Extra! Vineyard Gazette Sold

Continuously published for 164 years under just 10 publishers, the Vineyard Gazette was sold after today's edition by Dick Reston to Jerry Kohlberg.  Kohlberg is the retired founder of the leveraged buyout firm, Kohlberg Kravis and Roberts, or KKR.

Below are excerpts from Reston's final editorial:

"From the early 1970s to the present, the Vineyard moved from a sleepy Island community sometimes referred to as a civil wilderness to a great resort that today commands attention from across the nation and the world. The Island now draws countless thousands to her never-ending shoreline. They come as ordinary folk from the main streets of America and as power brokers from Wall Street and as presidents from the White House. But they all arrive on Martha’s Vineyard in search of the same thing: the solitude and beauty of the Island, the special sanctuary the Vineyard offers as a quiet refuge far from the clatter of the mainland.

"It is this transformative period in Island history that explains the fierce political battles, legal clashes, the social upheaval and the great debates about proper levels of development that have raged for more than three decades on the Vineyard. The Vineyard Gazette, more often than not during these years, landed at the center of the political and social collisions.

"And while perhaps not always understood, there was but one editorial message from this newspaper, one that has stood for the past thirty-five years, a position first set forth in the early decades before me under the direction of Henry Beetle Hough, the revered old country editor of the Gazette, and continued from 1968 to 1975 by my father, James (Scotty) Reston.

"The case for the Vineyard, as argued by the Gazette, was that the Island had the right to determine its own future, the right to define a plan for thoughtful and orderly growth. At stake was the preservation of the character of the Vineyard and the quality of Island life for her citizens. And so the Gazette through those sometimes tumultuous years often stood against those who pressed for unbridled development, against outside interests that appeared more interested in making money than in preserving the special character of Martha’s Vineyard. It is after all that character that makes the Island a special place and sets it apart from so many other communities now overdeveloped and long forgotten."