It’s 10 p.m. on a Thursday night. Steve Durkee, the Gazette graphics director, is in Dick Reston’s office, his head stuck out the open skylight, smoking a cigarette. Dick is at his computer, writing headlines.
Announcing his intent to retire as editor and publisher of the Vineyard Gazette after more than 27 years at the newspaper, Richard Reston this week also named his successor.
Beginning in the middle of March, John W. Walter Jr., a former executive editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, will arrive on the Island and take over the leadership role of the Gazette.
Mr. Walter, 56, was named editor and publisher of the Gazette and its other publications, Martha’s Vineyard Magazine and the Best Read Guide, after a search process that began early last fall.
The Vineyard Gazette today announced new publishers for the newspaper in changes that take effect immediately.
Richard Reston, presently editor in chief of the newspaper, assumes The position and added responsibilities of editor and publisher of the Vineyard Gazette.
Mary Jo Reston, now the newspaper’s general manager, moves up to the role of publisher and general manager, with full responsibility for the financial affairs of the Gazette.
With this issue of the Gazette the undersigned, after over thirty-two years’ occupancy of its editorial chair, vacates the same, having this week sold the paper and its goodwill to Henry Beetle Hough, a gentlemen, who, by reason of education, training and family tradition, will we believe carry the GAZETTE to a yet wider sphere of influence and to a high prosperity.
Today the Gazette comes before you under a new management. In assuming the responsibility of publishing the same we feel that we are accepting a public trust, which can be held only so long as we can fill it acceptably to the people of this town and county. This feeling comes to us when we remember how, week after week for many years, the paper has come to your firesides, until the people have learned to look upon it as one of the veteran institutions of the Island, to be sustained and supported accordingly.
After an unequal contest of more than four years at the editorial chair of the VINEYARD GAZETTE we resign our duties to other hands. We do not drop the pen without regret, for, with the many unpleasant issues that arise from such a position, there must be some agreeable associations to which, in all coming time, we shall look back with pleasure, and shall only regret that mingled with these associations there should be some unpleasant memories of the perversity and selfishness of humanity.
The seventeenth volume of the Gazette closed with its last issue, and to-day it enters upon a new year with a new editor and proprietor. The undersigned, after seventeen years of constant labor, as editor of the paper, retires, and Mr. James M. Cooms, Jr., a graduate of the office, assumes the entire control of the establishment. I know Mr.
We present to our readers this morning, the first number of “The Vineyard Gazette,” and are happy to state that our subscription list is well filled, our advertising patronage respectable.
