By Edward Munster
(August 22, 2025) — The Haddam Civic League, which publishes Haddam Killingworth News, met on August 14, 2025 to elect new members to its Board of Managers. At this meeting, I announced my retirement from the paper. Two new members, Janice Sina and Joanne Nesti, joined the Board. Re-elected to the Management group are Samuel Crum, who was chosen as President of HCL; William Bowles was selected to remain as Secretary. Other returning members are Stew Gillmor, Craig Salonia and Wayne Rutty. I am also pleased to announce that Carl Cavrell has taken the position of Advertising Manager for the newspaper.
I have been the President of HCL from its incorporation, and now, with the addition of new members to the Board of Managers and Sam Crum as President, I expect that their fresh ideas will result in an even better newspaper, with more volunteers writing even more articles about all the things happening in our towns.
The paper and the people involved with it have evolved over the years. We started out as a completely volunteer organization. We now have begun to pay for some of the services needed to produce the paper. That and the increasing cost of postage have been offset by donations from our readers, which are always greatly appreciated. In June of 2020 HCL was granted designation as an IRS 501(c)(3) organization, which means that donations to HCL to support the paper are tax-deductible. Donations can be sent to HCL at P.O. Box 15, Higganum, CT 06441.
The history of the paper goes back more than a decade. In April 2014 three people met around a dining room table with the goal of starting a newspaper in Haddam because there was no reliable source of information about what was happening in our town. We came to the realization that it would be too expensive to have a printed newspaper and that an online paper would be the way to go. We knew that we would need to pay for the creation of a website and felt we should have liability insurance for such an enterprise.
To fund this newspaper, we recruited twenty-five Haddam residents of different political stripes willing to put up $250 each to get the seed money. This group of people formed the Haddam Civic League, LLC (HCL), which publishes the online paper. We had to solicit advertisers willing to buy ads in this online paper so that there would be a source of long-range funding, and the online paper HaddamNow.com kicked off with an all-volunteer staff.
This went well, but in less than two years, people in town started asking that we produce a print version of the paper. It was decided that the printed paper should be published weekly and mailed free to every resident of Haddam. Because this would be quite expensive compared to the online paper, we needed a lot more advertising. This was achieved and the first edition of Haddam News was printed in November 2016. Because we share the same printer as East Haddam News our paper is mailed to and read by residents of both towns.
Because Haddam and Killingworth are both part of Regional School District 17 and because we share recreational authorities, HK Youth and Family Services, and have fire and ambulance groups that are cooperative, we began speaking with people in Killingworth about expanding the paper to include their town. On September 5, 2019 we published the first copy of Haddam Killingworth News and this paper is now sent to every resident of all three towns: Haddam, East Haddam and Killingworth.
With the addition of Killingworth we have a circulation of 12,000. Both towns use Haddam Killingworth News as their paper of record, which means that their legal notices are published in our community paper, which has full circulation in both towns compared to the larger papers such as the Hartford Courant and the New Haven Register which have very few subscribers in our towns.
Our success is the direct result of numerous gifted, hard-working and dedicated volunteers who give their energy, time and resources to the on-line and print versions of the paper. We are always looking to print articles relating to community events and activities – after all, this is your news source for your community. It is critical to attract more volunteers to write for the paper. To get involved, please contact our editors at HK-NowEditors@Outlook.com.
Photo by Pam Crum
