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.
The great storm had wheeled off into the Canadian Maritimes about 45 hours before, leaving a jungle of limbs and power lines almost two stories high on the corner of South Summer street and Davis Lane, just outside the Vineyard Gazette office in Edgartown.
There’s little to record in the history of the printer’s art between the invention of movable type in the early 1400s by Johannes Gutenberg and the first publication of the Vineyard Gazette some four hundred years later. In fact, if Joe Gutenberg could have been brought back to stand in front of the old Adams press still on display in the Gazette’s downstairs museum area, he certainly could have printed the first papers himself.
The Vineyard Gazette won 30 awards this year in the New England Newspaper and Press Association competition, including several top prizes for photography.
The Vineyard Gazette will donate $9,000 to the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group, the result of a successful subscription promotion drive that called attention to the plight of the Island’s coastal ponds.
