Times Herald-Record

A newspaper has been in existence in some form in the city of Middletown since 1851. The Times Herald was the result of a 1927 merger of the Times-Press, a merger of the old Middletown (Whig) Press of the 1850s and the Daily Times, founded in 1891, and the Daily Herald, founded in 1918, but also going back to the 1850s. The Times Herald had the Middletown market to itself from 1927 until 1956, when Jacob M. Kaplan started publishing the Middletown Daily Record, the first daily U.S. newspaper to use cold type, from a garage on North Street. The new paper grew to a daily circulation of 19,000 within three years but lost a lot of money in the process. In November 1959, James H. Ottaway Sr., the founder of Ottaway Newspapers Inc., bought the Times-Herald and the Port Jervis Union-Gazette from Ralph Ingersoll, who had owned the papers since 1951. The Gazette, serving Port Jervis and surrounding communities, still exists as a weekly newspaper published by the Times Herald-Record. A few months later, in April 1960, Kaplan sold his Daily Record to Ottaway. On September 4, 2013, News Corp announced that it would sell the Dow Jones Local Media Group to Newcastle Investment Corp.—an affiliate of Fortress Investment Group, for $87 million. The newspapers were to be operated by GateHouse Media, a newspaper group owned by Fortress. News Corp CEO and former Wall Street Journal editor Robert James Thomson indicated that the newspapers were "not strategically consistent with the emerging portfolio" of the company. GateHouse in turn filed prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 27, 2013, to restructure its debt obligations in order to accommodate the acquisition. GateHouse was subsequently purchased by New Media Investment Group in 2019 and merged into Gannett, making Gannett the largest newspaper chain in the United States with over 100 dailies. In February 2020, the paper announced it would be closing its printing plant in Wallkill, New York and outsourcing its printing to a plant in Rockaway, New Jersey in order to "adapt to market-driven changes and competition." Ninety-four employees were laid off in the process. In July 2021, employees of the Times Herald-Record, Poughkeepsie Journal and The Journal News voted to unionize. They joined the NewsGuild-CWA and formed the Hudson Valley News Guild. In February 2024, the newspaper announced it would switch from carrier to postal delivery. ==Prominent employees==

• Avrom "Al" Romm (1926–1999), named city editor of the Daily Record in 1957, became the Times Herald-Record first managing editor after the merge in 1960, a position he held until he was named editorial page editor in 1976. His youngest son is climate expert Joseph J. Romm. • Malcolm Browne, who later won the Pulitzer Prize covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press. He was a concentration camp survivor who became a photojournalist. Before and during his stint at the Record, he photographed Picasso, Marilyn Monroe, Tennessee Williams, and Ben Hecht, among others. In 1966, he went to Vietnam to take pictures of hometown soldiers in the war zone. In addition to his photojournalism assignments, he was a patient teacher but hard taskmaster. After retiring, he and his wife returned to her native France and lived in Paris, but came back to Middletown where they lived until his death in 2005. • Glenn Doty, one of the paper's former managing editors, later trained hundreds of student journalists at The Legislative Gazette, a student-run newspaper covering state government in Albany operated jointly by SUNY campuses at New Paltz and Albany. • Hunter S. Thompson, the future creator of gonzo journalism was fired by Editor A.N. Romm after "kicking open the office candy machine with his bare feet - again." The Mike Levine Journalism Education Fund was founded after his death, and sponsors an annual training for aspiring writers at The Mike Levine Workshop. The workshop is led each year by prominent writers. In addition, an annual Mike Levine Column Read-a-Thon is held which raises money for the Education Fund. Levine is the first writer in the history of The Record for whom every article he had written is available online by archive A clip of Levine addressing his community is on YouTube. • Mark Pittman (1957–2009), former Metro-Editor until 1997 when he left to work for Bloomberg News. He reported on the 2008 financial crisis. • Glenn Ritt, former city editor in the late 1970s who went on to become editor of the Bergen Record. ==References==