The Eagle building is nested into the triangle where Eagle Street meets North Street just along the railroad tracks off the Common in Pittsfield, MA in the Berkshires. A flat-iron building with a brick facade and enormous windows, it embodies the grandeur and the muscle of this factory town and what made The Berkshire Eagle such a great and beloved newspaper, with roots dating back to 1789. The paper was always considered the town square where people came together to share ideas and build the community.
The Eagle building grabs your attention when you drive into Pittsfield, but it is no longer the home of the Berkshire Eagle. To get to the current newsroom, I drove around the corner and over to a converted mill building at 75 South Church Street that in a way echoes the dark period of the newsroom, when it fell into the hands of people not focused on informing the community, but on extracting as much profit as they could, without giving much of anything in return. The paper’s former owner, the venture capital firm Alden Global Capital left the paper half gutted. But this isn’t a story of the fall of a legendary local paper, but of its revival. It is a story about how sometimes the good guys win and why local ownership matters for news organizations that serve local communities.
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