Big news: The Concord Monitor has moved! Except we haven’t, mostly.
Thirty-six years after the Monitor left its long-time home on North State Street for a spacious new building on the edge of Sewalls Falls — so spacious that we got our own street with the address of 1 Monitor Drive — the paper’s parent company has sold the building.
The move has been a long time coming, said publisher Steve Leone. The printing press moved from Monitor Drive to the former Rivco building in Penacook six years ago as part of an upgrade to the press, and the circulation and distribution departments went with it. That left the newsroom and advertising departments rattling around in a building with far more room than we needed.
Efforts to sell the Monitor Drive building were stalled by the pandemic, but last year the Monitor’s parent company, Newspapers of New England, sold it for $1.8 million to Gino Bernard, a Merrimack-based contractor. Bernard is in the process of cleaning up and refurbishing the three-story brick building, including the cavernous space that once held the printing press, and will lease the space out to different tenants.
The Monitor is the first of those tenants. Newspapers of New England leased the building’s top floor, and the newsroom and advertising department have recently moved up there.
So the newsroom has shifted but not really moved. We’re still at the same address, just slightly higher above the ground.
“Very little will change as part of our daily operations,” said Leone. “We’ve been preparing for this move for years.”
The sale is unrelated to the stalled plans to build hundreds of housing units along the Merrimack River just north of the Monitor building. That project is called Monitor Way because it initially included 95 acres of land to be purchased from Newspapers of New England, but the newspaper had no role in the proposed sale and the proposal did not include the newspaper’s office building.
