Belmont Citizen-Herald

Community Newspaper Company, or CNC, was the largest publisher of weekly newspapers in eastern Massachusetts in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century. It also published several daily newspapers in Greater Boston.

The company's properties were assembled by Fidelity Investments in the 1980s; Fidelity founded the company and then sold it to the ''Boston Herald'' in 2001. Five years later, the chain was purchased by, and immediately became the largest single component of, GateHouse Media. GateHouse gradually phased out CNC branding in favor of "WickedLocal.com", the company's website, and GateHouse Media New England; this process was complete by 2011, when staff email addresses dropped the "@cnc.com" domain.

Holdings

CNC's flagship publication was ''The MetroWest Daily News'', based in Framingham, Massachusetts. In 2011 it also published '' The Milford Daily News''. It had also published, and closed, three other daily newspapers: ''The Daily News Transcript'', ''The Daily News Tribune'' and the '' Enterprise-Sun''.

The GateHouse purchase in mid-2006 included CNC as well as Enterprise News Media, publisher of two dailies and several weeklies that competed with CNC's South Shore holdings. The weeklies were incorporated into CNC and the company also forged close ties with its new sister dailies, '' The Enterprise'' and '' The Patriot Ledger'', although they—and later GateHouse Media Massachusetts acquisitions '' The Herald News'' and the ''Taunton Daily Gazette''—retained their own editorial hierarchy, however, and were not considered part of Community Newspaper Company.

CNC's holdings, as well as its Massachusetts sister papers and ''The Bulletin'' in Connecticut, now constitute GateHouse Media New England.

Weeklies

CNC published more than 100 weeklies, semiweeklies and monthly publications. Each publication was classified in one of five or six semi-autonomous units (Cape, Metro, North, Northwest, South, West), each with its own editor-in-chief, covering distinct geographic areas of eastern Massachusetts and named for its location with respect to Boston.

The West Unit included oversight over all the daily newspapers, in addition to most of the CNC weeklies that complement them; at times, the Cape Unit properties were considered part of the South Unit.

References

External links

''The MetroWest Daily News''

WickedLocal.com, Website of the CNC weeklies

{{Gannett

Publishing companies established in 1991
Companies based in Massachusetts
Newspaper companies of the United States
Newspapers published in Massachusetts
Mass media in Norfolk County, Massachusetts
Gannett publications
Local mass media in Massachusetts
1991 establishments in Massachusetts