Since our founding in 1984, the Martha’s Vineyard Times has emerged as the Island’s most widely read news organization for year-round Islanders, long-term summer residents, and Vineyard visitors, with an average circulation of approximately 4,500 print editions each week and 20,000 digital subscribers who receive our daily newsletter, The Minute, in their inboxes every day.
Increasingly, the MV Times is a digital-first news organization offering daily and up-to-the-minute coverage for the community and a growing audience with impressive engagement metrics for our daily newsletter. The digital focus is important, but we also seek to serve the community with a newspaper that you can hold in your hands. We will continue to sell the paper at retail outlets and provide complimentary copies to assorted venues, including libraries, schools, the hospital and senior citizen centers.
We are deeply immersed in Vineyard life, and we dedicate considerable resources to cover our community broadly and deeply. We faithfully record the workings of municipal, country and state governments and we believe it is our job to hold them accountable. We also cover the arts and entertainment and keep our readers informed of the amazing array of events that are being held every day on the Island. This dedication to local coverage has earned the paper distinction with a myriad of awards, including the weekly/distinguished newspaper of the year from the New England Press Association.
The MV Times also publishes a strategically balanced portfolio of interest-focused products, print and web: Martha’s Vineyard Arts+Ideas Magazine (mvartsandideas.com), Vineyard Visitor (vineyardvisitor.com), and special print supplements for the annual Agricultural Fair and High School Graduation as well as holiday specials. Each provide texture and focus for particular interests among our readers and advertisers.
The MV Times has always sought to serve the year-round Islanders,and is proud of its original motto: “Real News for Real Islanders.” We have faithfully covered the importance of our Wampanoag community as the first Islanders and explored the proud history of Black heritage.
The MV Times has also embraced the changes in its year-round community and seeks to celebrate the increasing diversity of the Island including a surging community of Brazilian immigrants, who contribute greatly to the community, to our workforce and who represent approximately one-third of the students in our schools. To serve this community, the MV Times was the first to start a translation of all of our articles into Brazilian Portuguese and several other languages, including Spanish, to serve all readers.
Throughout our history, The Times has developed and continues to underwrite a number of important community initiatives. We developed The Bargain Box, a free classified service, matching Islanders with free or low-cost goods and services more than 25 years ago.
We publish the High School View, a weekly student newspaper, in our pages (making it one of a handful of high school publications in the U.S. that are circulated to the entire community). In the year ahead, we are expanding our efforts to work with the next generation of journalists on the Island.
We have a robust internship program and two reporter trainee positions for Islanders who want to work with us and tell the story of their community through both print and digital approaches.
We publish the monthly newsletter of the Island’s Councils on Aging, as well as lengthy town warrants and ballots, at no cost to the public. We have been the exclusive local sponsor and underwriter of each year’s Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee for more than 25 years. We also publish sponsor-supported special publications, such as the acclaimed “Voices on Racism.”
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The Martha’s Vineyard Times is an independently owned, weekly, community newspaper, published by The MV Times News Corp. on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.
We also sponsor or serve as media partners for events carefully selected for their broad Island benefit. Perhaps most ambitiously, we are the hosts and organizers of Islanders Write (islanderswrite.com), attracting several hundred attendees for a completely free two-day series of panels, roundtables, workshops, and exhibitions celebrating writers, publishers, readers, and teachers with deep ties to the Island, from all over the country. In 2025, we expanded Islanders’ Write to include a mid-winter workshop for Islanders in March, and we plan to publish selected works from the gathering.
All of our print and web products are published by the MV Times News Corporation. In 2024, as we marked our 40th anniversary, the paper was acquired by a new owner, Steve Bernier, the well-known and respected Islander who was the proprietor of Cronig’s Market. Steve worked in partnership with the previous owners Peter and Barbara Oberfest to sustain the paper and preserve its tradition of service to the community going into the future. Bernier joined forces with Island resident Charles Sennott, who serves as publisher of the MV Times. Sennott, a veteran journalist, is also the founder of The GroundTruth Project, a non-profit news organization, which is home to the national service journalism program Report for America that has supported 700 reporters in 300 newsrooms across America since its launch in 2008. Bernier and Sennott are both keenly aware of the financial challenges for local news in America but are equally aware of the importance of local news in a functioning democracy. Bernier and Sennott are dedicated to ensuring that the MV Times remains a healthy, innovative, and robust news organization that serves the whole Island.