The Hudson Reporter moved its main office last week to 447 Broadway in Bayonne after 33 years in Hoboken. The move has been met with excitement by owners and staff.
The company owns eight weekly newspapers and three local lifestyle magazines. The papers cover news and features in Bayonne (the Bayonne Community News), Hoboken, Jersey City, North Bergen, Weehawken, Secaucus, West New York, Union City, and Guttenberg. The lifestyle magazines cover Bayonne (Bayonne: Life on the Peninsula), Hoboken (07030), and Jersey City (Jersey City Magazine).
Just as the group was moving last week, its staff learned it had won a slew of awards for investigative reporting, advertising, and graphics in two statewide competitions.
Space
There were a few reasons for the group to move. For one, the old office – a large, historic bank building in uptown Hoboken – was not being fully used.
“It was the perfect size before, but technology now allows us to do more with less,” said Reporter co-owner Lucha Malato.
For example, a large darkroom has been unused since the staff got digital cameras around the turn of the millennium.
The newspaper group had a small satellite office in Bayonne for years. That office has been closed and staff has moved into the new, consolidated office at 447 Broadway.
Changes
The Reporter was born in Hoboken and grew into the organization it is today while its headquarters were on Washington Street.
Dave Unger said, “We love Hoboken. We’ve had a great relationship with the community and we look forward to continue growing that relationship. And we’re thankful for the friendships made and experiences had.”
Despite the co-publishers’ hometown pride, a change of scenery can be beneficial for a company. “Different is sometimes good,” Unger said. “The move is providing a lot of energy and people are excited about the change.”
Bayonne is a new frontier, development wise, with numerous luxury developments planned for the waterfront and elsewhere in town. The light rail train through Hudson County makes four stops in Bayonne, including one just three blocks from the Reporter’s new office.
Unger said that Bayonne residents have an “old fashioned” relationship with the Bayonne Community News, in which they walk into the office off the street to pitch a story or drop off a press release.
The Hudson Reporter’s headquarters moved to 1400 Washington St. in Hoboken in 1995 from a smaller office in a basement across the street. Before that, the company was in an even smaller building downtown in 1983.
The company was originally started by Hoboken-based developer Joseph Barry, who sold it to Malato and Unger in 1999.
Besides the new Broadway office, the company also maintains a distribution facility in North Bergen.
Easily accessible
Kate Rounds, editor of the Bayonne Community News and Bayonne: Life on the Peninsula, said, “Bayonne is a great news town. There is so much going on here, new development, a new influx of residents, and a burgeoning arts scene.”
Rounds noted that she enjoys a commute of only nine minutes on the light rail each morning.
The reporters and editors noted that exploring new terrain has gotten their creative juices flowing and they’ve added a slew of story ideas to work on in every town.
“A look at the awards we just won shows the diversity of what we cover in Hudson County,” said editor Caren Matzner. (Watch for a story on the awards in coming weeks.)
In the beginning
The company’s original name in 1983 was The Hudson Reporter and its first newspaper was The Hoboken Reporter. The organization later bought a chain of local newspapers and consolidated them into a coordinated weekly paper group that still maintains the largest print circulation in Hudson County.
In 2004, the group bought the Bayonne Community News. Unger and Malato kept the well-known community brand and expanded its editorial content with original locally focused editorial content stories instead of the collection of press releases that made up the old newspaper.
“We’re really proud of what we’ve done at the Hudson Reporter,” said Unger, “and look forward to continuing our commitment to getting good news to people of Hudson County.”
Read the stories online, including breaking news, at hudsonreporter.com. The company’s phone number is still (201) 798-7800. The company’s email addresses are listed on the letters page. The new address is 447 Broadway, Bayonne, New Jersey, 07002.
Rory Pasquariello can be reached at roryp@hudsonreporter.com.