Business

Map: GateHouse Grows Mass. Footprint With Worcester Paper Deal

By Adam Vaccaro

November 25, 2014

1 minute to read

GateHouse Media has expanded its footprint even further in Massachusetts.

GateHouse’s parent company, New Media Investment Group, gobbled up the Worcester Telegram & Gazette—and the rest of its Florida-based parent company, Halifax Media Group—last week. (Halifax had just shortly before bought the T&G, as Boston.com owner Boston Globe Media Partners agreed to sell the T&G to Halifax in May.)

New Media was formed as a new holding company after GateHouse emerged from bankruptcy in 2013. While GateHouse does not technically own all of the papers under the New Media banner, it does serve as their operator and is broadly considered the company behind the papers.

That puts dozens of weekly Massachusetts newspapers under the GateHouse umbrella. GateHouse also operates a number of prominent daily newspapers, a roster to which it will add the T&G. Among them: The Cape Cod Times, The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, The Enterprise of Brockton, The MetroWest Daily News, and more. And the T&G deal represents serious new daily paper turf for GateHouse in Massachusetts, into the central part of the state.

The graphic below shows just how much of Massachusetts now falls under the coverage areas of a GateHouse/New Media daily newspaper. The map would be colored in even further if weekly newspapers (many of which provide daily online coverage) were included. GateHouse also recently bought The Providence Journal, which in addition to covering all of Rhode Island, extends its coverage into parts of southeastern Massachusetts.

The coverage areas of daily newspapers in Massachusetts managed by GateHouse Media.

Many of the newspapers overlap in terms of some of the towns and cities that they consider their coverage areas. Most notably, The Enterprise and The Patriot Ledger each cover a number of the same towns in southeastern Massachusetts before The Enterprise breaks toward Brockton and The Ledger toward Quincy. The two papers often share coverage. (In disclosure, I formerly worked at The Patriot Ledger.) The Standard-Times of New Bedford and The Herald News of Fall River also have quite a bit of overlap.