Martha's Vineyard Times

About Martha's Vineyard Times

The Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly community newspaper published in Vineyard Haven on Martha's Vineyard, an island seven miles off the coast of southeastern Massachusetts. Founded in the spring of 1984, the tabloid-format paper serves the island's six towns — a year-round population of about 21,000 that swells to an estimated 100,000 in the summer season — with a weekly circulation of about 5,000 copies delivered by mail and at retail locations across the Vineyard on Thursdays. It is one of two weekly newspapers published on the island, its longstanding competitor being the Vineyard Gazette. The paper is owned by Steve Bernier and is headquartered at 30 Beach Road in Vineyard Haven.

History and founding

The Martha's Vineyard Times was founded in the spring of 1984 by five Islanders — Al Brickman, Robert Carroll, Fred Ferro, Allen Jones and Edward Redstone — in the midst of great change on the island. Between 1970 and 1980 alone the Vineyard's population grew by 45 percent, and personal per-capita income rose more than sixfold between 1970 and 2020, as tourism and second-home ownership steadily displaced the island's rural way of life. Writing in the Times' obituary for Robert "Bob" Carroll, one of the five founders, retired editor Doug Cabral recalled that the founders believed the Vineyard needed a newspaper that would take an aggressive interest in the year-round residents and the year-round economy of the island, both of which they felt were under-represented in existing coverage. The new paper was thus launched as a direct counterpoint to the editorial convictions of the venerable Vineyard Gazette, which under the Hough and Reston families had become deeply committed to conservation and the preservation of the Vineyard's bucolic past.

The five founders

The founders were all established island residents and business figures rather than professional journalists. Al Brickman, Robert Carroll, Fred Ferro, Allen Jones and Edward Redstone put up the money and the nerve to start a second weekly in a small island market that had long supported only one. Their wager was that a growing, diversifying and increasingly year-round community could sustain a paper that covered growth, development, jobs and the year-round economy with the same energy the Gazette devoted to preservation. For several of the founders the Times was as much a civic statement as a business venture, an attempt to give voice to Islanders who felt the island's conversation about its future was being dominated by conservation-minded seasonal voices.

Early struggles and the Cabral purchase

The challenges of publishing a comprehensive and responsible community newspaper in a competitive market proved daunting to the founders, and in 1991 they sold the Martha's Vineyard Times to their editor, Doug Cabral, and his wife Molly. Cabral had been the paper's editor from its early days, and his purchase marked the beginning of a long personal stewardship. The early years were sometimes abrasive and unpopular, as the paper balanced conflicting pressures amid the inevitability of community change, and the Times represented an unanticipated disruption within the previously closed media ecosystem of Martha's Vineyard. But under Cabral the paper survived and established itself as a durable island institution.

The free-distribution switch

A critical strategic decision in the paper's development was the conversion of the Times from a paid-circulation broadsheet, like the Vineyard Gazette, to a free, mailed, tabloid-size newspaper. By removing the subscription paywall entirely and mailing the paper free to island households, the Times dramatically expanded its reach and repositioned itself as the paper of the whole island rather than of a self-selecting readership. The move gave advertisers a genuinely island-wide audience and gave the paper a distribution base that underwrote decades of subsequent growth, including its eventual digital expansion.

The Oberfest years

After the Cabral era, the paper passed into the hands of Peter and Barbara Oberfest, who owned it through the Martha's Vineyard Times Corporation Inc., with Peter Oberfest serving as publisher and Doug Cabral continuing as editor. Under the Oberfests the paper consolidated its standing as the island's largest news operation in print terms: a free weekly with a circulation of about 5,000, supported by a newsroom whose earlier bylines included managing editor of news Nelson Sigelman, sports editor Don Lyons and copy editor Whit Griswold. The paper's content was organized into sections spanning News, Opinion, On Island, Classified, Real Estate, The Calendar, Activities, Eat & Drink, Come & Stay, Shopping, Services, Home & Garden and Weddings — a structure built around the rhythms of an island community that is at once a working town and a vacation destination.

Sale to Steve Bernier

In a change of ownership that drew notice in media circles, longtime publishers and owners Peter and Barbara Oberfest sold the island news organization to Steve Bernier, a West Tisbury resident and longtime owner of Cronig's Market, the island's well-known grocery chain. The acting publisher became Charles Sennott, a highly decorated journalist and the founder and editor of the GroundTruth Project, who had also helped launch Report for America. The combination of a local grocer-owner and a nationally recognized journalism leader as publisher signaled an attempt to keep the paper locally rooted while professionalizing its journalism for a digital era.

The Gazette rivalry

For four decades the defining relationship in island journalism has been the rivalry between the Times and the Vineyard Gazette, founded in 1846. The Gazette, which Henry Hough built into a celebrated weekly and which James Reston of the New York Times bought in 1968, was named Newspaper of the Year eight times by the New England Press Association and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Reporting for its coverage of 1991's Hurricane Bob. The five business owners who founded the Times in 1984 did so, as the Gazette's own history notes, precisely because they felt the Reston-era paper's editorial stance against development left a gap. The two papers have since spent decades competing for readers, advertisers and scoops, a rivalry that has arguably made island journalism sharper than either paper would be alone.

Print edition

The Times' print newspaper, with a weekly circulation of about 5,000 as of 2023, is delivered by mail and at retail locations across the Vineyard on Thursdays. The tabloid is produced from the paper's headquarters at 30 Beach Road, Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts 02568, and carries the ISSN 8750-1449. In an era when most community weeklies have cut frequency or closed, the paper's free-distribution model — underwritten by island advertisers reaching both the year-round community and the summer influx — has kept a print edition in island mailboxes every week.

"The Minute" newsletter

Alongside the print edition, the paper publishes a five-day-a-week email newsletter called "The Minute," which counts approximately 11,000 subscribers — more than twice the print circulation, and a meaningful share of the island's year-round population. The newsletter delivers the day's island headlines directly to inboxes on weekday mornings, serving year-round residents, seasonal homeowners and Vineyard-watchers on the mainland who want to keep up with town meetings, ferry news, real estate and the island's often-dramatic local politics.

Digital presence and sister publications

The paper's website, mvtimes.com, attracts more than 3.5 million unique visitors annually, a remarkable figure for a weekly serving an island of 21,000 year-round residents, and a reflection of the Vineyard's national profile as a vacation destination for presidents, celebrities and second-home owners. For both print and web, the Times also publishes a family of specialty publications: Edible Vineyard, Vineyard Visitor, Martha's Vineyard Arts & Ideas, Voices, and Vineyard Property Values. Together these titles cover the island's food scene, visitor economy, cultural life and real-estate market — the pillars of the modern Vineyard economy that the founders wanted the paper to take seriously from the start.

Coverage area and community

The Times covers all six of the island's towns — Vineyard Haven (Tisbury), Oak Bluffs, Edgartown, West Tisbury, Chilmark and Aquinnah — along with the surrounding waters and the mainland gateways of Woods Hole and New Bedford that connect the island to the rest of Massachusetts. Its reporting spans town government, the Martha's Vineyard Commission, schools, the Steamship Authority ferries, land use and development, the fishing and farming economy, arts and culture, sports and obituaries. For a paper born of the conviction that year-round Islanders and the year-round economy deserved aggressive coverage, the Times has grown into the island's paper of record for daily civic life. Its official website is mvtimes.com.