BaytoBay News (Dover’s Delaware State News) is expanding coverage to New Castle County.
Of late, the website has a sprinkling of staff-written stories north of the C&D Canal. Recent stories have included Wilmington flood victims seeking relief and action by the New Castle County Council.
It marks a change for the Independent Newsmedia USA flagship paper that focused on central and, to some extent, southern Delaware.
BaytoBay comes with a subscriber paywall and a few stories available free of charge. The site combines posts from Independent’s newspaper/websites in Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
Last year, the site was launched and mirrored similar sites at its holdings in a small portion of Florida and Arizona.
Independent has a new president, Charlene Bisson, who rose through the ranks at its Phoenix-area collection of community weeklies. She succeeds Ed Dulin.
The Smyth family was founded, independent. Later, Joe Smyth, son of the founder, moved to Arizona and launched the Phoenix-area operation that is now the largest within Independent.
Independent prides itself on being a tax-paying company owned by a nonprofit trust formed to ensure a chain owner does not come calling.
Families have been exiting the newspaper business over the decades, with succeeding generations of the founders losing interest in a business with shrinking profit margins.
Amy Cherry departs WDEL
Longtime radio reporter-editor Amy Cherry departed from WDEL last month.
Cherry is now working in a communications position at the University of Delaware College of Health Sciences in Newark.
Cherry spent 12 years at WDEL and won a number of awards for her reporting.
WDEL, under new upstate Pennsylvania owner Forever Media, has been paring down its once large (by radio standards) news staff.
As jobs dwindled, many print and electronic reporters have been able to land communications slots at UD and the state government.
Cherry says her departure was not related to any job cuts at Forever.
Forney no longer Barefootin’ in Sussex
Former Cape Gazette co-owner Dennis Forney has written his last Barefootin’ column in the Cape Gazette. Owners Forney and Trish Vernon sold the paper to co-publisher Chris Rausch and kept the paper out of the chain gang (Gannett, Alden, etc.).
Forney is now writing some pieces for The Spy, a digital site in Chestertown, MD. Forney grew up in that area.
The Spy was founded after the Kent County News and parent Chesapeake Publishing was bought out by a Texas-based chain and later by a Minnesota-based newspaper group.
The Spy was the original name of Kent County’s original newspaper, which was first printed in the 1790s.
