Monmouth Message is Silenced

Since May 9, 1950, The Monmouth Message has dutifully served the Fort Monmouth community. On Wednesday, Dec. 15, the fifty-year-old newspaper was put to bed for the final time.

Mark J. Coyle, editor of The Monmouth Message, says that advertising revenue dwindled when the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure legislation drastically reduced the fort's population. "The advertisers followed the workforce south to Aberdeen Proving Ground," said Coyle in a statement posted on the newspaper's website. "And MC Pubs, Inc., which published The Monmouth Message for the last twenty years, could not afford to keep the paper going."

The Monmouth Message will, however, continue to publish its online edition, which can be viewed here.

Although The Monmouth Message celebrated its fiftieth anniversary this past year, it wasn't the first newspaper to serve the Fort Monmouth community. Dots and Dashes printed its first edition in October 1917, when the fort was still called Camp Alfred Vail. After Dots and Dashes folded in January 1919, The Signal Corps Message covered the fort from 1942-1946, followed by The Signaleer, which printed its final issue in 1946.