, which had been absorbed into the Herald in the 1890s.
On October 31, 2010, Seacoast Media Group announced plans to charge online users nearly $69 per year to access the previously free content. The fee took effect November 16, 2010.
Read more about this topic: The Portsmouth Herald
Famous quotes containing the word competition:
“Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
“The elements of success in this business do not differ from the elements of success in any other. Competition is keen and bitter. Advertising is as large an element as in any other business, and since the usual avenues of successful exploitation are closed to the profession, the adage that the best advertisement is a pleased customer is doubly true for this business.”
—Madeleine [Blair], U.S. prostitute and “madam.” Madeleine, ch. 5 (1919)