Around New England

NH’s Only Pulitzer Prize-Winning Newspaper Selling Building, Land, For Smaller Digs

February 15, 2019

Confronted by a “shrinking” newspaper industry, the Concord Monitor, a much-lauded daily newspaper in the NH state capital that garnered a Pulitzer Prize in 2008, has announced it is putting its 25-year-old building up for sale and relocating its news and advertising departments, and its printing press, to a smaller space closer to the city.

The Monitor, the flagship paper of Newspapers of New England, Inc., said the 70,000-square-foot building will be listed, along with approximately 103 acres in its corporate park on 1 Monitor Drive in East Concord, for $6.5 million.

Monitor publisher Heather McKernan said the paper is “excited” with the move.

“While our current location has served us well, we are excited to eventually move closer to downtown and the State House, where much of the news is made,” she said in an article written by Monitor reporter David Brooks.

The paper’s press on 1 Monitor Drive will continue to operate until installation of a large press in nearby Penacook is complete, Brooks reports. Presently the Valley News, also a Newspapers of New England holding, is being printed at the Penacook facility.

The Monitor’s property can be seen on the west side of Interstate 93, between exits 16 and 17 and just north of Sewall Falls Road. When completed in 1990, the building was considered state-of-the-art in terms of design, lighting, and energy efficiency. 

According to Brooks’ article, the Monitor left its downtown Concord location in 1990 when it was trendy for urban papers around the country to move out of city centers for “lower land values and because [a less urban location] made it easier to distribute thousands of newspapers every morning.” Brooks noted that The Boston Globe, The Telegraph in Nashua, and Foster’s Daily Democrat in Portsmouth, have taken similar downsizing steps.

“In recent years,” Brooks writes, “with the print newspaper industry shrinking, many papers are reversing the trend.”

The Monitor has a daily circulation of about 20,000.

Newspapers of New England, Inc. also owns the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in Peterborough, and six papers in Massachusetts.