Coverage of community news in Boston has taken a double hit. First, Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell, the new owner of Community Newspaper Company (CNC), dumped nearly all of the news columns from the Boston Tab last month, converting the free weekly into an arts-and-entertainment guide. Then, last week, the Beacon Hill/Back Bay Chronicle announced it was packing it in after more than six years of publication.

According to Greg Reibman, editor-in-chief of CNC's Metro Unit, the Boston Tab has long suffered from an " identity crisis. " As papers such as the Newton Tab and the Allston-Brighton Tab have evolved into more traditional community weeklies, he says, the Boston paper has come to be seen as lacking a mission.

Mindy Campbell, who had edited the Boston and Allston-Brighton papers, resigned when the downsizing was announced. She declined to comment. The Boston Tab's two reporters have been reassigned within CNC. Reibman says the Boston Tab may rise again " once we've resolved some of our other priorities. "

Despite the Boston Tab's problems, it did provide nitty-gritty coverage of City Hall of the sort that the Globe and the Herald typically eschew. It also did a good job of covering the journalistically underserved Fenway neighborhood. Says Carl Koechlin, executive director of the Fenway Community Development Corporation: " I think it's a big loss. "

CNC is a chain of more than 100 papers. By contrast, Toni Norton has been on her own since launching the Beacon Hill/Back Bay Chronicle. Now 64, Norton says she's shutting down the free biweekly in order to spend more time traveling, gardening, and taking care of her grandchildren.

Calling herself a " hot-head, civic-activist, left-wing troublemaker, " Norton is most proud of her paper's reporting on efforts to renovate City Hall Plaza (which she says helped quash plans for a private hotel) and to save part of the historic Charles Street Jail from Mass General Hospital's wrecking ball.

" I am passionately committed to the Hill, " says Norton. Of her now-defunct paper, she adds, " I obviously have not made a penny on it. But that does not matter to me. "

Issue Date: April 5 - 12, 2001