My early journalism career was on New Hampshire's Seacoast working for Foster's Daily Democrat, a then 30,000 circulation newspaper -- which made it the second largest newspaper in the state, by the way. Initially I covered Hampton, N.H., a beach town that grows during the summer to a small city with the summer visitors. I then moved further north to Portsmouth, N.H. to cover the redevelopment of the former Pease Air Force Base, which the state was redeveloping into the Pease International Tradeport. (PIT? Hmmm)
Well, last week, the region got slammed with news that the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard was on the Defense Department's base closure list.
Most lawmakers made statements speaking about the importance of their local facility. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), a moderate, seemed to take the proposed closure of a Maine shipyard personally in the LAT, calling it "nothing short of stunning, devastating, and above all, outrageous. … It is a travesty and a strategic blunder of epic proportions."
Don't mince words, Olympia... What do you really think? She must have stumbled into the no-spin zone.
Photo is from Rich Beauchesne, a friend from New Hampshire who is a photojournalist at the Portsmouth Herald newspaper.And one aside: The paper doesn't use portsmouthherald.com, although they own it and you can eventually get to its main news site that way. Instead, the main news page is the horrible www.seacoastonline.com/news/. What do I know!?
Nice to see Rich's work.
Posted by: Doug Filaroski | 2005.05.18 at 18:46