Industry Newspapers Defunct January 11, 1996 Ceased operations January 11, 1996 | Fate Dissolved into parent Founded September 1990 | |
Key people Greg O'Brien, president 1990-1993Vicki Ogden, president 1993-1996 Successor | ||
Cape Cod Publishing Company, based in Orleans, Massachusetts, United States, was a publisher of weekly newspapers in the 1990s. It was created by Fidelity Investments as a holding company for newspapers acquired on Cape Cod, and eventually folded into Fidelity's Community Newspaper Company. CNC is now owned by GateHouse Media.
Contents
History
Four years before Cape Cod Publishing was formed, Fidelity Investments had provided some financing in Cape publisher Barry Paster's successful bid for North Shore Weeklies. The North Shore papers eventually became the first component of Fidelity's newspaper chain, which came to be known as Community Newspaper Company.
In 1990, Paster sold his original paper, The Register of Yarmouth—to Fidelity, which also picked up The Cape Codder of Orleans, a twice-weekly covering the Outer Cape, from longtime publisher Malcolm Hobbs.
The company grew substantially in 1991 with the purchase of 12 weekly newspapers from Memorial Press Group, including the Bourne Courier, Cape Cod News, Cape Cod Oracle, Mashpee Messenger and Village Broadsider. The combined circulation of The Register and the Cape Codder was given, at the time, as 27,000; the new additions—two paid weeklies and 10 free papers—added 60,000.
Cape Cod Publishing held on to this core through the mid-1990s, until it was dissolved in early 1996. CNC realigned its operating units by geography, although the Cape papers were transferred wholesale to CNC's new "Cape Unit", a division of the South Unit.
By 1999, several of the Cape papers had closed or been consolidated: Cape Cod News was gone, and the company's Bourne, Mashpee and Sandwich properties were consolidated into one publication, the Upper Cape Codder.
Properties
Since its founding in 1990, Cape Cod Publishing and its successor, CNC's Cape Unit (part of the South Unit) have published several free "Pennysaver" publications as well as several weekly newspapers on Cape Cod:
Several of the papers cover adjoining towns, as well: the Courier now circulates in Mashpee (replacing the defunct Messenger); the Cape Codder covers the territory from Orleans to Provincetown; The Register covers Barnstable and Dennis; the Upper Cape Codder for eight years covered Bourne, Falmouth, Mashpee and Sandwich.