By 1812Blockhouse
The story of The Mansfield Times, which appeared suddenly last year amidst an avalanche of similar sites across the country, continues.
Don’t look for that story on the pages of that publication, however, or else you will be sorely disappointed.
What might be considered Richland County’s newest online news site has been largely dormant for the last several weeks, and its feature story shows a publication date of late September.
1812Blockhouse carried a story about The Mansfield Times back in August. In that post, entitled “The Times, They Are A-Changin’,” we talked about the new site, its owner Metric Media LLC, and that owner’s recent purchase of the print and online Mount Vernon News.
That purchase was also discussed in a Knox Pages story cited in our post.
Since that time, new developments have taken place and more stories have been written about the company, many of them taking the lead from this October 18, 2020 article by Davey Alba and Jack Nicas in the New Yotk Times:
As Local News Dies, a Pay-for-Play Network Rises in Its Place
A nationwide operation of 1,300 local sites publishes coverage that is ordered up by Republican groups and corporate P.R. firms. Brian Timpone’s network of local news outlets is mostly online, but it also prints newspapers in some towns. Credit…
The Columbus Dispatch followed in early November with the following piece looking at both Metric Media LLC and the Mount Vernon News. Writer Sheridan Hendrix noted that the print run of the News dropped from six days a week to two shortly after purchase:
New Mount Vernon News owners linked to conglomerate of pay-to-play Republican news sites
When the Mount Vernon News announced in August that it had been sold, it was a shock to the community. For 80 years, the Mount Vernon News was owned by the Culbertson family. And before that, two locally owned newspapers – the Democratic Banner and Republican News – covered Knox County’s seat alongside each other for nearly a century.
Since that time, the online sites in Ohio have remained largely stagnant. Further, the copyright notice on the bottom of the Mount Vernon News home page was changed at some point from Metric Media LLC to Mount Vernon News, LLC. In late December, the Mount Vernon News building downtown was transferred to the Knox County Land Bank.
And, as noted above, even the AI generated content on The Mansfield Times has remained unchanged for some time.
This could certainly all be coincidental. What is certain, however, is that as the new world in local media take shape over the next few years, things may change at a moment’s notice.
