As of this week, the Upper Valley’s only region-wide and daily newspaper is sporting a significantly slimmer masthead after a series of departures have left just a core staff of reporters and a single photographer.
The newsroom box below (it runs at the bottom of p. A2 in the print edition every issue) shows the state of affairs at the end of October last year, just before Jim Kenyon, the paper’s longstanding columnist and veteran reporter, retired. He was followed at the end of the year by John Lippman, its equally veteran business and criminal justice reporter, who also retired.
This year, in relatively quick succession, the Valley News lost four more newsroom stalwarts. At the beginning of May, managing editor Geoff Hansen—a former photo editor—was moved to a new position with Newspapers of New England, the Valley News’s owner. News editor Nora Doyle-Burr, a former health reporter, was next: Her last issue was June 27, and she’s moved on to become a senior editor at VTDigger. At the end of June, top editor Matt Clary gave notice after five years in the position; he left on July 10. And last week, chief photographer Jennifer Hauck left the paper.
“Matt, Nora, Geoff, and Jen are incredibly talented, dedicated journalists who embody what has made the Valley News such a distinctive paper for decades,” says John Gregg, who worked at the Valley News from 2003 to 2022 as a reporter, political columnist, and news editor. “This is a huge loss for the paper and the Upper Valley.”
Here’s the newsroom masthead as of this week. It includes two relatively new reporters, Alex Ebrahimi, who was hired in December, and Sofia Langlois, who came on board in January—both of them while Clary, Hansen, and Doyle-Burr were still there.
Neither Clary nor Doyle-Burr would comment on their departures (or, in Clary’s case, his plans for the future), though they did respond to emails. That’s not the case with Valley News publisher Rich Wallace, who took over last February and hasn’t responded to either an email or a phone message asking about his plans for the newsroom; nor has he yet used a publisher’s note in the newspaper itself to update readers. Concord Monitor publisher Steve Leone, who also serves as vice president for news for Newspapers of New England and oversees newsroom strategy for its stable of publications—which includes the Monitor, the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, and a string of papers in Massachusetts’ northern Pioneer Valley—also didn’t respond to a request for comment on NNE’s plans for the Valley News.
