Another blow to local journalism.

The newspaper's headquarters has been advertised as being available for lease.

On the front page of its last two editions, The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Mass., has run a notice to its loyal readers that the newspaper would be taking another step toward oblivion.

That may sound overly negative, but I don't know another way to describe it and still be honest.

The newspaper, which can draw its roots all the way back to 1871, told its readers that beginning in the first week of May, it would no longer produce a print edition on Mondays. That will reduce its publication schedule to newspapers on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, as well as a "Weekend" edition that replaced the Sunday edition that started in 1989 and was the showcase of the operation until it was discontinued amid falling circulation and dwindling advertising revenue at the end of the last decade.

Attributed to Craig Borges, the newspaper's executive editor, the note to readers said, "This was not an easy decision. The financial pressures facing local newspapers are real and significant. The cost of newsprint has risen sharply in recent years, along with fuel for delivery and electricity to operate and power our press and other machinery. ... Publishing six days a week in print is no longer financially sustainable."

We put out a good product.

Plenty more factors have undercut The Sun Chronicle's ability to carry out its mission -- and those factors actually began back when the newspaper was in its fat-and-happy stage.

I joined the staff of the newspaper on Feb. 7, 1977, but had actually worked for one of its predecessor publications, the Attleboro Sun, as a part-time high school sports correspondent from 1969-71. Earlier in 1971, the two local daily newspapers of the Attleboros, the Sun and the North Attleboro Chronicle, were merged into one publication, and a lengthy period of staff expansion and prosperity began.

The heyday came in the late 1980s, coinciding with the opening of the Emerald Square shopping mall on U.S. 1 in North Attleboro. While other newspapers were already starting to feel the pinch in advertising revenue that resulted from the wild fluctuations in the national economy at the time, The Sun Chronicle was the beneficiary of the many national and regional retailers that occupied the new mall and were eager to advertise their existence to what was then a vastly underserved area of southeastern Massachusetts and neighboring Rhode Island.

Fortunately, I was there to be part of the boom. I almost wasn't.

I had actually left the newspaper in 1987 after 10 award-winning years, seven of those as its first official sports editor, after a series of disputes with upper management. In a rare misjudging of our audience, the powers-that be wanted to change the focus of our sports coverage -- from a philosophy that embraced local high school sports and the many college and professional offerings in our immediate area, to a much-more narrowly focused scope that would basically ignore the pro teams and downplay the high schools while boosting staff commitment to coverage of pre-teen events such as Pop Warner football and other youth sports, as well as local beer league softball.

Our original computer-free newsroom, circa 1979.

It was an intolerable suggestion, and I fought like hell against it -- and lost badly. My temper often got the better of me in those days, and I left the paper in anger and a measure of disgrace. It was a down period in my life because I really believed I was building something good for our readers as well as myself. I was already 10 years into my coverage of the Patriots and five as a stringer working for the Associated Press, I had covered NCAA basketball and World Series games, and our local high school coverage was second to none -- and the feedback I had gotten was in direct contrast to the opinions being formulated in the bosses' offices.

I spent the next two years working part-time in both the news and sports departments of The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, a much larger newspaper (100,000 daily circulation in its heyday), and I was able to maintain my presence on the Patriots beat for both them and the AP during that time.

We expanded and prospered in the '80s and '90s.

It was then that The Sun Chronicle decided to add a Sunday edition and publish every day of the week, which meant a large staff expansion and a need to find people that could get a lot of things done in a short amount of time. Their attempts to find someone to handle the chores in an expanded sports department fell flat as the debut day drew near, so they decided to offer the job to the devil they knew -- me. 

The first interviews went badly. There was still bad blood between me and some of the management, and I turned down the first offer quite firmly. But incense was burned, sacrifices were made, and when the pay offer came up and promises were made that I would be able to resume my coverage of the Patriots, I returned on Sept. 9, 1989, as the "Weekend Sports Editor." Also important were assurances that the philosophy that Peter Gobis and I had developed over 10 years would return as our guiding principles.

I was now a second-in-command, which was occasionally not in sync with my ego -- just ask former sports editors Bill Stedman and Dale Ransom about that -- but I had been humbled by my past failure and was able to swallow my pride more easily than in the past when it wasn't worth a fight.

Another busy night in the Sports Department.

The Sunday paper was a smashing success for a long time. At some point, our circulation through the 10 towns we served reached a high of over 26,000, almost 10,000 more than when I joined the staff in 1977. Our reach in the Sports Department was nationwide; I went to nine Super Bowls during my tenure and visited NFL stadiums in every city in the league. Gobis was also a regular at Providence College basketball games and Big East Tournaments, and we did it all with our expanded staff, winning awards for our local sports coverage as well as for the national stuff. We were respected and admired by most of our readers (well, there were holdouts that criticized us at every turn) and our peers at both large and small papers.

Gradually, however, the gravy train ground to a halt. Emerald Square was a boon for a while, but after a while, the big-box stores no longer felt the need to throw advertising cash at the "Dinky Daily." And that also came at the expense of local retailers, many of which went out of business when faced with the competition of the shiny new mall. One of those, in fact, was my father's clothing store in Mansfield, which had been a staple for local shoppers since 1936 but closed its doors in 1991 because shoppers thought they wanted the trendy new stuff sold at the mall. Only when it was too late did they realize they missed the reliable store where they could buy their everyday clothes for reasonable prices.

Classified advertising also dropped precipitously -- first under the pressure of local "shopper" publications that contained no local news but lots of coupons and lower rates for classified advertising. Then came the online revolution; people could advertise their wares for free on various websites, rendering newspaper classified ads to the mists of antiquity. 

We, as well as almost every newspaper in existence in the 1990s, also made a tactical error where the Internet was concerned. We all created websites and put our product on it for viewers to view free of charge, thinking the Internet to be a promotional tool that would spur people to go out and buy our newspaper. Nobody in the industry realized until it was too late that readers would get used to getting their news for free, and thus had no reason at all to pay for the product.

Behind the scenes, another problem was brewing for The Sun Chronicle.

The paper had been owned since 1971 by absentee owners from Wisconsin, the United Communications Corp. (owners of the Kenosha News and several small print and broadcast entities), and for most of that time, it was a benign and benevolent partnership. Kenosha did not interfere with our editorial content and gave us all the resources we needed to stay on the cutting edge of the industry, while at the same time sucking away a hefty portion of our large profit margin to prop up its other holdings.

That wasn't a problem for the longest time, but when The Sun Chronicle's revenues started to fall after the turn of the century, Kenosha was no longer able to squeeze blood from a stone. Suddenly, despite all our awards and the demonstrated skill of our news, sports and photography staffs, we became a drain on UCC's resources.

Our benefactor,
Howard Brown

As long as he was alive, a man named Howard Brown was the benevolent godfather of The Sun Chronicle. The respected owner of the Kenosha News was as supportive of our success as a newspaper as he was of any other holding in the UCC family. But when he died in 2011, the writing was on the wall for us. When Brown's daughters took the reins, they looked us as an asset that was annoyingly far away from the home base -- and when we stopped sending a tsunami of profits into UCC's coffers, we became expendable.

I recall a meeting that was held in our newsroom with the Brown sisters and their new general manager, some slick Midwestern douchebag that had no idea at all how to comprehend or address the unique New England culture. This pompous fool stood before us and said he wanted to transform us into a paper that was "more local than local." 

I did a short video to endorse Bill Parcells
for membership in the Patriots' Hall of Fame.

"You have no need to cover the New England Patriots," he said as I stood directly in his line of sight. "You have no need to cover any of the pro or college sports. Your mission should be to cover anything that's played on the local playgrounds." I turned my back on the guy and walked back to my desk in an obvious pique. And why not? I had covered the Patriots from rags to riches for a period spanning five decades, won awards for my coverage, and became the longest-tenured writer on the beat briefly. I worked hard to hold my own with the big papers, and while I wasn't a star reporter by any means, I could match story-for-story the output of any paper that would send multiple writers to one game. I got myself on TV and did radio interviews on WFAN and many other big stations across the continent, and I occasionally wrote stories for papers in opposing cities that were looking for a Patriots sidebar. And even well into my retirement, I still have a role in Foxboro as a member of the Patriots Hall of Fame Nominating Committee.

Not long after, buyouts were offered to a number of longest-tenured employees. I was one of them, but the terms were laughable and I was only starting to realize gains in my retirement account since turning it over to a personal financial advisor. I needed to work a little longer, and I did -- working myself into a minor stroke over the Christmas holidays in 2014. I recovered quickly -- even spent a week in Phoenix about a month later to cover Super Bowl 49 against doctors' orders -- but working conditions in Attleboro continued to degenerate into chaos with staff reductions coming almost every three months.

The Kenosha (Wis.) News. Thanks for nothing.

At the beginning of August 2018, we heard the news we had anticipated for many months before -- UCC had sold the paper to a bunch of venture capitalists based in Canada, who had already snapped up the Pawtucket Times and Woonsocket Call to form the "Tri-Boro News Media Corp." Members of the Brown family came to our offices, shook our hands and thanked us for our hard work. Funny thing -- not long afterward, they sold all of UCC's holdings and got out of the news biz altogether.

Twenty-eight days later, I and several other news staffers, including our publisher, were simply told that our jobs had been eliminated. There was a little compensation, not much, but there was no real reason for me to blow my stack or pout. My investments were doing very well. At least they didn't escort me out a back door, as they had with others. They even gave me three days to clean out my desk and file cabinets.

Besides, I was tired. The long hours over the length of my career had taken their toll, and I had planned to retire after I turned 65 anyway -- a target date of March 17, 2019, in fact. Even though the retirement was forced seven months before my plans, I was prepared and ready. To linger on would have been to face longer hours and far more work to produce even a remote facsimile what our staff had created. I just didn't have it in me to continue under those circumstances. So I bade farewell to print journalism altogether after just one more year as an AP part-timer, and committed myself fully to a new "career" as a sports play-by-play announcer for North Attleborough Community Television, Mansfield Cable Access and Foxboro Cable Access.

Gobis was the master of getting all the school scores.

My friend Peter Gobis stuck around for a few more years before retiring. Now 75, he still contributes as a part-timer when he's not lounging and tanning on the beaches of south Florida. Gradually, the paper has called some of its former luminaries back to its pages, including former editor Mike Kirby (who writes more now on a daily basis than he did when he worked for Gobis and me at the start of his career), former copy editor Tom Reilly and former political reporter Jim Hand. 

But its writing, editing and photography staffs are now bare-bones due to the venture capitalists' bottom-lining of the operation. Amazingly, they still put out a fairly good product -- definitely better than most of the chain-owned daily papers left in New England, although, for obvious reasons, the coverage of breaking news and municipal government is extremely shallow and late in delivery. For instance, decisions made at a Mansfield town meeting don't mean anything to Mansfield readers if the reports come three days after the fact. Where the paper used to have veteran reporters based in every town, it's now basically down to one fellow that handles the bulk of the newsy stuff. A couple of younger reporters and a precious few part-timers have come up with interesting features on a regular basis, but so-called enterprise reporting is non-existent. And today, much of the paper is written by a news-gathering operation called MassLive, based out of Springfield, which has expanded state-wide and is syndicating much of its output to a network of smaller papers. 

The lone full-timer sportswriter, Tyler Hetu, works his ass off to try to maintain a level of high school coverage comparable to the traditions of the newspaper. But the paper no longer has a local voice for sports opinions. It lacks a columnist willing or able to delve into topics of local interest. Instead, the paper devotes space to overly long missives about fishing, and essays about pro sports from a copy editor that should be repurposed to tell people why Bishop Feehan is leaving the Catholic Central League, why there's such a huge turnover of coaches at King Philip Regional High or whether Attleboro High made the right choice for its new football coach.

One of my joys, doing all-star teams.

Back in my days as a columnist, I focused a lot upon the Patriots because I covered them on a regular basis. I didn't devote many columns to pro teams I didn't cover in person because I could add nothing more from a personal presence to what the readers already saw on TV. Otherwise, I'd say at least 60 percent of my columns over the last 15 years of my career were sharply focused upon local topics and issues that impacted our local schools and our local athletes. Some people loved them, others hated them, but people read them. 

There have been other missteps by the paper as well. They've tried on occasion to pander to the minority of angry conservatives in this part of the commonwealth by hiring underqualified and unreadable columnists to spit out their vile MAGA tropes on the editorial pages. 

The Sun Chronicle does get complaints from the MAGA element about its supposed liberal leanings -- which, I would contend, is an accurate representation of its readership area. Only one local town, Rehoboth, gave convicted felon Donald Trump a thin majority of its votes in the last election. Prior to 2024, other elections had been a clean Democrat sweep in the Sun Chronicle's circulation area. But the loudmouths demanded a local conservative voice, and they got a couple. The most recent one didn't last for more than a few weeks. His predecessor was a long-time grouch that commented on every post the paper would put on Facebook, whether he had any working knowledge of the subject matter or not, and for reasons that still escape a lot of people, the paper gave him a weekly forum in which to dispense his wretched ramblings. 

All he succeeded in doing, other than briefly placating the few other right-wing extremists that demanded their voice be heard, was to embarrass himself and the newspaper until the editors wised up and sent him back to his old life as an Internet tough guy.

I've also been told that the paper's decision to eliminate its own delivery services and rely upon the U.S. Postal Service for home delivery has been a public-relations disaster. People who were used to having the daily paper on their doorstep when they woke up now must wait until they return home from work to read it -- if it gets delivered at all. 

It seems as if nothing has worked. Despite the best efforts of the very hard-working journalists that remain, the paper's circulation has dropped to an estimated 7,000 papers a day -- maybe fewer. It's tough to get an accurate number. So they have joined a number of other publications throughout the country in reducing the printed product, while trying to maintain a breaking-news presence on its Internet site. 

The weekly NFL picks contest was a big hit with The Sun Chronicle's readership.

Today, almost eight full years after I left, people still come up to me throughout our many communities and they tell me how much they miss my columns and the level of coverage that I, Gobis and our numerous fellow sports staffers offered the communities in our heyday. They particularly seem to miss my annual "Beat Fearless" contest, in which the readers would try to do better on weekly NFL predictions than me, and potentially win prizes. Maybe it was popular because it was pretty easy to beat me, I don't know for sure, but I was glad to offer that weekly feature for more than 30 years. 

Of course, I thank them for their kind words. But I always ask them to give Tyler Hetu the benefit of the doubt because I know how extremely hard he has worked to become part of the Attleboro-area sports community. We didn't do him any favors by doing the extensive job we did, but the job hasn't been something a lone writer could truly handle since the early 1970s -- which the penny-pinching ownership doesn't understand, nor bothers to care about.

I don't know what the future holds for my former newspaper. I chat with some people from time to time and the general consensus is that it's holding on by its fingertips. Maybe the owners will merge it with what's left of the Times and Call, which will fall flat with readers in the SC's northern towns that don't give a rat's ass about anything that happens in Rhode Island. Or maybe they'll just shutter it altogether. New local ownership doesn't seem to be a viable option, and I'm not sure the other regional behemoth, Gannett (formerly GateHouse when it snapped up almost all of the other local dailies in this part of the country) is in a financial position to complete its reign over the region. The end of an era might truly be coming.

Maybe someday I'll write more extensively about my career -- although to be honest, it would work better as a script for a situation comedy about a small newspaper with a cast of truly quirky and lovable characters. There aren't many villains to be found among the people with whom I worked over 40-plus years, and I have enough stories to tell to last several seasons. And maybe if Netflix gives me a shot, I can tell some of the more saucy stories that transpired (or at least juice up some of the more mundane stories to help the ratings).

We even had swag back in the day. 

But I can't help but feel an overwhelming sense of dread about the future of newsgathering in the towns where I worked for most of my adult life. Americans need to get their news from reliable sources that include checks and balances throughout the editorial process. Too much of what is called "news" these days comes from online sites that crank out whatever shit they can throw at a wall to see if it sticks. Whether nationally or locally, too much information is unedited and unchecked for factuality, and laced with efforts to indoctrinate its readers to a preferred point of view. Or it's just mind-numbing bullshit that saps the general intelligence of the populace. 

I honestly have to believe there would be a lot fewer people that believe the earth is flat, that vaccines are bad, and that Donald Trump is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ if we had a stronger and more vital news media. And that starts with the hometown papers that tell you what your town's select board or school committee has decided, what damage that storm did, why the tax rate is going up, and how your kid did in last night's big basketball game.

I'll always be proud of what I and my co-workers produced for the many years I worked for The Sun Chronicle. I'm most proud of the decision I made only a few years after coming on board to begin the equalization of coverage for high school boys' and girls' sports. That may be my only true legacy, and it's a good one to have. 

Despite all the jokes and snide comments that dog the paper today (you know, "The Slum Comical" and so on ... ) and did even back when we were fully-staffed and selling like hotcakes, this newspaper was as good a local paper as you could find almost anywhere -- and I know, because I used to buy local papers in the NFL cities I would visit, metro and suburban both, and bring the copies back to Attleboro for everyone on staff to peruse. We compared ourselves to those, learned from what they did well and guarded ourselves against what they did poorly. Whatever was within our capabilities to do well, we tried our best to do it.

I just can't imagine our area without The Sun Chronicle. Simple as that.

MARK FARINELLA worked from February 1977 to September 1987 and from September 1989 to August 2018 for The Sun Chronicle.