Chronicling the decline of a once-great local newspaper.

Selling the product proudly in 2017; a year later, I was out the door.

It's no secret that I used to work for The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, Mass. I still have a few friends that work there, although not many given the many staff reductions that have taken place in the past three years, and I still have reason to read it on occasion. So it was that I read something in today's Opinion section that made me chuckle.

It was a letter to the editor, written by an old friend and former neighbor who is also the widow of a former copy editor at the newspaper. Apparently she has moved away from within The Sun Chronicle's local circulation area but still has the paper sent to her, and she wrote to tell readers how lucky they are that they are served by a local newspaper that still places local news as its highest priority, as opposed to the local paper that serves the community in which she lives now.

I chuckled not out of derision directed at the letter-writer, but because I know that appearances can be deceiving. 

Yes, The Sun Chronicle still is devoted to local news coverage above all else, or at least as much of it as it can process with a severely reduced staff. In fact, I don't believe there are more than four full-time news reporters and one superhuman 70-year-old sportswriter left on the staff, all of them cranking out prodigious amounts of copy. But what once made The Sun Chronicle a great local newspaper, its ability to cover breaking news in all of the 10 communities it which it is sold, has all-but disappeared.

Especially outside of Attleboro and North Attleboro (with the exception of Foxboro, where the former publisher was rehired as the lone reporter for the weekly newspaper that The Sun Chronicle owns), there is next to no timely coverage of municipal news. Most of what appears is a rehash or rewrite of press releases or other media, often several days after the fact. The old derisive nickname that know-nothing critics had for the paper, "The Sun Comical," now has some merit because of the growing number of headline mistakes and glaring lack of copy editing that goes into the finished product these days.

Again, this is not to criticize those that still work at the Blue Ribbon Daily, as I used to call it. They are working their asses off. They are just overmatched by the challenge presented to them by their penurious new owners -- and that would be more readily apparent if it weren't for the fact that the Gannett-owned papers that surround The Sun Chronicle have been gutted far worse, and have considerably less local content.

But for me to make these statements, I need to establish my credentials as someone that actually knows what he's talking about when it comes to local journalism.

The early days (with contact lenses).

I was hired at The Sun Chronicle as a full-time local news reporter on Feb. 7, 1977, and was reassigned to become the first full-time sports editor in the paper's history in 1980. But I wore many hats for the better part of five decades. In my "first" tenure, I covered both local news in four communities and sports in all 10 towns, and did the sports-page layouts until they made my sports assignment permanent. After taking a one-man operation and expanding it to three full-time writers and a network of part-time correspondents, I left the paper on Sept. 9, 1987, then returned as the editor in charge of the Sunday sports section on Sept. 11, 1989 (after a two-year stint at The Patriot Ledger of Quincy). I served in that capacity for another 10 years before the bosses granted me my wish to devote myself fully to writing -- now fully committing me to covering the Patriots and high school sports and writing opinion columns. I did that in award-winning fashion prior to being laid off on Aug. 29, 2018, less than seven months shy of my planned retirement date.

My tenure there actually goes beyond the full-time work; I started contributing to the pages of the then-Attleboro Sun in 1969 as a high school sports correspondent, dutifully calling in the results of every Mansfield High School boys' varsity event for $3 a call. I did not call in girls' scores because it was not requested of me -- an oversight in the newspaper's coverage I would correct as its sports editor about 10 years later. That part-time job was mine for about two years before I went to college.

It was always a balancing act in the early years.

I am proud to say that during my tenure, The Sun Chronicle reached a peak subscription rate of about 26,000, seven days a week, and that it bucked the trend of falling circulation in the 2000s much longer than its competitors. We enjoyed the reputation of having a comprehensive sports section that offered far more extensive coverage of the schools than other papers around us. My coverage of the Patriots held its own against the competition of the metro papers (and almost got me hired elsewhere twice), and our sports columns were must-read features. And even as our circulation fell and our staff was reduced, Peter Gobis and I tried our level best to maintain that level of quality for as long as we could. Gobis, who predated me at The Sun Chronicle by five years, continues to labor on in a manner that defies explanation, given his age.

And yes, I could have left permanently. I had job offers from the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville and The Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence and interviewed favorably at the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. But for me, The Sun Chronicle was "home" -- the paper of record in my hometown and the area in which I grew up -- and the job I had there was still better than the ones I had been offered elsewhere. I became a lifer, and I don't regret it in the slightest.

So, lest what I have to say be labeled the rantings of a "disgruntled" former employee, let it be known from the onset that it was always my intention to become a former employee -- on March 17, 2019, precisely. More than 40 years of full-time work, which included me becoming the longest-tenured reporter assigned to the Patriots beat at the time of my departure, wore me down, especially after I had suffered a mild stroke in late 2014. I could see at the time of my decision to retire that the dire economic conditions faced by the newspaper industry as a whole were only going to get worse, not better -- and that as staffs were trimmed, the end result would be that more work was going to be heaped upon those that remained, not less. That's more easily handled by younger individuals (like me in my 30s, when a 72-hour work week was considered the norm) than by those of us creeping into our middle 60s.

But it could have been a different departure. When the topic of my retirement was first brought up, The Sun Chronicle was still owned by the United Communications Corp. of Kenosha, Wis., whose ownership of The Sun Chronicle is best described as being benevolent and benign for most of the nearly half-century in charge. When it was suggested in 2016 that I accept a buyout during a period of staff reduction, I was told by the publisher that I would be kept on in a part-time capacity, still covering the Patriots and the local high schools and writing opinion columns, just for a lot less money. That, and the need for health insurance as I was continuing to recover from the stroke, prompted me to turn down the buyout and to take my chances with continued full-time employment.

But not long after that, UCC put The Sun Chronicle up for sale. It was purchased by an outfit that called itself "TriBoro Massachusetts News Media," led by an individual named Steven Malkowich, which is a front for a Canadian-based media conglomerate, the Alberta Newspaper Group Ltd., where Malkowich is listed as executive vice president.

That company, which also owns the Pawtucket Times and Woonsocket Call, has been buying up small newspapers and struggling newspaper groups all over North America, then gutting their staffs and operating on a bare-bones level. It's not the only group that operates that way. The national chain Gannett used to stand for excellence in local journalism, but its assets were purchased by the the bottom-line vultures that ran GateHouse Media (which owned The Patriot Ledger, the Brockton Enterprise, Taunton Daily Gazette, Fall River Herald News, New Bedford Standard-Times, Cape Cod Times, Providence Journal and Worcester Telegram & Gazette, among others) and with the full company now under the Gannett name, it's a travesty to see how strong local media outlets have become mere spokes in the big wheel of bottom-lined publications.

By the way, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2019 that "the Vancouver-based Alberta Newspaper Group, where Malkowich is employed as an executive vice president, is run by David Radler, the man who helped fallen media baron Conrad Black build a global newspaper empire. Radler was Black’s longtime right-hand man, and later — in exchange for a plea bargain in their fraud case — served as the star witness against Black at trial. Radler, who was formerly the publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, served less than a year of his 29-month sentence for fraud. Black was recently pardoned by (former) President Trump."

The sale of The Sun Chronicle was announced on Aug. 1, 2018. In the story announcing the sale, it was said that the new company "would retain all employees" -- which it did for less than four weeks. Among the first wave of cuts were the publisher and five veteran newsroom employees, including me -- most of them over the age of 60, which makes me wonder why we didn't consider an age discrimination lawsuit. And there have been other layoffs and reassignments of full-timers to part-time status in the years that have followed. Up-to-date circulation figures are difficult to find, but I've been told it has plummeted well below 10,000 papers since the return to six-day publication just before I departed.

The famed "banned byline."

Needless to say, the suggestion that I would be kept on as a part-time contributor went out the window with the new ownership. On the day I was dispatched, I was told that I would not be welcomed back in any capacity -- an edict that was not imposed upon several other former staffers who were retained to write opinion columns or more. And when one of the stories I wrote about the Patriots in my resumed capacity as an Associated Press stringer displayed my byline on the front sports page of The Sun Chronicle, the editor that allowed that to happen was reprimanded.

A year before, I was called "the face of The Sun Chronicle to most of its readers" in my performance evaluation because of my long tenure, my award-winning work and the popular football picks contest run for nearly 30 years as "Beat Fearless." But suddenly, I was persona non grata because the new owners did not want to call attention to what had been lost as part of their cost-cutting measures.

As far as I can tell, those efforts have not been successful in eliminating my legacy. A week does not pass without me hearing from someone that misses my writing and says there's nothing to read in the paper anymore. I usually thank them for the compliment and tell them that there are still hard-working individuals at the paper trying to produce a good product, all things considered. I also suggest they check out my podcasts and this website, where I still offer opinions on various topics. The blog recently went over 34,000 visitors since I rekindled it last year. And, of course, I still am active in local sports coverage through my work as a sports announcer for three local cable TV systems.

So, I am fulfilled in my retirement. Indeed, I recently gave up my role as an AP correspondent as an accommodation to advancing age, and I suspect that even if I had been offered part-time work with my former newspaper, I'd probably be lessening my commitment by now so I could more fully appreciate life without daily deadlines. Or, more likely, further belt-tightening would have made that decision for me.

So, instead of being a "disgruntled" former employee, I think it's more accurate to call me a "disappointed" former employee -- disappointed by the decline in the quality of a newspaper to which I devoted the best years of my life. 

One particular thing that sticks in my craw is a recent decision to give a permanent column to a letter-to-the-editor gadfly that has no business being employed by any newspaper anywhere.

This individual has been hired to be the newspaper's "conservative voice," apparently. His lengthy and poorly-written ramblings carry the taint and stench of the Donald Trump doctrine of xenophobia,  racism, exclusionism and divisiveness that practically fractured America before the electorate came to its senses and overwhelmingly threw the failed New York City entrepreneur out of office after four nightmarish years.

But why did The Sun Chronicle hire this individual to write his Trumpian nonsense? Plain and simple, it's pandering to potential subscribers.

Back in the day when newspapers declared their political affiliation to the world, the Attleboro Sun and North Attleboro Chronicle were known as "Republican," and that status carried over to The Sun Chronicle after the papers merged in 1971. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the paper hired young reporters and editors who were more forward-thinking and liberal, and thus any official political affiliation was permanently dropped.

Undoubtedly, The Sun Chronicle voiced a more liberal slant to its opinions and endorsements over most of my tenure there, and reserved the letters-to-the-editor column for the yelps of outrage expressed by the area's conservative gadflies. As a matter of fact, a liberal editorial stance is more reflective of most of the readership. In the paper's circulation area, eight of 10 towns voted in support of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and nine of 10 for Joe Biden in 2020, although the margins were narrower in the towns closer to the conservative hotbeds of central Bristol County. 

I have no way of knowing the actual thought processes which went into the decision to hire a columnist that embraces the failed policies of Trump. But given the number of letters the paper received during the election that decried Joe Biden as a Satanic ultra-left radical that hated America, it makes sense that someone in authority might believe that there was an untapped reservoir of potential subscribers that felt unserved by the paper's liberal slant. And by pandering to that specific angry and bitter minority, maybe they might be persuaded to buy a newspaper that offered some measure of validation to their fringe beliefs.

Rather than convince any of the well-meaning and respected Republican public servants of the area (of which there are many) to become a regular contributor to add balance to the paper's perspective, it instead offered regular column space to a junior-grade Alex Jones, a Trump wannabe that loves to dish out the criticism but can't take any himself. Years earlier, when he was just another letter-column gadfly, I personally and privately disputed a falsehood directed at me that he espoused in one of his diatribes. He immediately went running to the managing editor, crying that the big, bad sportswriter had said awful things to him (which I hadn't). And because spines lost a lot of calcium within the offices at 34 South Main Street as the circulation numbers plummeted, I was called into the office and reprimanded as being "unprofessional" -- the implication being that it was wrong to challenge any potential subscriber about anything, no matter how stupid, untrue and insulting it was, as long as it was possible for us to squeeze 10 bucks a week out of that nitwit's wallet.

That may have been the day, in fact, that I knew it was time to retire. That was the day that I realized that the paper would never again back one of its columnists in a dispute that included a threat to stop buying the paper by those aggrieved by an opinion contrary to their own.

Still proud of the work we did.

Don't get me wrong. I loved the paper for most of my long tenure there. There were bumps along the way and nothing was ever perfect. I thought some of my bosses had no idea what made our section successful and often tried to change our content in a manner that would be distasteful and repellant to our loyal readers, and some of my bosses surely thought I was headstrong, arrogant, unwilling to take direction and occasionally reckless and insubordinate. They were correct, of course. But somehow, we all managed to get the job done in a positive way over more than 40 years. 

I'll always have the greatest love and respect for the newspaper and many of the people that worked for it, and the adventures we shared -- some of which I speak about in the episode of "The Owner's Box After Dark" to which I added a link at the end of this column. In that episode, I recognized the positive things said about Gobis and me in a special section marking the paper's post-merger 50th anniversary. And who knows, maybe I'll write a lengthy post someday about the positive memories -- things like how we all banded together during a surprise April 1 blizzard to put out a newspaper with ancient, battery-powered laptop computers and lanterns, or the amazing tales of publishing (or trying to publish) in the wake of the Blizzard of '78.

I grieve the impending death of local journalism, because it's already clear that the less local news reporting there is, the less informed the public becomes about the world around them, and that eventually leads to how you get the likes of Donald Trump elected to national office. And it's only going to get worse before it gets better -- if it ever does.

But while I also believe, as my friend said in her letter to the editor, that there's still reason to respect The Sun Chronicle as a vital source of local news, I think I should be able to note the mistakes it makes -- especially the continuing participation of the rabble-rousing conservative columnist -- without my being labeled as a "disgruntled" former employee.

Disappointed, yes. Disgruntled? Not at all. I'm quite proud of what I accomplished along with so many other outstanding community journalists over the years. And I'm saddened to see it disappearing with every passing day.