The Advocate & BoxCar Media Form Alliance
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — Berkshire Advocate Inc., publishers of The Advocate and The South Advocate, have formed a cooperative venture with BoxCar Media, creators of iBerkshires.com to provide broad coverage of regional news, arts, entertainment and community information both online and in print.
Osmin Alvarez, president of BoxCar Media, and Ellen Joy Bernstein, publisher of The Advocate newsweeklies, announced their plans today. The two media organizations have been cooperating for almost a year and will formalize the relationship within the next week. In exchange for a minority investment, Berkshire Advocate Inc. will grant BoxCar Media the sole license to publish its news content online.
"Ozzie and I both feel strongly that a community is best served by locally owned media," explained Bernstein, "but it is very difficult for small media organizations to survive on their own today. The answer is for local media groups to join together to provide a full range of options to the community."
"We are hopeful that other locally owned media will join our network in the future," added Alvarez. "We are open to a variety of cooperative arrangements to enhance the level of interactive communication throughout our community."
A portion of the proceeds from the investment in the newspapers will be used to increase coverage in South and Central Berkshire County. Currently The Advocate, based in Williamstown and North Adams, includes four more pages a week than The South Advocate, based in Lenox and Lee. The new venture will allow the newspaper to hire an additional South County reporter and add four pages to The South Advocate. These pages will concentrate primarily on news of Lenox, Lee and Stockbridge.
Since the stories will be posted to iBerkshires.com, online coverage of South County will be greatly expanded, too.
Alvarez and Bernstein believe that by increasing the volume and depth of local news coverage for The South Advocate's key towns, readership will increase and more advertising support will follow. Both the newspapers and the websites are supported entirely by advertising revenues.
Plans are also being formulated to experiment with new features that may appear both online and in print. The goal is to make iBerkshires.com the premier information source for the community while The Advocate and The South Advocate will continue to provide quality journalism and analysis of key issues facing the region.
In addition to news articles, columns and feature stories, The Advocate's Arts and Community Calendars are posted online each week along with selected advertising sections. Special products such as The Advocate's Guides to the Northern and Southern Berkshires are also online at iBerkshires.com.
Alvarez, who grew up in North Adams, co-founded Publications Resource Group (PRG) — now MindBranch — in 1992. Last August, Alvarez stepped down as president and CEO of MindBranch to become chairman of that company's board and to launch BoxCar Media, a website development and multi-media production company.
The iBerkshires.com network was launched in November offering websites to each of the 32 cities and towns in the Berkshire community. The company is located at the Windsor Mill in North Adams and has a growing workforce of more than 15 people.
Bernstein purchased The Advocate and The South Advocate in 1992. Sixteen staff members and sales representatives form the core team.
The Advocate's main office is on the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art campus in North Adams. The South Advocate office is on located at 27 Church St. in Lenox. The newspaper also maintains a desk at TGL Photoworks, 4 Water St. in Williamstown. Approximately 20,500 copies of the newspapers are distributed at 600 locations throughout Berkshire and Bennington Counties, and, through this new alliance, on the web at iBerkshires.com.
