Foster's Sunday Citizen: Nov 1997-May 2015: RIP

Foster's Daily Democrat loves raking in $150 an obit, which used to be free till their business model went south and they began relying on the passing of former readers to subsidize their ineptitude.

Even sadder is they were too cheap to throw in a couple of hundred to pay for an obit for their own newspaper, Foster's Sunday Citizen.

It officially passed last Sunday when not even its former banner appeared on the "Seacoast Sunday" Foster's edition.

For a couple of weeks after they changed the name to Seacoast Sunday they had a little 2 X 2 display ad saying this "new newspaper" was the former Foster's Sunday Citizen.

To paraphrase the late Lloyd Bentsen's remarks in a vice presidential debate with Dan Quayle in 1988, "I knew the Foster's Sunday Citizen, I worked on the Foster's Sunday Citizen. I was the editor of the Foster's Sunday Citizen. I won two Best New Hampshire Sunday paper awards and was runner-up in a New England Sunday newspaper awards during the three years I was editor of the Foster's Sunday Citizen. Seacoast Sunday, you're no Foster's Sunday Citizen."

On the Foster's website today there is not one news story from Saturday from Rochester, Dover or Somersworth, formerly the core of its readership area.

Sunday papers are traditionally more issue- than news-driven given there are neither courts nor government offices open and producing news for them to report. But to have no representation in your core readership area is pathetic to say the least and shows the hand of the Seacoast Online brain trust, who want to homogenize the news into one newspaper when all is said and done.

I remember that night the Foster's Sunday Citizen was born vividly. A handful of newsmen including myself under the direction of editor Peter Swanson had been hired in the fall of 1997 to begin working on the soon-to-be Foster's Sunday Citizen a month before it was launched Sunday, Nov. 2. Swanson had formerly worked for the Union Leader of Manchester and knew a thing or two about newspapering.

But even with him at the helm and a month under our belts learning the styles, fonts and technology used in producing the paper, all hell broke loose that Saturday night in Foster's downtown Dover building as we tried to launch the premiere edition. We wanted to have the last page sent to camera by11 p.m. but around 8 p.m. we realized we were so far behind that wasn't going to happen.

Higher-end mucky mucks began showing up to help out, but as usual, they just made it worse.

It was like birthing a baby, painful and slow, but in the end she was so beautiful. And when we all joined publisher Robert Foster at the printing facility on Venture Drive, watched the first edition roll off the press and saw Foster pop a bottle of champagne, we knew we were all a small part of newspaper history.

The newspaper was designed to be different than the daily. It looked different, and the stories were different. The staff prided itself on its design and delivery of news. We had a 10-person staff that worked on nothing but the Sunday paper, freeing us up to develop enterprise and feature stories that won many awards.

When I took over the paper in 2000 we won several awards, for a series on a heroin bust in Hampton, for transportation reporting on the new Downeaster train service from Boston to Portland as well as the aforementioned Newspaper of the Year awards.

After I left the newspaper in 2004, readership shrank, but of course, it wasn't because I left. It was because print journalism was slowly dying and beginning its long, painful contraction into the shell of news gathering it now is.

Under Seacoast Online that contraction continues before our very eyes. If you look at the Seacoast Online site and the Foster's site today, you will see scant difference. It seems two formerly great papers have become one mediocre one overnight.

Could it be another newspaper has died?