[M]aggie Cassidy, who was the first web editor at the Valley News, will be the newspaper’s next editor and the first woman to run the newsroom since its founding in 1952.
Cassidy, 30, replaces Martin Frank, who got the job in 2013 after a long tenure as the paper’s editorial page editor.
“She’s helped us navigate this difficult-to-predict future we’re facing,” said Dan McClory, the Valley News publisher, who announced Cassidy’s appointment Tuesday. “She’s done that really almost on her own.”
Cassidy said that when she arrived at the Valley News as a reporter in 2012, the paper was posting a few stories online a day after they had been published in print.
“For all intents and purposes we were a print organization that also put some stuff on the web,” she said.
The transition to a “full-fledged, fully rounded newspaper in 2018” was met with some resistance along the way, she said, but staff have come around to the value of the website.
“I do advocate for a robust website,” she said, “but I also grew up in print journalism. I’m a skeptic through and through and that includes being a skeptic of new ideas.”
Cassidy spent time as a girl at the MetroWest Daily News in Framingham, Massachusetts, where her father Gene Cassidy was an editor and where she got her first bylines as a sports correspondent. She reported and edited for the The Molokai Dispatch in Kaunakakai, Hawaii, the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald before getting hired at the Valley News.
Becoming the newspaper’s editor was not something she was thinking about just a year ago, Cassidy said.
“I think that speaks to the mindset that young women have to overcome,” she said.
“It’s not something that…I naturally thought of as the next step, then I did start thinking about it. I realized there is no reason not to think of myself as somebody who can take this on,” she added.
McClory said it was not so much Cassidy’s work on the newspaper’s digital offerings that won him over, but rather her ideas for the newspaper and interactions with colleagues.
“She’s very collaborative and that’s exactly what we need,” he said.
Frank, who will be stepping aside next month and retiring in January, credited Cassidy with teaching colleagues to use social media, introducing videos and podcasts to the website, starting a blog called the UV Index, and starting to break more stories online.
“She was very quick to acquaint herself with best practices and help us figure out how to practice journalism in the digital age in a way that allows us to remain true to our core values, which is much more challenging than I ever thought it would be,” he said.
As with newspapers across the world, the shift of advertisers from print to online, where ads cost a fraction of the price, has been felt at the Valley News, which has a daily circulation of more than 16,000 readers in four dozen towns in the Upper Valley.
The economic issues were only compounded by a tariff on newsprint resulting from President Donald Trump’s trade policies.
“In that regard,” McClory wrote in a letter to readers earlier this year, “it’s not surprising that I’m often asked how the Valley News is doing. Some people pose the question in the starkest terms: Is the Valley News going to make it?”
The answer, according to McClory in that letter, was “a resounding yes,” because what it’s offering is still in demand and because it’s making tough decisions now that will increase the chances of long-term viability.
McClory announced in June that the Valley News would shift its printing from West Lebanon to a new press in Concord, shared with the Concord Monitor. And it laid off three employees as a result of outsourcing its advertising design process.
Frank said the newsroom has also downsized as a result of the new economic reality. “It’s definitely been felt — perhaps less so than at others newspapers, but there’s no doubt that we have a smaller staff now than we did two to three years ago,” he said.
He attributed the relatively light impact on the newsroom to the continued loyalty of readers and to the Newspapers of New England, the company that purchased the paper in 1981.
Cassidy said that she plans to continue to build the website and innovate elsewhere, but didn’t think major changes were in order. The biggest change in the next year would be altering the size of the print edition with the new press, and making sure readers are comfortable with it.
“I don’t have any magic ball or wild flashy plans about changing the kind of journalism we do except to continue building on it and my role is sort of elbowing out space to allow that to continue to happen as the environment changes,” she said.
What has she learned from working under Frank? “What have I not learned from Marty Frank?” she said.
“He’s just a thoughtful person, he’s a compassionate person, and that goes for his colleagues and the people we write about,” she said. “To be a good journalist you have to try to be a good person.”
