Oberfests leave an Island legacy

Vineyard Haven residents Peter and Barbara Oberfest didn’t come into ownership of The Martha’s Vineyard Times with a background in newspapers. The two were looking to move to the Vineyard full-time from Philadelphia. 

But in the mid-1990s, the Oberfests became the publishers of the paper anyway, and for nearly three decades, they shepherded it through the ups and downs of a struggling industry, through the tumultuous digital age and through the COVID-19 pandemic, before finally, as announced last week, selling the news organization to Island businessman Steve Bernier, in a sale that the Oberfests believe will allow the community paper to continue to provide a voice for Islanders.

Peter Oberfest, whose idea it was to dive into the Island news scene, at the time ran a consulting business for the healthcare industry. But his introduction to the newspaper industry came much earlier, with a humble beginning.

His parents emigrated from Poland to New York City, and to learn English and to become acculturated, he said, they read newspapers. A lot of newspapers. Oberfest said that there were up to seven or eight papers lying around his home at any given time, which he would pick up and read through. He says he remembers which paper had the best sports news, which had good international reporting, who had the good columnists, and which had the Yankee scores.

“I liked newspapers, but I didn’t grow up in a household of journalists or publishers,” Peter Oberfest told The Times this week, after successfully selling the paper this past weekend. “I was lucky to have an occasional acquaintance with a journalist, and I always thought, ‘Well, that would be a nice thing to do.’”

The Oberfests got that chance in the mid-1990s. As fate would have it, they had a son attending the Vineyard Montessori School, where Doug Cabral and his wife Molly had their children in school. The Cabrals had bought The Times in 1991, but were looking for help running the business side of the paper. Doug Cabral had been an editor at the Vineyard Gazette for several years before running the editorial section of The Times soon after it was created in the mid-1980s.

“Peter was a very capable fellow, and smart,” Cabral recently said of the partnership. “And to do the kind of work he did, he had to be.” 

A 1996 MV Times news clipping announcing the new partnership reads that the paper had grown since the Cabrals bought it in 1991, and with that growth “has come a need for more sophisticated business management skills. To consolidate and expand the newspaper’s business success requires ‘just what Peter and Barbara provide,’” Cabral was quoted.

As with many small communities with two newspapers, The MV Times stuck to a free, tabloid-style paper. As a free paper, they could charge more for advertisements than the competition. In 1996, the circulation was approximately 10,000, growing to 15,000 in the summer.

As Peter Oberfest described it, the paper was floundering a bit on the business side. He said that the editorial side was not an issue: The Cabrals ran a solid community paper. 

And Oberfest said they would keep out of the editorial side of things, which would — as described by some former editors at the paper — set his tone as a publisher who backed the journalists to do the reporting that was important to the community. 

The two families ran the paper together for about two decades. As described by Doug Cabral, they were family friends, they would vacation together, and they ran the paper that way.

“It was a family business. It was fun,” Cabral said. “It was more casual. It wasn’t big business.”

The Oberfests took full control of the paper in the spring of 2014, as the internet age was starting to have a big impact on the newspaper industry across the country. 

Peter Oberfest said that initially, the newspaper didn’t get hit as hard financially as many others had. He said The Times benefited from a Vineyard community that took on change slowly and enjoyed reading a physical paper. And the help-wanted and classified sections hadn’t been gutted by social media and Craigslist, compared with other papers. 

“This was not the canary in the coal mine,” he said. “That gave us a false sense that we were going to dodge that bullet. We took more for granted than we should have.”

One of the struggles of adapting to the digital age was getting a newsroom publishing a weekly paper to turn into a 24/7 news outfit. As had been the case for many years, reporters would typically file stories early in the week, and then Thursday and Friday, with the paper already out, things would slow down. Peter remembers talking with the sports reporter at the time, who was in the habit of posting scores on Wednesdays, even if the game was on a Thursday or Friday.

“It wasn’t because we had to be the fastest to tell a story,” Peter Oberfest said. “We didn’t care if we weren’t beating anyone with a story. The community needed that information.”

One of the most successful additions to The Times’ online presence was the introduction of the Minute, a newsletter that launched in 2017, and still lands in readers’ inboxes on weekday afternoons.

The News editor at the time, George Brennan, said the Oberfests were willing to take chances, and the Minute was a good example. Instead of waiting a week to read what was in the paper, the newsletter brought the news of the day. Brennan noted that risked taking away from the print edition, but he said that the Vineyard community embraced the new format.

Brennan said that the Oberfest publishing style was to give their editorial staff free rein to tell the stories that Islanders needed to hear.

“They had a tremendous amount of trust in us to tell these important stories,” Brennan said. “On an Island, that can be pretty tough, because it’s pretty hard to escape running into people at the grocery store or on a ferry ride.”

A story that Brennan said had a big impact on the community was the Mill House. He said that the story led to significant and positive change in Martha’s Vineyard Commission procedures. The Mill House, a historic site and one of the most recognizable buildings on the Vineyard Haven waterfront, was demolished. Brennan also noted many stories that former Times reporter Rich Saltzberg broke through public records requests, including a missing rifle from the Oak Bluffs Police Department.

“Keeping public agencies honest is the mission of journalism, and they were tremendously supportive of that,” Brennan said of the Oberfests.

With the paper slowly taking a financial hit with the digital age, the pandemic era may have been a hill too steep. Peter Oberfest said that essentially overnight, advertising revenue declined by about half in the spring of 2020.

And it wasn’t just The MV Times that struggled. Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism reports that since 2005, the U.S. has lost nearly 3,000 newspapers, with about 6,000 newspapers remaining. In 2023, the journalism school reported that 2½ newspapers were closing per week, more frequently than in 2022, when approximately two papers closed a week.

“It took the heart of the money that it takes to run a newspaper,” Oberfest said. He said that government COVID funding helped, but it was too late and not enough. At the same time, he said that nonprofits on the Island were able to keep running, and were attracting staff away from the Times.

In the last few years, the Oberfests had been looking for a new owner who could work with the challenges facing the industry now, and continue to provide a voice to the Island community. 

Peter Oberfest said that they have found that with Bernier, along with Charlie Sennott as an advisor and publisher. Oberfest said that it will be important that both have considered a philanthropic component to the paper, but also that they are both Islanders.

He said that essential for a healthy community is having a newspaper that listens to the people and provides a voice for the community. Without that voice, the Vineyard could change for the worse. 

“It won’t be the community we like,” he said.

“I’m happy that this is the way it worked out.”