GateHouse Media makes the news

GateHouse Media, which owns the Newburyport Current and a whole slew of other weeky newspapers, last fall tried an 'experiment' in Batavia, NY - launching a web-only news source in a town where they did not have a print presence.

Back in Sept., Scott Karp wrote on publishing2.com:

It’s a newspaper company thinking and acting like a startup — which is what every media company needs to do to survive the digital transition.

The real problem is, you know, is that not everyone has a computer. Hard to believe, but it's true ... and then there are the folks, like my mother, who use a computer for email, writing and doing her family tree - but who would never read a newspaper on line.

And even here in Newburyport, there are a lot of people who read the weekly because they can't afford the daily.

More recently, GateHouse media has filed suit against the New York Times Co., which owns the Boston Globe over intellectual property. (That phrase always makes me smile.)

From Friday's Boston.com (it's a Globe story, by Robert Weisman):

At the heart of the complaint, lodged by GateHouse Media Inc., which publishes 125 community newspapers in Massachusetts, is the question of whether Internet news providers will be able to continue the practice of posting headlines and lead sentences from stories they link to on other sites. The case has been scheduled for trial in US District Court in Boston as early as Monday.

As someone called pinball25 comments:

It's not just the links. It's the fact that Boston.com created these Your Town sites and rather than hire the nessecary staff to create content for the sites, they are simply linking to GateHouse Media's Wicked Local content. So Boston.com gets all the revenue from having local sites with none of the expense. Something this blatantly bias article fails to point out.

I agree with pinball25. As someone who was pushed aside due to cutbacks - and basically told to go back to writing for "the competition" (not in a mean way) - I find this amazing. So they don't to pay me, or other GateHouse media reporters/stringers, but they want what we write?

I know, any link to a story on WickedLocal is more traffic for GateHouse Media sites, but honestly ...

And I really don't see why the New York Times has a Northeast edition. Isn't that what the Globe is?