Talk:List of newspapers in Massachusetts

Articles For All Daily Papers
We should finish creating articles for the remaining daily newspapers that do not have them. I know I can at least write the one for Salem News, and another that is not on the list the Manchester Cricket which I think is a weekly publication. Yamaka122 15:52, 10 June 2007 (UTC)


 * It's something I've been working on, piecemeal, for some time now. Glad to see someone else helping out. I see that you're working mostly on Essex County titles; I've got some old Globe clippings with information to add, which I'll get around to once I get a free afternoon. As for weeklies ... I'm not sure exactly what to do here; there are a ton of weeklies in Massachusetts -- definitely more than 300, perhaps as many as 400 or 500 if business publications, alternative weeklies, college papers and foreign-language papers are to be considered. My own solution has been to encourage writing about companies that own weeklies (except in the case of independent papers, in which it would be silly to do a story on a company that consists of just one paper -- write the article about the paper itself). For an example of this, surf around the List of newspapers in Rhode Island page, which contains every R.I. paper of which I'm aware, formatted the way I'd like to see Massachusetts done. Welcome aboard! ``` W i k i W i s t a h W a s s a p ``` 04:25, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Table / Circulation / Online
User:M2545 has done some great work turning this list into a table and adding more newspapers to it. I do think the table as currently formatted is a bit unweildy. Some thoughts:


 * 1) We should eliminate the "circulation" column. For the vast majority of papers, finding circulation numbers accurate enough for meaningful comparison is impossible, and at any rate they would be updated on Wikipedia only sporadically, which means the table will quickly become outdated. The only use I can think of for circulation numbers is to name the five or ten highest-circulation dailies (maybe weeklies too); that can easily be broken out into a separate listing on this page. Otherwise we're going to end up, at best, with a table that has a few newspapers with correct, independently audited circulations -- the major dailies; a few newspapers with (probably out-of-date, and probably inflated) publisher's estimates gleaned from websites, or advertising rep puffery about "average press runs" (but how many are returned? and how many did you have to give away?) and "average readership" (but what's your multiplier? Now we're comparing apples to oranges); and a truly massive number of papers with no circ information at all, making the table useless for comparisons.
 * Agreed M2545 (talk) 01:15, 10 May 2012 (UTC)


 * 1) We should eliminate the listing of towns covered for dailies. Most dailies cover multiple towns, and if we're going to set the precedent of listing all seven towns surrounding Gardner (for example), are we going to list all 100+ towns "covered" by the Globe?
 * 2) We should split the online sites into their own listing, either on this page or on a different one. The name of this list is "list of newspapers" -- not "list of news sources". If we're going to treat Patch as though it were a newspaper, we should have different entries for every town where Patch has a site (after all, each has its own editor and its own web address; Patch is putting just as many resources into each community as many weekly papers do). But doing so raises the question of where we stop. Once Patch is on the list, what's to keep every placeblogger in the state off the list? Who's to say that the Patch brand of online journalism is more 'newspapery' than your average wannabe selectman with a blog? (mind you, it is, but how do we set that policy in writing?). And for what it's worth, Wicked Local shouldn't even be on this list. It's the web arm of GateHouse and only exists in communities served by GateHouse newspapers. Its content is created and managed by GateHouse newspaper employees. If Wicked Local is on the list then boston.com and bostonherald.com and telegram.com and masslive.com and all the rest should be listed separately from their printed counterparts.
 * 3) "Publisher/Parent Company" should be one or the other. Corporate papers have individual publishers too. My vote is to make it "Owner".
 * 4) Is a table truly the best way to present this information? I hesitate to mention this because I'm sure this took M2545 eleven kajillion hours to format, but I wonder if the old tried-and-true bulleted list might be less unweildy. Perhaps a series of bulleted lists -- one per county, or one per region of the state (Western - Central - MetroWest - North - Metro - Southeast - Cape/Islands). ``` t b w i l l i e ` $1.25 ` 19:29, 9 May 2012 (UTC)


 * To quickly respond to at least some of your thoughtful comments, here's my two cents. The table format allows sorting by title, town, county and owner. The form anticipates multiple readers who may access the page for a variety of reasons. For example, someone who has relocated to Massachusetts may seek information about news sources in their locality. Or someone wondering about "Wicked Local" or "Patch" in their community may not realize that both homegrown-sounding titles are in fact owned by distant corporate entities, and managed as such. The state-wide list allows for context and comparison. M2545 (talk) 01:15, 10 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I'm not terribly opposed to the tabular setup, I just think it looks a little "clunky" as it stands, and the Patch and WickedLocal boxes, in particular, are downright ugly -- we shouldn't be using one cell to hold 100 town names. I'd disagree with your characterization of WickedLoal and Patch as being "... managed as such". In both cases, the sites are run by local news editors and contain primarily local content; they're no less local than hundreds of print dailies and weeklies in Massachusetts that also have "homegrown-sounding titles". And being "owned by distant entities" is hardly a unique distinction -- consider the Globe (New York), the Sun (Denver), the Eagle-Tribune (Alabama), the Republican (Staten Island), the Daily Hampshire Gazette (New Hampshire). In fact, the only 15,000+ circ Massachusetts newspaper I can think of that's owned locally is the Boston Herald.


 * I get your point that some people might think Patch and Wicked Local are real print newspapers and come here looking for them (although why wouldn't they just do a Wikipedia search for "Patch" or "Wicked Local"?). It probably does make sense to have a separate section on this page for "online news sites", despite the headache that it could cause if every newsblogger in the commonwealth decides he's found the perfect advertising medium. In addition to those two, I'd add Main Street Connect, and if WickedLocal qualifies then boston.com/Your Town probably does too. ``` t b w i l l i e ` $1.25 ` 15:01, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

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