The Worcester Business Journal says the Herald News now has no full-time staff photographers. The nonprofit Poynter media center says two reporters were cut at each of three other GateHouse papers: The Cape Cod Times, the New Bedford Standard-Times, and the Fall River Herald News. The bloodletting at the Telegram this week was by no means the only Massachusetts hit in the vast GateHouse portfolio. It increasingly looks like there are two viable options at the paper: Show yourself to the door, or have the cost-slashing corporate managers do it for you. And Telegram reporter Mark Sullivan said last week that he’s leaving for a job at Brandeis University. “There is no more real newspaper in the city of Worcester,” he told a local radio show.Īs MassLive reports, McFarlane’s ouster was just the latest blow to the paper covering New England’s second largest city since it was acquired by the GateHouse chain in 2014.Ĭolumnist Dianne Williamson quit last February after 35 years at the paper, “saying it was no longer a good fit.” In May, six staffers were axed. The news prompted a blunt assessment from Worcester Mayor Joseph Petty. The Worcester Business Journal says he was one of six staffers let go at the paper. The latest chapter in the relentless hollowing out of Massachusetts media came with news that columnist Clive McFarlane, a 26-year veteran of the Worcester Telegram, was shown the door. We now have these spectral offerings in abundance. “Ghost newspaper” is the label researchers are using for publications that still churn out a daily issue, but one that is a shell of its former self. But the land is becoming so parched of substantive news coverage as to make it the next closest thing. The state has not yet been hit with vast news deserts, the term of the media moment to describe areas without any newspaper presence following the closure of more than 1,800 US papers since 2004. THE “GHOST NEWSPAPER” ERA has arrived in Massachusetts, and the worst is almost certainly yet to come. On the Worcester skyline, the Telegram & Gazette rents space in the tower on the right.
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