Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas and Cy Young made headlines 150 years ago, and last week those headlines were uncovered when the shingles came off the front of the Littlefield house in West Tisbury.
Newspapers dating to the mid 19th century were discovered on the State Road home by Island builder Tucker Hubbell when he and his crew removed the front porch of the house for a renovation project. Mr. Hubbell estimated the last time the 1844 house had been shingled was around 1910, when newspapers were commonly used to help insulate and prevent wind from blowing through the walls.
The Vineyard Gazette’s total print circulation remained flat this year, as traffic to its website continued double digit growth.
Total average circulation for the Gazette over the past 12 months was 8,903, compared with 8,823 for the same period last year. Paid circulation was 8,472 compared with 8,569 in 2011, a 1.1 per cent decline.
The Vineyard Gazette was named Weekly Newspaper of
the Year for 2001, the highest honor given to weekly newspapers by
the New England Press Association (NEPA). Also known as the George A.
Speers Award, the coveted honor is given out to just three newspapers
each year: one small daily, one weekly, and one alternative weekly.
The Gazette has won the award six times since 1990.
The Vineyard Gazette announces the launch of a new Web site today. The newspaper’s Web site has been redesigned and reconfigured, and beginning today the site will feature all the editorial content that appears in the Gazette print edition, from front page stories to town columns to letters to the editor.
The Vineyard Gazette won 12 awards in the annual New England Newspaper Association Better Newspaper Contest this year, including six first place awards that recognized the 163-year-old weekly newspaper for excellence in journalism across the spectrum from advertising to editorial.
It was thirty-five years ago that I wrote my first editorial for the Vineyard Gazette, an editorial so important that today no one remembers the message. The thoughts behind that editorial essay were of no particular significance, except perhaps to mark the beginning of a journalistic journey through a profoundly important period of Martha’s Vineyard history.
Sporting a baseball cap still, the 85-year-old guy recalled the progression of his fielding positions over five decades of summer games on the Chilmark diamond.
“I played third up until I got too old, then I went to short, then to second as my arm gave out, but that took 50 years,” he says.
The Vineyard Gazette, the family-owned weekly newspaper that has been a prominent, much-decorated and enduring chronicle of Island life for 164 years, will be sold to new owners, the newspaper’s publisher Richard Reston announced today.
A superior court judge has dismissed a political operative’s lawsuit claiming he was libeled by news stories in the Vineyard Gazette and The Boston Globe over his behavior, including his arrest, on the Island during the run-up to the 2008 presidential campaign.
