The
Old Colony Memorial, which claims the title of oldest
weekly newspaper in
New England, was founded in 1822 in
Plymouth, Massachusetts. The
Memorial had become the flagship of a nine-paper chain stretching from Plymouth north to the
Boston suburbs by the turn of the 21st century.
Dailies K. Prescott Low, whose family had published
The Patriot Ledger for a century, purchased MPG in 1979 and incorporated it into the privately owned George W. Prescott Publishing Company. Thirty years later, however, in 1997, Low found that "mega-players competing with us" made family ownership of the
Ledger and MPG uneconomic, and sought to sell them. A buyer quickly emerged: James F. Plugh, owner of
The Enterprise, the
Brockton daily newspaper that competed with the
Ledger and several MPG papers. Plugh's Newspaper Media LLC, later renamed Enterprise NewsMedia, bought the Prescott Publishing for an estimated
US$60 to
US$70 million. Toward the end of Plugh's ownership of MPG, the company began expanding. In 2005, MPG purchased the Call Group of three weeklies in the
Taunton area, as well as the
Norwood Bulletin. A year later, Plugh purchased Associated and Independent Newspapers, an independent chain of 12 weeklies in the suburbs around Brockton.
GateHouse Liberty Publishing purchased Enterprise NewsMedia in 2006 as part of a mammoth deal that also included
Community Newspaper Company—then owned by the
Boston Herald—and a new name for the parent company,
GateHouse Media. Under GateHouse, MPG was gradually folded into CNC's South Unit. In a reorganization announced October 1, 2006, MPG's executives were reassigned to CNC positions and a handful of newspapers were closed to eliminate competition within the merged company. Additionally, MPG papers that had been printed in
tabloid format became
broadsheets and would now be printed at CNC presses. == Properties ==