You’ll read elsewhere in our pages and online this morning that by the first of the year The Times will have been sold to Steve Bernier of West Tisbury. This is astoundingly good news for all Islanders, good news because it means that The Times, a community newspaper through and through, will remain in community hands as Barbara and I take our leave. And not just any hands, but in Steve’s, perhaps the best — if quiet — example of Vineyard philanthropy one could find. Steve and his wife Constance, already enmeshed in projects on the Vineyard Haven waterfront, are the best new owners Barbara and I could have hoped for as we move The Times along while keeping it local.
To multiply the opportunity for positive change in front of us, Steve has persuaded Charlie Sennott of Chilmark to join him as acting publisher, replacing Barbara and me at MVT world headquarters on Beach Road. With a background as a reporter and a foreign correspondent, Charlie is among the best-known organizers and practitioners of new journalism in America, having co-founded GroundTruth and Report for America while serving as their editor-and-chief. Charlie, his wife Julie and family, are full-time Chilmarkians, so once again, Times2 has pulled off a great coup, with one of the best practitioners of journalism available to lead the newsroom.
This new leadership is essential because as many of you know community newspapers, the pulse and thrum of healthy communities, are failing — gone or agglomerated into uselessness — at an alarming rate, perhaps 25 percent in the last 15 years. It will take great inventiveness and great community support (readership, joint projects, ongoing financial support) to keep The Times and its digital offspring the vital force the great Vineyard community will need to meet the existential challenges we will face in the next decades.
This new class of leadership is a far cry from the quieter, humbler transition that took place when Barbara and I bought into The Times about 30 years ago — an unplanned career move sparked by a Montessori School friendship. It seemed like an OK idea, but we really had no clue what we were getting into.
We learn in unexpected ways. I was running errands on the Thursday in 1994 that The Times ran a story announcing that Barbara and I had become partners in the paper with Doug and Molly Cabral. Part of my usual rounds included a stop at the Tisbury dump. Larry, the dump maitre’d, came out of the entry booth as I approached and hummed a solid rendition of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin.” I self-consciously hemmed and hawed, but I was struck by the realization that this transaction actually attracted some attention across the community.
This casual exchange clarified our purpose in getting involved in something as fragile as a community newspaper in the first place. I say fragile because community newspapers need to serve the journalism of course, but also readers and advertisers, and find a place in the social pecking order in which to reside — and the sum accomplished by a small underpaid staff.
Most of all community newspapers need a unique purpose: What job are we doing here?
Neither journalists nor moguls, the job for Barbara and me has continued to be providing support — a scaffold — for The Times so it could be the best possible cog of our community wheel. This meant the capital “J” Journalism of course, but more important — more important — has been our interest in and respect for the whole Vineyard.
We wanted to own a newspaper on which a community could hang its insecurities, its conflicts, its changes, its uncertainties, its successes, small and large. We worked hard to avoid the temptation to sit aloft and judge one bit worthy and another bit less significant. In short, we wanted to honor the social mission of a community newspaper above all — to be the sounding board, the glue, the cohesion, the service.
We needed shoulders to stand on and The Times we bought into, Doug Cabral’s Times, provided those. Doug knew the community in ways we never would and he provided shortcuts for us, in solid journalism, a wonderful and loyal staff with strong ties to the Vineyard. Doug hung in with us as editor and partner for 20 years.
But we needed it to be our Times, our voice, our sensibilities, and we’ve spent another 10 years having our way with you. The changes were subtle but they mattered to us. We hope you think that we succeeded.
Unanticipated, though, the pace of news delivery change, the digital platforms, the technology and the ad markets of the last 20 years have changed the object of our passion all around; it had been a newspaper — once-a-week, all analog, free distribution, an advertising monopoly — and it needed to change. Perhaps most of all it needed younger, more supple brains, and more funding than we could provide.
For newspapers to change hands these days is not a simple matter of buyers meeting sellers. Newspapers need vast change — as the poet said, “you’d better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone” — and buyers, even community-minded buyers, don’t readily step up to the bar. That’s where Steve Bernier fits in: a community guy through and through, a lover of what The Times means to the Vineyard. And Charlie, with a unique journalism talent at the right moment in Times history.
So it’s time for us to hand The Times over. We’ve had a great run, learned a lot and met great people. We deeply appreciate our staff, our readers, our advertisers, and our critics. Godspeed.
–Peter and Barbara Oberfest
