The Weekly with a Heart •
66th Year of Community Service, serving Keene, Peterborough, and the Mo
Keene, NH
| Monday | 9am - 4pm |
| Tuesday | 9am - 4pm |
| Wednesday | 9am - 4pm |
| Thursday | 9am - 4pm |
| Friday | 9am - 4pm |
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Midway through 1958, Gabriel and Barbara Shakour started publishing a small paper known as The Keene Shopper in an 8x10 room with three desks. The room also happened to be in the basement of their home. Fifty years ago, the “Shopper” was a small publication, containing nothing but advertisements placed by small, local businesses in an effort to improve their profits and educate local consumers.
Fifty years later, you hold in your hands the natural evolution of that tiny advertising publication, a business that has grown up around it, and the hard work and dedication of three generations of employees, family, and local business owners. From that one basement room sprang a weekly community newspaper that’s had its own building since the early 1960s, has increased its circulation from 14,000 in 1958 to 42,000 in 2008, and has gone from three employees then to almost 20 employees now. What was (as recently as 20 years ago) painstakingly pasted together by hand is now created, laid out, and sent to the printer on computers. Today, we publish The Monadnock Shopper News, an evolution in the name brought about by the realization that to serve our readers best, we needed to provide them with news of immediate and local importance, not just the ads for products and services from local business owners.
Just about the only thing that hasn’t changed at this paper is its overriding mission, to support and serve local small businesses. Original publisher Gabriel Shakour was himself a small-business owner (many readers will remember the Keene Drive-In Theater), and knew full well the challenges and rewards inherent in doing business in our “tiny little corner of the world.” Since its inception the Shopper News’ mission has been to be helpful to local business, not adversarial, as a great deal of daily and national media can be. Second-generation Monadnock Shopper News publisher Mitchell Shakour says it best: “We’ve stayed true to helping small businesses in the community. The success of other businesses is our entire goal, and we will do whatever is legal and ethical in the service of that goal.”
“We don’t run negative ads,” he continues. “We want to keep this a family paper, based on the higher, common values that unite the members of this community: God, motherhood, and country.”
