The Citizen newspaper in Laconia published its last edition Friday after 90 years, including 65 years of ownership by one family, reflecting the difficulties faced by the newspaper industry as well as the unusual situation in Laconia, which had two daily newspapers.
Editor Ed Pierce attributed the closure to financial difficulties exacerbated by a shift in printing. The Citizen does have its own press and until May was printed at its sister paper, the Claremont Eagle Times, which is also owned by the Sample News Group of Pennsylvania. For reasons related to the Eagle Times’ recovery from bankruptcy, Pierce said, the printing contract was shifted to Portland, Maine, which proved too great an expense.
Since 2000 the six-day-a-week Citizen, which has a paid circulation, competed against a free, five-day-a-week tabloid paper, the Laconia Daily Sun. Pierce discounted the effect of the Sun on the Citizen.
“I never looked at the other paper as competition,” he said.
Still, it is unusual these days for a city to have more than one daily newspaper.
This week, for example, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in Pennsylvania announced it would stop producing a printed paper in Pittsburgh and go-all digital, leaving just one print paper in that city. Out on New Hampshire’s Seacoast, Foster’s Daily Democrat, an independent paper in the city of Dover, and the Portsmouth Herald merged in a 2014 purchase, largely ending decades of competition between two newspapers that had existed just a few miles apart.
The first edition of the Citizen appeared Jan. 4, 1926, and it was run by founder Edward J. Gallagher and his daughter, Alma Gallagher Smith, until 1991, when it was bought by the publishers of Foster’s. Foster’s sold it to Sample News Group in 2010.
The independently owned Laconia Daily Sun is printed by Newspapers of New England, the owner of the Monitor.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
