News

Small town New Hampshire library takes over newspaper to keep it in production

WEARE, N.H. — It's an understatement to say these are tough times for newspapers. Just this week, the Boston Herald was sold after declaring bankruptcy.

Small town papers - often the lifeblood of a community - have been hit particularly hard.

When Weare, New Hampshire lost its paper last year, an unlikely publisher took over.

Every Tuesday morning, the staff at the library fires up the copy machine and creates a couple hundred copies of Weare in the World, a free paper they started publishing after The Weare Community News went under in 2016.

“I would rather that we had a real newspaper,” said Library Director Michael Sullivan. “I liked our old paper. But this is what appears to be sustainable.”

Newspapers are having hard time surviving these days. Daily circulation is about half of what it was in the 1980s. Sullivan believes small towns have bared the brunt of the decline. “I think we are losing more of it off the bottom than the top, and that means just more of a breakdown of community.”

That’s why the library stepped in and started publishing four pages a week, filled with community events and calendar listings. It costs about $25 a week to produce and is left around town for free.

Sullivan believes Weare in the World can help fill an information vacuum the town was experiencing, but that this is not a panacea. “I remind myself every day I am not a journalist. That job is very important. We still need it. We still need coverage of our town.”

Residents like Pamela Moul believe this is, by far, better than nothing. “We are not really served by larger newspapers in the area unless we proactively give content to the Union Leader or the Concord Monitor. We have no way of knowing what's going on in our town unless we have someone who steps up and fills that void.”

Sullivan hopes more people will start contributing to the paper. In the meantime, he’ll continue to generate a crossword puzzle each week - the paper’s most popular feature. “When someone is waiting for the new edition to come out, it's usually because they are one clue short.”

There has been some criticism of libraries publishing newspapers. But Sullivan doesn’t think it’s a bad fit since libraries have morphed from book lenders to community centers in recent years, and this is still all about sharing information.