You are reading an Eagle Times that is growing, evolving

By BILL CHAISSON
The Claremont Daily Eagle published its first issue on Oct. 5, 1914 and continued to publish under that name until Dec. 31, 1951. The name of the city was then dropped from the masthead, and it continued as the Daily Eagle until Oct. 31, 1974.

In fall 1974 this newspaper merged with the Connecticut Valley Times Reporter. The Sunday papers were combined earlier in October and the daily papers in November. The Times Reporter had been published in Bellows Falls and had also covered Springfield, Vermont. The two publications dropped the “Reporter” part of the name to form the Eagle Times, which continues — with a four-month hiatus in 2009 — to the present day.

Newspapers have changed quite a bit since 1914. They have been accumulating media competitors steadily over the last century. Commercial radio began to grow in the 1920s, bringing the news into people’s lives even more quickly and dramatically than “extra editions” could do. (Remember the newsboys in the streets in old movies shouting “Extra, extra, read all about it!”)

Television technology became standardized in 1941, and televisions began appearing in greater numbers in American households after World War II. Since the 1990s, of course, there has been the internet.

The ownership of newspapers has changed too. From the 1920s onward, more and more publications were owned by large corporations like Hearst, McClatchy, Gannett, and the News Corporation. In the 19th and early 20th century the press was often decidedly partisan, but an objective model pioneered by the New York Times after the late 1880s. While the Gray Lady has often been accused of a liberal bias, left-wingers just as often accuse it of a right-wing or at least establishment slant.

“We have to be really careful that people feel like they can see themselves in The New York Times,” said executive editor Dean Baquet in 2017. “I want us to be perceived as fair and honest to the world, not just a segment of it. It’s a really difficult goal. Do we pull it off all the time? No.”

As the new editor of the Eagle Times, I would like the paper to be perceived as fair and honest to readers in our coverage area (which is considerably smaller than the world). We have the best interests of Claremont as a whole in mind, rather than those of any particular faction within it.

We have begun to re-establish a set geography for the newspaper. We want you to reliably go to a particular page and be assured of finding the content you expect. The syndicated columnists now appear on a regular weekly rotation (in the order they come to us). We have introduced some new features, like the Great Outdoors page, which appears on B5 in each weekend edition, and a Health Care page on B4 each Tuesday. Both of these pages include new columns.

We will, in general, be including more and more local content, pushing back the syndicated material in the news, the lifestyles, and the sports pages.

There is a lot going on in Claremont and in the broader Upper Valley. We want the Eagle Times to reflect that fully and accurately.