Rutland Herald
The Rutland Herald front page after the last sale.

[T]he Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and Rutland Herald newspapers have been sold again just 18 months after they were purchased by Vermont Community Media.

The sale will be finalized by the end of the month, according to an article published by the Herald. The new owner, Sample News Group, is a family-run business that owns dozens of newspapers in Pennsylvania and others in New England.

Rob Mitchell, general manager of the Herald, whose family sold the papers in 2016 to businessmen Chip Harris of New Hampshire and Reade Brower of Maine, said the latest sale was easier to deal with than the last one.

“At the time of the last sale, we were in pretty bad financial condition and close to going out of business. It was a lot more traumatic in that sense,” he said in an interview Thursday afternoon. “Now we are in a much better financial position.”

Both of the current owners also said the paper’s financial stability had been restored during their time running the paper, according to the Herald report.

That has required some painful cuts. Just last month, the papers eliminated the position of editorial page editor, parting ways with David Moats, who won a Pulitzer prize in 2001 for a series of editorials that advocated for the passage of civil unions legislation in Vermont.

The newspaper also retrenched its editorial staff to focus on Rutland and Washington counties last year.

“It’s a shame, but it’s not a wholesale abandonment. It’s a change in emphasis,” editor Steven Pappas said at the time. “Local content is king, and that’s what we’re going to put the focus on.”

Mitchell said Thursday that the newspaper’s financials had largely stabilized over the past year, though he said it was too soon to say what changes, if any, might be made under the new owners.

“We’re in a good place as a company, but it’s a messy business to be in,” he said. “There are a lot of things that are out of our control.”

Mitchell said that the sale was largely a strategic decision. Brower mostly owns newspapers in Maine, and does not have the same ability to share resources as Sample, which owns The Eagle-Times in Claremont, New Hampshire.

“From a geographic perspective, it made sense to be partnered with the Eagle Times and Sample papers. There’s a potential for us to share things like delivery,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell said he spoke to George “Scoop” Sample, the owner of the news group, earlier this week, but did not know what the future held.

“In this type of transition, you get lots of information up front, but you aren’t making any decisions until you are closer to it,” he said.

The Pennsylvania-based Sample News Group already owns one Vermont newspaper, the Message for the Week in Chester.

The Herald, founded in 1794, and the Times Argus, with daily roots dating back to 1897, had been owned locally for decades. The papers’ last hometown publishers, the Mitchell family, bought the Herald in 1947 and the Times Argus in 1964, adding a joint Sunday edition in 1975. But they were forced to sell the papers in 2016 after employee paychecks started bouncing.

The Mitchells, who still own the Herald building in Rutland, have an outstanding $800,000 Small Business Administration loan they hope to pay through the sale of their one-story downtown property. The family held an auction last October, only to have the deal fall through in January when the prospective purchaser learned the site was contaminated and required a $2 million cleanup.

Colin Meyn is VTDigger's managing editor. He spent most of his career in Cambodia, where he was a reporter and editor at English-language newspapers The Cambodia Daily and The Phnom Penh Post, and most...