“As traditional media collapsed, so did the paper’s influence despite fine work by a skilled but shrunken staff,” said Charlie Perkins, a former reporter, editor, and executive who worked at the paper for over 30 years. “New Hampshire knows far less about itself now, and that’s a damn shame.”
Just this year, the Union Leader has moved to a smaller newsroom, shifted its signature Sunday News to a Saturday print schedule, and secured a $1 million loan to help cover pension costs. Its struggles have some observers wondering whether there are enough readers left to save the publication.
“Who is the Union Leader writing for anymore?” said Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire. “Is that conservative, working-class citizen getting a newspaper?”
Founded in 1863, the Union Leader rose to national prominence under William and Nackey Scripps Loeb, after the former bought the paper in 1946. He was known for his aggressive, provocative, and conservative front-page editorials.
While his own legacy took a dark turn in 2022 — his stepdaughter alleged he sexually abused her as a child, prompting the Union Leader to condemn its former publisher and remove him from the masthead — many of his views and his style as a political provocateur have lived on.
The style of Loeb’s presidential epithets — he called Gerald Ford “Jerry the Jerk” and Lyndon B. Johnson “Snake Oil Lyndon” — has echoes in the politics of today. And the use of the paper to attack candidates its leadership opposed was a forebear to today’s partisan vitriol, much of its produced by news outlets at least as at home on the right as the Loebs were.
For instance, the Union Leader played a major role in the political downfall of Democrat Edmund Muskie, whose emotional speech (reports at the time varied on whether he cried) in response to a fake letter published by the paper helped cost him a shot at the presidency.
“The Union Leader, in many ways, wrote the right-wing media playbook that we see invoked over and over again,” said Meg Heckman, a journalism professor at Northeastern University and former Concord Monitor reporter who wrote a biography of Scripps Loeb.
But in the decades that followed, its political influence has waned.
“It doesn’t have the power it once had,” said David Scannell, a former Manchester school board member and Democratic mayoral aide who remembers how when growing up Loeb’s front page editorials always “sparked emotions” in his dad.
Joe McQuaid succeeded Nackey Scripps Loeb as publisher after her retirement in 1999, and when she died, the paper passed into the possession of a nonprofit she had founded.
Over the past few decades, the politics of the state have also changed. While New Hampshire is still more of a swing state than many of its New England neighbors, it has nonetheless shifted blue in recent elections. In other words, it’s no longer the New Hampshire of the Loebs.
While the paper’s endorsements have still garnered national headlines, recent attention has been more about its rejection of Donald Trump. When it endorsed Joe Biden over Trump in the 2020 general election, the first time it had backed a Democrat in over 100 years, CNN anchor Jake Tapper tweeted an image that read “Tonight, Hell freezes over.”
The primary had long given Union Leader reporters a chance to cover a national election. But the primary’s unique stature is in jeopardy — national Democrats moved their first-in-the-nation contest to the more diverse state of South Carolina, which this year meant Biden wasn’t on the ballot when New Hampshire held its primary more than a week earlier. He still won due to a write-in effort.
John Clayton, a former Union Leader reporter who wrote an award-winning column focused on the city of Manchester, said he is worried that the next generation of reporters might not get those same opportunities.
“I grew up in the age of Watergate,” Clayton said. “That emotional satisfaction that came with the career, that might not be there for the next generation.”
The paper’s full-time staff has shrunk over the years through layoffs and other departures. David Lane, the paper’s lone staff photographer and incoming president of the New Hampshire NewsGuild, said the union had over 200 members a decade ago. Now, it has roughly 40 full- and part-time editorial, accounting, and advertising staffers.
The staff reduction has left New Hampshire’s only statewide paper without the ability to cover the state like it did during its peak. While Lane said it has fared better than other local papers, it is “heartbreaking” to go to places like local schools to take students’ photos and not be recognized.
“They’re not really sure what we’re there for and what the Union Leader is,” he said.
The paper’s diminished stature has been obvious to readers.
Mike Norris, an engineer for a local tech company and a Union Leader subscriber, said the paper had robust local coverage when he moved to the city about 25 years ago. But that has changed.
“It’s gotten so thin,” he said. “It’s hard to see how it will continue.”
The paper’s leadership is taking steps to try to preserve its future.
The low-interest, $1 million loan it secured from the New Hampshire Business Finance Authority, a state agency focused on economic development, will help pay for three employee pension plans, and executive pensions were cut by 65 percent.
The paper also moved from a 27,000-square-foot newsroom to a downtown Manchester office that is a third of that size. It had previously been leasing space in its old building, a 173,000-square-foot complex it sold in 2017.
The paper’s president and publisher, Brendan McQuaid, said he had “no comment beyond what has been published” when reached by phone for this article.
McQuaid laid out the organization’s business strategy in a Union Leader article last month: “Without doing this, the paper would struggle to survive.”
The cuts come as the paper has lost readers, and revenue. Circulation of the Sunday News averaged about 85,000 copies between April and September 1999, according to a publisher’s statement provided by the Alliance for Audited Media. McQuaid told New Hampshire Public Radio last month that its Sunday circulation is now about 20,000 copies.
Average weekday copies fell from over 63,000 in 1999 to under 16,000 in early 2023.
And digital subscriptions aren’t filling the gap. A March 2023 AAM report showed that the Union Leader only averaged roughly 4,000 digital subscribers on top of its print subscribers, who also receive digital subscriptions.
Annual revenue has similarly dropped from more than $50 million to roughly $14 million in recent years, according to a Union Leader preliminary investor prospectus from June obtained by the Globe from the union.
The prospectus was written for potential investors — the $1 million loan also requires the paper to raise a separate $1 million in an equity investment. New Hampshire Business Finance Authority executive director, James Key-Wallace, said in an interview he expects the loan to close by the end of this month.
Meanwhile, unionized employees have grown increasingly restive and have picketed outside of the Union Leader’s office on multiple occasions as they seek better wages and benefits. Among the worries, Lane said, are that the loan could open the door to new owners who might not be good stewards of the organization.
Currently, the fact that its majority owner remains in control gives the paper some hope. Unlike other struggling papers, the Union Leader is not owned by a cost-cutting newspaper chain or private equity firm. The Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications, a nonprofit based in Manchester offering communications and journalism classes, owns two-thirds of the paper.
“It is not easy to run a news organization today, full stop,” said Northeastern’s Heckman.
“Because the Union Leader is under local control, it means that the often difficult and complex decisions about its financial future are being made by people with roots in the local community who genuinely care about serving New Hampshire audiences,” she added.
Aidan Ryan can be reached at aidan.ryan@globe.com. Follow him @aidanfitzryan.
