The Berkshire Eagle soars once again
How a Massachusetts community saved a great newspaper from a predatory hedge fund
Editor’s Note: This story is part of GroundTruth’s continuing series of posts on the state of local news across America. Today, we are launching a map of the series in the lead up to Local News Day on April 9. You can view the story map here.
The Eagle building is nested into the triangle where Eagle Street meets North Street just along the railroad tracks off the Common in Pittsfield, MA in the Berkshires. A flat-iron building with a brick facade and enormous windows, it embodies the grandeur and the muscle of this factory town and what made The Berkshire Eagle such a great and beloved newspaper, with roots dating back to 1789. The paper was always considered the town square where people came together to share ideas and build the community.
The Eagle building grabs your attention when you drive into Pittsfield, but it is no longer the home of the Berkshire Eagle. To get to the current newsroom, I drove around the corner and over to a converted mill building at 75 South Church Street that in a way echoes the dark period of the newsroom, when it fell into the hands of people not focused on informing the community, but on extracting as much profit as they could, without giving much of anything in return. The paper’s former owner, the venture capital firm Alden Global Capital left the paper half gutted. But this isn’t a story of the fall of a legendary local paper, but of its revival. It is a story about how sometimes the good guys win and why local ownership matters for news organizations that serve local communities.
You learned about the vulture capitalism practices of Alden Global Capital last week, when I stopped at the New York Daily News, as part of my tour of local newspapers around the country in the lead-up to Local News Day on April 9. The News has always been New York’s hometown newspaper, but since it was acquired by Alden it has seen its newsroom hollowed out year by year with a small staff that now represents a shadow of what it once was.
Alden was on its way to do the same to the Berkshire Eagle until community stakeholders and a team of investors in the Berkshires rallied together to buy the Eagle back and save it from the ravages of the New York-based venture capital firm’s predatory, cost-cutting approach.
The Eagle was owned for decades by the Miller family. With a flatbed press and one typesetting machine, Kelton B. Miller started publishing the Eagle in 1892, succeeded by sons Pete and Don in 1941, and by grandsons Mark and Michael in the 1980s. Throughout the years, the Millers kept investing in the paper and made it the pride of Pittsfield, an industrial town that housed General Electric and had a solid middle class and a circle of towns around that were beautiful and filled with great music and theater and became the place for proud second homes of a certain wealthy elite that heralded from Boston, New York and beyond. As the Berkshires became more desirable for tourists, it faded in its industrial base and lost most of its middle class, not unlike so many corners of America. Still the Millers kept turning a modest profit and built an unusually large staff for a paper with a circulation, at its peak, of about 35,000.
It earned a national reputation for being both elegant and tough at the same time. In 1972, Washington Post press critic Ben Bagdikian told Time magazine there were only three great newspapers in the world: “The New York Times, Le Monde, and The Berkshire Eagle.”
As a result, The Eagle became a training ground for top, emerging talent in the country. Notable alums include Gustav Niebuhr, who became a respected religion writer at The New York Times; Helen Donovan, onetime executive editor of the Globe; and Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan in 2002 while reporting a story about Al Qaeda. Large black-and-white photographs of these legends adorn the walls of the newsroom. But they feel like museum pieces enshrining a past era of greatness that came very close to vanishing.
A critical turning point for the Eagle came in the late 1980s when the Miller grandchildren undertook a questionable real estate deal, acquiring the old Sheaffer-Eaton mill. They sold off the beautiful Eagle Building where they had always been housed and spent $23 million to renovate the 11-acre Sheaffer-Eaton mill for the newsroom, a new printing press and they were hoping other tenants would follow and pay the mortgage.
The year they pulled the trigger was 1987, the same year the stock market crashed, and the cost of newsprint soared while print advertising began to decline. Soon after, General Electric, which once employed 13,000 people at its Pittsfield plant, announced mass layoffs, devastating the local economy. Drowning in debt, the Miller family sold the Eagle and a group of papers they owned in Vermont and Connecticut to the legendary Dean Singleton, a Denver newspaper executive dubbed “Lean Dean.” His MediaNews Group made its mark buying regional papers and cutting costs by consolidating business operations, ad sales, and printing.
The writing was on the wall for the Berkshire Eagle as it began to tumble down into a mean-spirited era of decline in American newspapers which was made more precipitous by the advent of the internet and the collapse of the traditional newspaper business model which held together around print advertising.
Singleton’s Colorado publishing company, formerly known as Digital First Media, became a subsidiary of Alden Global Capital, which has more than earned a reputation as a predatory force that buys beleaguered papers and slashes staff in order to raise profits. Alden now owns dozens of newspapers, including The Denver Post, The Mercury News of San Jose, California, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise, and the Boston Herald, which it bought out of bankruptcy last year and promptly cut a quarter of the staff. And, of course, the New York Daily News.
A man named Fred Rutberg was watching this tragedy unfold around his beloved local newspaper with particular interest. Rutberg, a respected leader in the community for more than 40 years, was a prominent attorney with a practice in Stockbridge. He was eventually named chief judge in the Berkshire County District Court, and as he approached his retirement nothing made him more sad than seeing the Berkshire Eagle wither and fade.
In 2016, Rutberg was on his way to retirement. He had reached the age of 70, which is the mandatory age for retirement for judges in Massachusetts. He began a journey to try to save the paper and restore local ownership. He wanted to keep alive, he said, the idea that the Berkshire Eagle was the “town square” in his community. When asked why he did it, he said, “ I thought it was the right thing to do. I thought I could maybe do some good for our community.”
He began to pull together the investors and the stakeholders who could make it happen. They formed a board of directors, and, as he remembers it, two of the more prominent board members offered different ways to define the mission statement. There was a local banker, Robert Wilmers, who described it this way: “To create the finest local newspaper in America.” And for John C. (Hans) Morris, a good-hearted and successful head of Nyca Partners, a “fin tech” firm out of New York who had a spectacular second home in the Berkshires, the vision was described this way: “To build a company that would last 100 years.”
The challenge, according to Rutberg, was to bring those two visions together to form a single “north star” that would allow him as publisher to balance “the aspiration of greatness with the discipline of a sustainable operation.”
“To be high quality but sustainable in a small market, well, that is a challenge and a struggle, as you know,” said Rutberg, referencing the idea that the two of us are publishers who are sharing notes while traveling similar roads. Rutberg succinctly framed the question all publishers of print newspapers face these days: “How do we convince the next generation that paying for content is in their best interest?”
He offered his own answer, saying, “We have to keep making the product that is worth being paid for, and communicate that because that is what is going to keep this alive. Philanthropy is great, non profit models are great, but you have to have a product that has value and that the value is expressed by people stepping up and saying they will pay for it.”
In the end of September, as the fall foliage was taking hold, I took a long drive from Martha’s Vineyard to the Berkshires to meet with Rutberg, who I had gotten to know through the years of building Report for America and partnering with the Eagle to help them build back their staff. Just under ten years into his journey to rebuild the paper, Rutberg built it back to a total staff of 125 and restored readership to 20,000 daily readers in both print and digital. One part of the formula of their success was a time-tested approach: they hired more talented reporters and editors and recommitted themselves to the Eagle’s tradition of solid local coverage that serves their community.
What I did not know until the day I walked into his newsroom was that this was the day Rutberg was planning to announce that he would step down and hand the baton of publisher to a young protege named Gary Lavariere, who was 31 years old at the time.
It was quite a moment and I recently circled back to talk with Rutberg and Lavariere about the first six months of the new era.
The locally born and raised Lavariere rose through the ranks of the paper on the business side of operations. He had a brief, two year interlude where he headed up a digital transformation for a newspaper in Las Vegas, but returned to the Berkshires just before COVID and felt it was a stroke of luck to be back at the Eagle where he wanted to be and in the place where he wanted to raise a family. He and his wife have two kids and a house just one town away from where he was born in North Adams.
Promoted to Chief Revenue Officer, Lavariere developed a digital strategy at the Eagle that is still in mid-stride and involves an ongoing remake of the backend and the website through a host of contractors. I plan on circling back to him to discuss in more detail how his plan to not just save the paper, but to make it grow is going. When asked how he wanted his tenure to be remembered ten years from now, Lavariere said, “The role of the news organization today will be the same ten years from now. We will still be the town square, the conversation starter. As we evolve and lean into digital, we will need to focus harder on how we bring the community together. We will have to keep working hard at that through leveraging events and leveraging the emotional connection people feel with our brand.”
One of the goals that Rutberg will be helping him with is building the non-profit arm of the news organization which helps the business raise philanthropic dollars to add specific reporting beats that the organization otherwise may not be able to afford. Together, Rutberg and Lavariere are on their way to beating the odds and establishing a local newspaper with a long history that can survive well into a future that promises transformational change.
Through all the change that has happened and through all the tumult and change that lies ahead with the advent of AI, Rutberg still maintains that the story of the Berkshire Eagle is a fable that revolves around one word: “Trust.”
Rutberg explained, “Our most valuable asset is the trust the community has in us. Absentee ownership didn’t destroy all of that but it nearly did, and we have worked hard on rebuilding that trust. For any local paper struggling to sustain, I think that is the thing to remember: you have to have the trust of your community.”
This just made my day. I love visiting The Berkshires, and one of the first things I do when I get there is pick up The Berkshire Eagle to read what is happening locally. Thank you for this story.
The Berkshire Eagle is located near the center of Berkshire County that consists of beautiful natural landscapes, small farms and numerous communities that each have their own historically determined characteristics. Pittsfield is the largest city, but is of modest size. The county has multiple art museums and historical sites as well as three colleges and venues that support a multiplicity of historical cultural and popular concerts, exhibitions and other events that attract local citizens along with urban visitors and second home owners. The public is engaged politically and relishes the political events covered by the Eagle.
There are the less savory local news that is also covered, but these stories never dominate the messaging of the Berkshire Eagle.
Excellent writing and accurate reporting provide a paper that is informative, interesting and readable.
William Moomaw, Williamstown, MA