The Mating sounds of Dinosaurs - Part 3

The triumphal return of Kirk Davis to Cape Cod
How many of the newspapers bought last month will be merged?

By Walter Brooks

Kirk Davis comes back as head of The community Newspaper Company (CNC).

In Steve Bailey's Globe column on May 13, he reported (the last item);

...Neighborhood news. Coincidence or not, some of Boston Herald owner Pat Purcell's family are stepping out of the family business following the sale of his suburban newspapers. Son-in-law Greg Rushh, chief operating officer of the suburban chain, is departing to work for GateHouse Media Inc., the buyer of the Purcell papers. Pat (Purcell) Jr., the Herald's display advertising manager, is returning to the New York Post to be with his wife, who works at New York magazine. Daughter Erin, who runs the Herald online operations, is pregnant with twins, but is expected to return after a break. Another daughter, Kerry, is a feature writer.

Although employees of CNC tried to point out to me today that since CNC is now a part of Gatehouse Media, Rush is not changing titles or jobs, simply getting his paycheck from a publisher other than his father-in-law, the new local boss of the combined groups in Eastern Massachusetts, Kirk Davis, is quoted in the Quincy Ledger today saying Rush is now an "Associate Publisher".

The Ledger story continues, "GateHouse Media has completed its acquisition of Enterprise NewsMedia LLC and Community Newspaper Co. in a move that immediately gives the publishing company a powerful presence in the suburban markets that ring Boston. Kirk Davis, CEO and president of Quincy-based Enterprise NewsMedia, is also taking over as CEO and president of Community Newspaper Co. Greg Rush, the chief operating officer and associate publisher at Needham-based CNC, will continue in that role..."

Davis was the president of CNC from 1998 through 2001 and handled the sale of that company to Herald Media. But Davis said he’ll rely on Rush to oversee the day-to-day operations at CNC. At the time insiders said that Davis and Purcell had differences about how weeklies should be run. Former publisher of The Cape Codder, Glenn Ritt, now publisher of Cape Business magazine, had similar misgivings and left CNC around that same time.

Others inside CNC say off the record that they won't mind if  Purcell's daughter Erin is no longer handling the CNC websites which, while better than the MPG sites, is little more than "shovel ware" with no input from local editors on which stories to headline.

As an example of MPG's web efforts, it's hard to believe that a dozen years after the birth of the user-friendly internet The Wareham Courier still does not have a website. If they asked my IT company to create a minimum site for the Courier at 9 am any morning, we'd have it up before 10 am as a blog and have a fully functioning "content management" site which the local editors could manage themselves within a few days. It must be the difference between upstarts like us and any bureaucracy.

Whether Plymouth & Wareham Bulletins?

But of greater interest to readers on the South Shore and Cape Cod, what will new owner Mike Reed do about the duplications we bought by buying both Community Newspapers (CNC) AND MPG Communications?

Those two media chains each publish separate weeklies in both Plymouth and Wareham;

• MPG -The Plymouth Old Colony Memorial
• CNC - The Plymouth Bulletin
• MPG - The Wareham Courier (no web site)
• CNC - The Wareham Bulletin

And if new owner Mike Reed lifts enough rocks in his new neighborhood he'll also discover the nearly total disaffection of Upper Cape Cod readers to former CNC ad-guy Gary Higgins' worst idea, The Upper Cape Codder where (if you follow the link) the Editors think that the "Upper Cape" is really only the two towns of Sandwich and Bourne, not the four as covered so much better by the four Enterprise Newspapers which cover those as well as Falmouth and Mashpee. After all, there are only 15 towns on Cape Cod, and losing two due to a former ad man's bad judgment is probably one reason CNC is doing so poorly in that area of Barnstable County.

A former Circulation Director who once managed the distribution of the Upper Cape Codder even told me that retail outlets in Falmouth and Mashpee would not take any of the other newspapers he distributed it they were forced to take the benighted Upper Cape Codder. 

If further evidence is required about the sad state of our newspapers, check these previous items:

• CNC sold - again
• Mating Sound of Dinosaurs, Part 2
• Former Times sibling sold - again
• Does anybody want to buy a newspaper?
• Why I left The Times