Gazette News Group received $890,000 in NY tax credits for 2025. Why are Saranac Lake, Lake Placid, and Tupper Lake residents still paying for access?
Gazette News Group — the Schenectady company that bought the Adirondack Daily Enterprise and Lake Placid News back in February — received more than $890,000 in tax credits for 2025 from a New York State program designed to help local media businesses keep and hire journalists.
The money comes from the state's Newspaper and Broadcast Media Jobs Program, the first journalism jobs tax credit passed by any state in the country. Governor Hochul said the program exists to "keep reporters on the beat, strengthen local coverage and ensure New Yorkers have the trusted information they need."
To qualify, an outlet has to be independently owned, based in New York, and either maintaining or growing its journalism staff — or, for print outlets, showing it lost at least 20% of its circulation or staff over the past five years.
The tax credit is public money — funded by New York taxpayers, including the residents of Saranac Lake, Lake Placid, and Tupper Lake whose towns this coverage is about. But the Enterprise, the Lake Placid News, and every other Gazette News Group publication remain behind a paywall. A resident whose tax dollars just helped fund the outlet's operations still has to pay a subscription to read what that outlet reports about their own village government, their own schools, their own town.
Gazette News Group's owner, John J. DeAugustine, said the funding would let the company "deepen our journalistic impact within the communities we currently serve, while strategically expanding our reach across the state." The company now owns eleven publications, including the three that cover our towns directly.
Nothing about the tax credit program requires an outlet to drop its paywall, and subscription revenue does fund real reporting. But it's a fair question for a taxpayer-funded program: should public money meant to "ensure New Yorkers have the trusted information they need" go toward outlets that then charge those same New Yorkers to access it? The program doesn't ask that question. Maybe it should.
Tri-Lakes Town Square doesn't take tax credits, doesn't have a paywall, and never will. When a woman was found dead in Jay this August, we reported it — free, immediately, no login required — before the Enterprise's coverage went up. That's not a boast. It's the actual difference between a model funded by reader subscriptions and public tax credits, and one funded by nothing but volunteer time and $10 a year.
The tax credit program runs through the end of 2027. Outlets have to reapply every year.