The Lakeville Journal Co. gains nonprofit status

The Lakeville Journal Co. is proud to announce that the IRS has granted us nonprofit status.

We thank you all in the community for supporting us during our transition away from traditional newspaper financing toward a new community-supported model. For two years it was your donations that helped us survive (along with a boost from the federal government in the form of pandemic funds).

The company also received substantial financial and organizational help from a local family, which wishes to remain anonymous, committed to The Lakeville Journal’s ability to survive and thrive (with ongoing community support). They have been instrumental in making this process possible.

Publisher and Editor in Chief Janet Manko said, “It’s critical for our democracy that local independent journalism survive, but what’s the best way to accomplish that? For us, we chose to go nonprofit, given the very generous support our readers offered for the past two years. If other local newspapers would like to know how we did it, we’re very willing to share that information with them.”

Now we move toward the end of the year with a new nonprofit foundation stepping in to take over from the investor group that has so staunchly supported and led our newspapers since 1995, when they purchased The Lakeville Journal and Millerton News from its previous owner, Robert Hatch.

William E. Little Jr., our longtime chairman, served as chairman during 20 of those years. He was part of the founding triumvirate of our over two decades as The Lakeville Journal Co. LLC, along with the late Whitney Ellsworth and Robert Estabrook. 

Little remains with the nonprofit Lakeville Journal Foundation on the board, as does longtime investor and owner Keith Johnson. 

Full biographies of our new foundation board members will be posted on our website at www.tricornernews.com. 

But we will offer here an abbreviated introduction to our new foundation — along with our profound thanks to you, our readers, for your continued interest in learning more about the community you live in. Civic engagement and civil discourse are essential in these difficult times; we hope to be part of encouraging them through our articles, editorials and letters to the editor.

As the year comes to an end, we will begin to seek financial support for the coming year. We thank you again for all you have done for us and with us, and we hope you will be partners with us on our journey into life as a 501(c)3 nonprofit.

A very brief introduction to all members of the new foundation board:

• The new chair of the Foundation board is Noreen Doyle, a Salisbury resident who retired here in 2019 after working in London in finance, including as Chair of the Board of Credit Suisse International and Chair of the British Bankers Association, from 1990 to 2019. Doyle has had a home in the Northwest Corner for decades and was a part-time resident before retiring to live here full time.

• Will Little has lived in Lakeville part time since 1983. He has now retired from his family’s business, George Little Management. He has been actively involved in Democratic politics and causes, and is particularly proud to have been included on Richard Nixon’s Enemies List. 

• Devereux Chatillon lives in Sharon and is an attorney specializing in media/journalism and intellectual property rights.

• Dave Colmar has lived in the Northwest Corner since 2010 and is a tech/marketing consultant and website designer.

• Dan Dwyer lives in Salisbury where he owns and operates Johnnycake Books. He has had a long career in public and civic affairs, having served on the boards of Salisbury Family Services, Northwest Connecticut Community Foundation, and Salisbury P&Z. 

• Keith Johnson is a resident of Sharon and has been an investor/executive committee member of The Lakeville Journal Co. LLC for more than a decade. He is a retired journalist who has been a writer/editor for publications including the New York Herald Tribune and Fortune magazine.

 • Jonathan Landman has lived in Cornwall full time since the start of the pandemic — and part time since the 1960s, when his parents first moved to the Yelping Hill community. An editor at Bloomberg Opinion, he was an editor and news executive at the New York Times for 26 years.

• Janet Manko, the longtime publisher and editor in chief of The Lakeville Journal Co., is now a member of the Foundation board as well. A resident of the Lime Rock section of Salisbury, she has worked at The Lakeville Journal since 1998 and has made it her mission for the company’s Lakeville Journal and Millerton News to survive at a time when hundreds of small newspapers are closing each year.

• Brian Ross lives in Sharon and has dedicated four decades of his life to investigative journalism reporting, most of them at NBC and ABC. He is now chief investigative correspondent for the Law and Crime Network.