Times Herald-Record

Daily newspaper published in Middletown, NY, USA

The Times Herald Record, often referred to as The Record or Middletown Record in its coverage area, is a daily newspaper published in Middletown, New York, covering the northwest suburbs of New York City. It covers Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties in New York. It was published in a tabloid format until March 1, 2022, when it began being published like most other newspapers, in a broadsheet format. The newspaper left its long time main office in Middletown in 2021 and moved into a small office nearby in the Town of Wallkill. The newsroom had 120 full time equivalent employees in the 1990s, but as of July 2023 it had one news reporter and one sports reporter. It came into being in the late 1950s when Middletown's two papers merged. It is owned by Gannett.

A newspaper has been in existence in some form in the city of Middletown since 1851. The Times Herald was the result of a 1927 merger of the Times Press, a merger of the old Middletown (Whig) Press of the 1850s and the Daily Times, founded in 1891, and the Daily Herald, founded in 1918, but also going back to the 1850s. The Times Herald had the Middletown market to itself from 1927 until 1956, when Jacob M. Kaplan started publishing the Middletown Daily Record, the first daily U. S. newspaper to use cold type, from a garage on North Street. The new paper grew to a daily circulation of 19,000 within three years but lost a lot of money in the process. In November 1959, James H. Ottaway Sr., the founder of Ottaway Newspapers Inc., bought the Times Herald and the Port Jervis Union Gazette from Ralph Ingersoll, who had owned the papers since 1951. The Gazette, serving Port Jervis and surrounding communities, still exists as a weekly newspaper published by the Times Herald Record. A few months later, in April 1960, Kaplan sold his Daily Record to Ottaway. GateHouse in turn filed prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 27, 2013, to restructure its debt obligations in order to accommodate the acquisition. In February 2024, the newspaper announced it will switch from carrier to postal delivery.

Avrom "Al" Romm (1926–1999), named city editor of the Daily Record in 1957, became the Times Herald Record first managing editor after the merge in 1960, a position he held until he was named editorial page editor in 1976. His youngest son is climate expert Joseph J. Romm. Malcolm Browne, who later won the Pulitzer Prize covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press. He was a concentration camp survivor who became a photojournalist. Before and during his stint at the Record, he photographed Picasso, Marilyn Monroe, Tennessee Williams, and Ben Hecht, among others. In 1966, he went to Vietnam to take pictures of hometown soldiers in the war zone. In addition to his photojournalism assignments, he was a patient teacher but hard taskmaster. After retiring, he and his wife returned to her native France and lived in Paris, but came back to Middletown where they lived until his death in 2005. Glenn Doty, one of the paper's former managing editors, later trained hundreds of student journalists at The Legislative Gazette, a student run newspaper covering state government in Albany operated jointly by SUNY campuses at New Paltz and Albany. Hunter S. Thompson, the future creator of gonzo journalism was fired by Editor A. N. Romm after "kicking open the office candy machine with his bare feet again." The Mike Levine Journalism Education Fund was founded after his death, and sponsors an annual training for aspiring writers at The Mike Levine Workshop. The workshop is led each year by prominent writers. In addition, an annual Mike Levine Column Read a Thon is held which raises money for the Education Fund. Levine is the first writer in the history of The Record for whom every article he had written is available online by archive A clip of Levine addressing his community is on YouTube. Mark Pittman (1957–2009), former Metro Editor until 1997 when he left to work for Bloomberg News to break international headlines as a reporter who called the financial crisis of 2007. Glenn Ritt, former city editor in the late 1970s who went on to become editor of the Bergen Record.