The Delaware Valley News will print its final edition this week after serving 10 New Jersey and Pennsylvania towns along the banks of the Delaware River for nearly 130 years, the mycentraljersey.com website has reported. The weekly newspaper's four staffers were notified of the shutdown on Monday as they continued to produce the paper's last issue, which is scheduled to hit newsstands Thursday.
Some details:
Joe Gioioso, publisher and president of NJN Publishing, said company officials decided it was time to fully pitch the weekly Hunterdon County Democrat, a sister publication based in Raritan Township, to readers of the Delaware Valley News in an effort to eliminate duplication of coverage and to offer stories from the entire county. "We'll still be covering those towns that we were covering in the DVN, so that's not going to change," Gioioso said.
Delaware Valley News Editor Deb Dawson said in a brief telephone interview that she lost her job yesterday after spending nine years with the company, most of them as a reporter for the Democrat. "They decided to close it," Dawson said of the paper she's led for the past year. "That's about all I know."
Jay Langley, executive editor of the Hunterdon County Democrat, declined to comment on the closure, as well as whether the shutdown was accompanied by staff reductions at his publication. "Anything I know will appear in Thursday's paper," Langley said, adding that subscribers of the Delaware Valley News are being notified through letters of the newspaper's final days.
The Delaware Valley News, established in 1879 and called the Frenchtown Star until it was sold to the Democrat in 1932, has a paid circulation of about 3,000, according to the New Jersey Press Association's citation of 2006 figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
