Sun, The
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News Org
Newspaper
The Lowell Sun is a daily newspaper published in Lowell, Massachusetts. Its sports desk once employed as a reporter, Jack Kerouac, who later gained considerable fame as a Beat novelist and poet.
In 2012 its circulation reached around 43,000 copies. Since 1997 it has been owned by MediaNews Group of Colorado, itself owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.
The Sun’s editorial stance is conservative in an otherwise Democratic city. The paper’s colorful history includes its former editor Clement Costello, who wore a cape and wrote that the U.S. should annex Mexico. The Sun raised eyebrows when it endorsed George W. Bush for President over Democratic candidate John Kerry.
The Sun is the smallest paper to win an Overseas Press Club Award for its coverage of divided refugee families from Cambodia living in Lowell and Thailand.
In 1878, two brothers, print shop owners John and Daniel Harrington, founded the paper as a weekly. The Sun provided a voice for Irish Catholics, a minority in a city run by wealthy Protestant factory owners. It outlasted its competitors to become Lowell’s only major newspaper. It expanded to a daily in 1892 and, in 1942, bought out its last competitor, The Courier-Citizen. In 1952, when the Sun bought out its only Sunday competition, they added The Lowell Sunday Telegram edition.
In 1957, MediaNews Group purchased The Sun, from John Harrington’s descendants, the Costello family. At that time daily circulation reached 52,234 daily papers and 55,804 Sunday editions. The paper had been under family ownership for 119 years.
MediaNews CEO William Dean Singleton credits the Sun with a rebirth of the downtown area and the arrival of hockey and minor-league baseball teams.
MediaNews subsequently purchased Nashoba publications, weeklies covering the Lowell-Fitchburg area. In 2002 MediaNews consolidated printing for the Sun, Nashoba, the Fitchburg-based Sentinel & Enterprise at a new $7 million printing plant in Devens, Mass.
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