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)
“Never before has a generation of parents faced such awesome competition with the mass media for their children’s attention. While parents tout the virtues of premarital virginity, drug-free living, nonviolent resolution of social conflict, or character over physical appearance, their values are daily challenged by television soaps, rock music lyrics, tabloid headlines, and movie scenes extolling the importance of physical appearance and conformity.”
—Marianne E. Neifert (20th century)
“Mothers seem to be in subtle competition with teachers. There is always an underlying fear that teachers will do a better job than they have done with their child.... But mostly mothers feel that their areas of competence are very much similar to those of the teacher. In fact they feel they know their child better than anyone else and that the teacher doesn’t possess any special field of authority or expertise.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)