Bay State Newspaper Company , based in Somerville, Massachusetts , United States, was a publisher of weekly newspapers in suburbs north of Boston . It was formed in 1991 by Fidelity Investments after it bought Dole Publishing from its longtime owner, William P. Dole.
7-634: Bay State Newspaper was folded into the Metro Unit of Fidelity's Community Newspaper Company in 1996. CNC is now owned by GateHouse Media . Bay State's properties were assembled by the Dole family, which ran the Cambridge Chronicle from the 1930s to early 1990s. The Chronicle , newspaper of record for the city of Cambridge , has published since 1846 and, under the Doles, was combined with
14-624: A shopper serving the Lowell area, called the Merrimack Valley Advertiser . That publication was later converted to two Advertiser weeklies in Tewksbury and Wilmington , now published by CNC's Northwest Unit as The Tewksbury Advocate and The Wilmington Advocate . Community Newspaper Company Community Newspaper Company , or CNC , was the largest publisher of weekly newspapers in eastern Massachusetts in
21-512: The Enterprise-Sun . The GateHouse purchase in mid-2006 included CNC as well as Enterprise News Media , publisher of two dailies and several weeklies that competed with CNC's South Shore holdings. The weeklies were incorporated into CNC and the company also forged close ties with its new sister dailies, The Enterprise and The Patriot Ledger , although they—and later GateHouse Media Massachusetts acquisitions The Herald News and
28-805: The Taunton Daily Gazette —retained their own editorial hierarchy, however, and were not considered part of Community Newspaper Company. CNC's holdings, as well as its Massachusetts sister papers and The Bulletin in Connecticut, now constitute GateHouse Media New England. CNC published more than 100 weeklies, semiweeklies and monthly publications. Each publication was classified in one of five or six semi-autonomous units (Cape, Metro, North, Northwest, South, West), each with its own editor-in-chief, covering distinct geographic areas of eastern Massachusetts and named for its location with respect to Boston. The West Unit included oversight over all
35-597: The 1990s and first decade of the 21st century. It also published several daily newspapers in Greater Boston . The company's properties were assembled by Fidelity Investments in the 1980s; Fidelity founded the company and then sold it to the Boston Herald in 2001. Five years later, the chain was purchased by, and immediately became the largest single component of, GateHouse Media . GateHouse gradually phased out CNC branding in favor of " WickedLocal.com ",
42-489: The company's website, and GateHouse Media New England; this process was complete by 2011, when staff email addresses dropped the "@cnc.com" domain. CNC's flagship publication was The MetroWest Daily News , based in Framingham, Massachusetts . In 2011 it also published The Milford Daily News . It had also published, and closed, three other daily newspapers: The Daily News Transcript , The Daily News Tribune and
49-771: The rival Cambridge Sun . The Doles also acquired the main weeklies in two other suburban cities north of Boston , as well as printing other publications (such as shoppers ). At the time of its sale to Fidelity in 1991, Dole Publishing (renamed Bay State Newspaper Co.) consisted of three weeklies, all in Middlesex County, Massachusetts and also the Merrimack Valley Advertiser which published in Tewksbury, Wilmington, Billerica, Chelmsford, and part of Westford.: All of these papers still publish as part of CNC's Metro Unit. Bay State also published
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