The Port Perry (ON) Star has been sold to Metroland Publishing. The sale was effective July 21, 2004.
Metroland had been publishing Port Perry This Week, twice a week in the same area. With the sale, Metroland will publish one newspaper twice weekly under the Star name.
ÔÇ£The Star has been publishing since 1866 as an independent under a number of different publishers, so we have gone with the age-old community name,ÔÇØ said editor-in-chief Joanne Burghardt.
Readers will also notice a few changes to the paper, which had a total redesign that went into effect this week. ÔÇ£It married up a lot of the features from both papers,ÔÇØ noted Burghardt.
ÔÇ£We have two great teams. The Star and This Week have each won numerous awards, and we are bringing the best of both products together,ÔÇØ said Burghardt.
ÔÇ£ItÔÇÖs going to be a Port Perry newspaper with a lot of regional content, because we have the advantage of going from having two full-time editorial people to drawing on the thirty editorial people that we have in the Durham region, which gives us a lot more flexibility,ÔÇØ said Burghardt.
Additionally, the paper is upgrading its technology to Mac OS X and changing its layout software from QuarkXpress to Adobe InDesign.
This makes it the first paper in the Durham region to make these switches, although all Metroland papers in the region will make the switch by September.
Also, all the reporters are switching to laptops so that they can write articles on the road.
ÔÇ£Plus, we wonÔÇÖt have a problem the next time there is a major blackout, because they all have batteries,ÔÇØ said Burghardt.