Selling out the Provincetown Banner

ANOTHER SMALL weekly newspaper gets gobbled up by a faceless media giant from out of town. No big deal, right?

Maybe, but when it's a newspaper that made its name as an independent upstart committed to keeping corporate predators at bay, there's added sadness - particularly if you were part of a small group that gave life to that newspaper and saw it through its rough-and-tumble early years.

The announcement last week that the Provincetown Banner had been purchased by GateHouse Media was, of course, just another notch in the gun of this upstate New York enterprise, which owns hundreds of small newspapers around the country including many in Massachusetts. And while outgoing Banner owner Alix Ritchie assured the public and staff that nothing would change under the new regime, it was clear that everything already had. Soon the suits will be calling the shots.

In spring 1995, I was named editor of the Banner, with just over a month to devise a format, hire a staff, set up an office, and get out the first issue by Memorial Day weekend.

It was a crazy time - only a few of us had any newspaper experience - and a skeptical public was awaiting the results. But we managed to get that first issue out, and by July we had found a groove and were putting out a lively, professional product. Soon we slowly began winning over readers of the established paper, the Provincetown Advocate, as well as advertisers, who saw that they needed to advertise in both papers, just in case.

Throughout all this, there were many public pronouncements about how much the Banner cared about the town, how we were dedicated to being the independent voice of the town into the foreseeable future. It was all about "community" - about building up not tearing down, about taking care of one another and sticking together, about being good stewards of this "very special place."

From there, things pretty much become a blur. The Banner was named paper of the year by the New England Press Association in its first year of competition and was written up repeatedly as an example of a successful start-up. Advertising and pages exploded to the point where what began as one section rarely topping 40 pages was suddenly a multisection, 100-plus-page behemoth at high season.

In spring 2000, the Banner bought the Advocate and put it out of business. Quoted in the Banner, Ritchie said, "The most important thing is that this community's newspaper is going to be locally owned and independent."

For a newspaper person, there are bound to be mixed feelings about being involved in the demise of any newspaper, even if it is one you have been waging a war against. But I justified my actions with the belief that we were helping the town by giving it a much better paper than it had.

As I was often reminded by colleagues at other papers, I had the dream job many of them had fantasized about - living and working on outer Cape Cod, writing about a place of interest to people around the world, working for a financially supportive local owner.

But in 2004, I saw that the Banner's future plans didn't include me, and left.

I have watched the Banner closely since I left. And whatever they've done that I haven't agreed with, I've felt pride in knowing I helped to create what I felt sure would be an enduring entity. And then came the announcement of not just a sale, but a sale to GateHouse, which owns almost all the other weeklies on the Cape, including the Banner's closest competitor, whose coverage area includes the same towns the Banner has covered. With that kind of duplication of effort, something has got to give.

But no matter what happens, the principles and the promises of the Banner's birth have been abandoned, along with the good citizens of Provincetown. Little did they know that they could be sold out, for the right price.

Hamilton Kahn is host of "In The News" on community radio station WOMR-FM in Provincetown. He lives in Wellfleet.