Since 1792, this newspaper has gone by more than a dozen names. Among them: Greenfield Gazette, The Greenfield Recorder, The Greenfield Daily Recorder, Greenfield Recorder-Gazette, Greenfield Recorder, Gazette and Courier, Greenfield Recorder, and for the last generation or so, just plain The Recorder. There have also been a Traveller, a Herald, a Mercury, and of course, the original weekly: The Impartial Intelligencer.
The current name has always sounded flat to me, and unmoored, lacking any solid sense of place. The nameplate has always seemed divorced from the Franklin County region we all call home and cover.
So, in this, our 225th anniversary year, we’ve decided to return to our roots, by restoring Greenfield to our nameplate. Since the time of our country’s founding, from our base in the center of the county, our reporters have spread out across the region to tell the story of Franklin County — from Monroe Bridge to Orange and its North Quabbin neighbors. Today we have reporters dedicated to covering the compass points of our county, north, south, east and west of Greenfield and Montague.
The people of the county have never really stopped referring to us as the Greenfield Recorder, so this won’t be such a change.
As we contemplate how to improve the paper’s look and feel in this visual age, we’ve come up with a new nameplate we think is more graphically interesting, balanced and distinctive.
It won’t change what we do or how. We are and have always been telling Franklin County’s story to its residents. It’s why our banner notes we serve all the people of Franklin County and the North Quabbin. That’s our mission.