Understanding media ownership and its impact

The front page of an early October 2025 edition of The Keene Sentinel features stories about city elections, the ongoing drought in New Hampshire and two Medicare Advantage providers leaving the state.

It’s all local news. Flip to the second page of the paper, and you’ll see the paper’s masthead, a list of the over 225-year-old daily paper’s key personnel and contact information. The local theme continues on the masthead, says Sean Burke, president and chief operating officer of The Sentinel.

“ Here at The Sentinel, the owner and publisher [Thomas Ewing] lives and is involved in the community," Burke says.

That local element — a local owner of a local newspaper — is key to The Sentinel, says Burke.

“The news decisions become more sensitive to the needs of the community because we are living it.”

Many newspapers across the country, like The Keene Sentinel, are owned by local publishers, although a majority of news outlets are owned by news chains.

The Northwestern University's Medill Local News Initiative counts 7,945 news outlets across the country. More than 1,300 of those outlets are owned by the largest 10 newspaper companies, including Gannett, Alden/MediaNews Group and Adams Publishing Group.

Gannett, a publicly traded company, owns 310 total papers, including USA Today, and is the largest newspaper group in the country, according to the Northwestern study. Alden/MediaNew Group, the second-largest newspaper owner, owns 170 papers, according to the 2024 report.

Both companies have a presence in New England. Gannett owns 10 papers in Massachusetts and others throughout New England, including the Burlington Free Press in Vermont and Portsmouth Herald and Foster’s Daily Democrat in New Hampshire. Alden/MediaNews Group owns the Boston Herald, Telegram and Gazette in Worcester, Mass., and the Connecticut Courant, among others.

Evolving landscape of newspaper ownership

Smaller newspaper chains, including Newspapers of New England, also exist in the New England market. The Concord Monitor is the flagship publication for the local, family-owned company, which publishes four dailies, three weeklies and other subsidiary publications, covering communities in New Hampshire and western Massachusetts.

Other newspaper ownership models exist, such as nonprofit news outlets, which are overseen by a board of directors. Nonprofit news outlets in New England include VTDigger, Maine Trust for Local News, and New Bedford Light in Massachusetts.

Since the early 2000s, the landscape of newspaper ownership has been in flux, with the growth of newspaper chains and a mix of new owners, including private equity.

According to a report from the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, the financial crisis and great recession of 2008 exacerbated newspapers’ troubles, and, as newspaper valuations plummeted, private equity funds, pension funds and other investment partnerships began purchasing newspapers in small and mid-sized communities.

As newspapers across the country have closed or downsized, large newspaper companies have taken much criticism. In 2022, 19 weekly Gannett-owned newspapers in Massachusetts ended print publication to become digital only, according to reporting from Boston.com. At the time, the company said that it remained committed to the future of local journalism.

“In corporate ownership, increasingly, there is a move towards centralization and regionalization. And that has progressed to be centralization, where many important decisions — not all, but many important decisions — are now made corporately on behalf of local communities,” said Burke, who worked at corporate media houses Lee Enterprises, McClatchy and GateHouse before joining The Sentinel. “And I think that is not to the benefit of the local news operation, and it's certainly not to the benefit of the local community. The further the decision-making from the local community, I think the less effective and the less sensitive they are.”

Gannett declined to comment for this story. But in its 2024 impact report, the company highlighted the impact its journalists across the country have had on the communities they serve — from investigative news series to events celebrating those communities.

“The ways audiences consume news have evolved over the years. USA TODAY Network journalists make up the largest news organization in the U.S. We serve readers, listeners and viewers on dozens of platforms, bringing the most important stories to where they already are. Our newsrooms are constantly experimenting to better reach our audience,” the company said in its report. “What doesn’t change is our dedication to our fundamental mission: finding stories that help our communities become better places.”

In 2024, Jesse Floyd, editor of the Belmont Voice in Belmont, Massachusetts, was part of a team that launched that news organization, an independent nonprofit newsroom that prints once a week and sends out a weekly newsletter with breaking news, upcoming stories and other information to subscribers. The news outlet emerged because community members wanted an outlet to cover local news after the Gannett-owned Belmont Citizen Herald started shrinking its coverage of the town, Floyd said.

“Belmont readers had gotten used to picking up the Belmont Citizen Herald and it being all news about Belmont. Then it was stories that were written about towns elsewhere that had issues similar to what was going on in Belmont,” said Floyd, a 30-year news veteran. “And the argument the corporation was making was that people in Belmont will read about a hypothetical rat infestation in Newton because they have rats too. I don't think that thinking worked out the way they planned it to.”

Locally owned newspapers may not face the widespread criticism attached to larger newspaper owners, but that does not mean newspaper ownership is easy.

“On the one hand, we don't have the resources of a major corporation, but on the other hand, it sure seems like we don't have the red tape, " Anika Clark, executive editor at the Keene Sentinel said. “We obviously work with our publisher on initiatives, but there's not this running it way up the chain. And I feel like it helps us be more nimble to try things and to evolve more quickly.”

For Clark, the value of local newspaper ownership is local connections. “You remember the purity of the goal every day; you remember every day why you're doing this,” Clark said. “You get to have relationships and talk to people – and, you know, you get reminded what you do is important and why it matters, and why we all are striving for something we truly believe in.”

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