What We Are

Online newspapers, like the Hamden Daily News, are the newest wave in independent journalism. We are bringing back old-fashioned, often termed "hyper-local," reporting via a new technology.

Remember when your community newspaper was actually owned by a local person or family who cared? When there was backyard reporting? When the mission was providing readers with real news with passion and depth, instead of putting profits before all else?

Well, folks, sadly those days are but mere memories. Today, a handful of major media corporations has swallowed up most of the country's newspapers and TV and radio stations. What they're dishing out is skimpy, cookie-cutter reports. No longer can independents start their own hard-copy newspapers because they can't compete with the media goliaths when it comes to raking in advertising revenue.

But we haven't hung up our reporter's cap. We're way too tenacious. Instead, we've taken to the Internet. That's what the Hamden Daily News is all about - providing the community with news they care about, profiles of their neighbors, information about what's going on around town and inside Town Hall, by someone who lives here. That'd be me, Sharon Bass.

I have been a reporter and editor for over 20 years. I got my start in New Haven, Conn., where I wrote for the Sunday section of The New York Times, was editor of the defunct Business Digest and freelanced for many of the area's newspapers and magazines. I left in 1993 for western Massachusetts, where I landed a job as editor of an arts and news weekly. A few years later, Maine Times, one of the country's first alternative newspapers (then based in Portland, Maine), came a knockin' with an offer I couldn't refuse. As deputy editor of that groundbreaking paper, I covered health care, politics and education.

That paper went bankrupt, and I eventually became editor of Casco Bay Weekly, an alternative weekly in Portland, Maine. After that independently owned paper went belly-up, I started my own community paper, backed by a Maine businessman, which I named the Windham Independent.

Now I'm back, bringing with me my love for community reporting. The Hamden Daily News is for you. Let us know what you think, give us your ideas and most of all …

Happy reading!

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