Its horridly branded 'ZONE ONE' edition covers Garwood and other Central Union County towns, including its home-base in Clark. Cranford, Fanwood, Kenilworth, Mountainside, New Providence, Rahway, Roselle Park, Scotch Plains, Springfield, Union and Westfield round out the paper's awkward coverage area, which online is referred to as Southern Union County (check out your nearest map to see why that's geographically unsound at best).
The paper is owned by the Flemington Based NJN Publishing-
Penn Jersey Advance, Inc. It was established 1948, and nowadays focuses heavily on 'feature' stories. Its current mantra is: 'Find out about Clark, New Jersey's nightlife and restaurants, events, search for real estate, get local opinions.' It 'powers' (supplies headlines and links) nj.com like many of its local sister products like the Cranford Chronicle. According to the New Jersey Press Association it boasts 55,283 in circulation. It publishes on Wednesdays.
While it claims a strong Garwood presence, its list of headlines in the print and online editions rarely mentions the Industrial Center of Union County. Since Garwood 365 started publishing in 2009 the newspaper has rarely netted interesting tidbits or stories (unlike the Westfield Leader, the Clark-Garwood Patch, the Cranford Chronicle and the Garwood T.R.E.E.).
Is this paper a legit Garwood source for the borough?
Its not actually a newspaper in the true sense in that it reports the news on towns in its zone. Its more like a compilation of press releases and organizational events. Rare does the front page not have a photo of children or scouties.
ReplyDeleteIts premise appears to be to make the readers feel good and have them happy and pliable when they peruse the many advertisements among the press releases. Nothing wrong with this premise as the world is pretty heavy with many concerns and issues. There is nary a mention of those.
I still remember when it came out twice a week, Saturday and Wednesdays. The Saturday edition was just basically ads. I remember going over to the west end of westfield's south aveneu where it was being printed and getting a Saturday copy on Friday ahead of time to peruse the apts for rent or cars for sale. (Building is still there) A more recent program was in the advertisement section they had free ads for anyone selling items under $100. So many took advantage of that that the end of the paper would end up having 8 pages of free ads. They cancelled that program maybe because they weren't getting revenue from it as a guess, and it got out of hand. Not sure but long, long ago it may not have been called the "suburban news" but don't hold me to it. Maybe someone remembers that. It was always a weekly, and one time called itself the biweekly paper.