According to Jay Lucas, Newport, New Hampshire, around the middle of the century was the best place to grow up.
In one of her advertising movies about his relationship with his hometown, Lucas describes the event as ideal. We had what I would describe as a Main Street that resembled a Main Street in Norman Rockwell.
The local economy was still being supported by textile mills in the 1950s and 1960s. In Lucas’ nostalgic mind, downtown Newport was teeming with amiable merchants. Children played in the street. The neighbors watched out for one another. Lucas was on the honor roll and played football at the time. You can practically see him going to the homecoming dance while wearing his varsity jacket.
However, after a few decades, Newport has disappeared, its economy drained by the mill closures. Lucas, a venture investor who graduated from the local high school and went on to receive degrees from Yale and Harvard, recounted a depressing drive down the main drag with his wife.
When I looked at those same lovely storefronts, I noticed that some of them were boarded up, some were closed, and some were used shops. Lucas states in another video, “This is not the town I grew up in,” and I just responded.
This actual trip down memory lane serves as the backdrop for the Sunshine Initiative, an ambitious and vague initiative that Lucas and his wife started in 2018 in an attempt to reinvigorate Newport. They’ve posted inspirational pep talks and videos of Lucas atribbon cuttings, documenting their efforts many times.
When Lucas bought the local newspaper, the Eagle Times, from an out-of-state media conglomerate in 2022, it was the Sunshine Initiative’s most noticeable investment in Newport.
Lucas stated at the time, “Local news is everything, so I’m really excited about that.” We are all interested in local news.
However, the Eagle Times abruptly went black last month, just three years after the acquisition, when a large number of staff resigned. Local officials and subscribers were irritated by the paper’s closure. Following the collapse, employees have said that Lucas has frequently neglected to pay past-due payments and occasionally asked employees to postpone cashing their paychecks because of a shortage of funds.
All of a sudden, the Sunshine Initiative’s positive story was confronted by a different one: the local teenager who had made amends and made the decision to invest in his hometown seemed to have hurt the exact community he was trying to support.
A positive mindset
Following high school, Lucas enrolled in Yale’s business and law schools before moving on to Harvard. He accepted a position at Bain & Company, the private equity and consultancy firm that Mitt Romney had previously headed. Lucas entered politics like Romney and won the Republican nomination for governor in 1998, but Jeanne Shaheen defeated him in that race.
Following that, Lucas spent a few years in Florida before coming back to Portsmouth, where he is currently 70 years old and operates a venture capital firm that specializes in the health and beauty industry.
While Lucas seemed to have prospered, his small community has not. Newport, located in Sullivan County about 30 miles south of Hanover, has been further affected by the opioid crisis in addition to economic stagnation. Newport is well behind the statewide average on metrics such as the poverty rate and median income. More than twice as many children in its public schools come from homes who are impoverished enough to be eligible for free school lunches.
However, the Sunshine Initiative is more about the sensations Lucas frequently mentions from his Norman Rockwell experience than it is about numbers. According to the initiative’s website, it is dedicated to supporting small towns’ prosperity by promoting optimism and teamwork in the development of solutions. Lucas’s videos frequently discuss the effectiveness of kindness and positive energy in producing outcomes.
In a recent interview with NHPR, Lucas seized the chance to discuss a project that, in his opinion, best embodies the goals of the Initiative: organizing a record effort at sunflower bouquets.
The Sunshine Initiative’s objective is to create local feel-good stories, and on a Saturday morning in 2019, 339 individuals came to help construct the bouquets on the town common, helping Newport set the Guinness World Record.
A way to give back
A few years later, in 2022, Lucas founded Sunshine Communications, a for-profit company that expanded beyond social media motivational speeches and community gatherings to acquire the local newspaper, The Eagle Times, which was situated in nearby Claremont.
At the time, the paper was losing money, Lucas said.
“I wanted to make it break even, and that would be fantastic,” he remarked. Or, let’s say, nearly equal to break even. I saw it more as a means of giving back to the community, and I still do.
Lucas remembers cutting his own picture and high school football results out of the local newspaper in the 1960s because it was a great fit with his goal of bringing Newport back to its mid-century splendor. More recently, however, the Eagle Times had shifted its emphasis from local journalism to nationally syndicated stories.
The paper would once more concentrate almost entirely on local stories under Lucas. At first, the editorial staff embraced their new owner.
Katlyn Proctor, who worked for the daily in a variety of capacities in the ten years prior to Lucas’s tenure, stated, “We seem to be doing all right, and most papers seem to be struggling.” Thus, it was thrilling.
Proctor took over as general manager of Eagle Times in 2024. She claimed that after making monthly visits to the paper’s Claremont offices at first, Lucas started to visit the office less frequently. She claimed that he was mainly indifferent to the paper’s editorial and financial aspects, which was problematic.
According to Proctor, “a lot of dumb operational things happened that caused us to take a lot of hits.” We didn’t use our phones from November 2024 until April 2025. Furthermore, I was unable to convince them to resume their leadership role.
Proctor claimed that Lucas was the sole employee at the Eagle Times with access to the financial records of the publication and the ability to write checks.
According to her, when debts needed to be paid, they were just sent to Jay, who then died.
Subscribers experienced a halt in service when the Eagle Times fell behind on payments to the USPS, which delivered the publication. After it was resolved, another past-due bill caused the newspaper’s website to freeze on June 6. Email accounts for employees were also unavailable.
As they attempted to find out how to publish and deliver a newspaper, the team was informed that, as had happened before, there was not enough money in the paper’s bank account for staff to cash their paychecks.
Proctor claimed, “Jay asked me to hold them and not give them out at all.” (Proctor claims that the paper’s usage of direct transfers for wages was discontinued following an overdraft.)
That was the final straw for the Eagle Times crew. That afternoon, Proctor and all but one remaining employee the sole reporter walked out. The little newspaper that Lucas purchased to bring his childhood community together now lay in tatters.
We gave it our very best shot
Earlier this month, Lucas agreed to an interview to discuss the final months of the Eagle Times and his broader efforts to boost Newport. Like in his Sunshine videos, he was overwhelmingly upbeat and quick to praise his former employees.
I think it was a tale of two cities, Lucas told me. Where on the one hand, they did a really extraordinary job of content.
But he said the staff was unable to generate the revenues subscriptions and ad sales to make the paper financially viable. They just didn’t have the capability, he said.
In his version of events, Lucas said he was often notified last minute about unpaid bills, and would need to infuse more money into the paper. He was often traveling, he said, and would wire funds as soon as he could.
In total, Lucas said he invested approximately $500,000 in the purchase and daily operations at the Eagle Times over a three year period.
According to Proctor, the New Hampshire Department of Labor has inquired about missed or delayed payments to employees, and Lucas confirmed what he termed a routine investigation by the state, but noted that all back wages have been paid off. (The Department of Labor declined to confirm if it was investigating Sunshine Communications or Lucas regarding wages.)
For now, the Eagle Times remains mothballed; Lucas said he has hopes for restarting the paper, in some capacity, in the future.
Certainly we gave it our very best shot, and I certainly exhausted my financial capability to take this any further, Lucas said. I’m going to continue to do all I can for the community.
A plaque comes down
The Eagle Times aside, there are other success stories in Newport that Lucas points to.
Earlier this year, he posed for photos at a ribbon cutting ceremony celebrating the renovation of a former mill building into affordable housing units. People involved in the project said Lucas was a steady cheerleader and helped behind the scenes, even if he or the Sunshine Initiative didn t have a financial investment in the development.
And Lucas has taken credit for the culmination of a decades-long plan to build a new community center in Newport. Ina video posted to his Facebook pagein February, Lucas gets a tour of the center before its formal opening. In one frame, the camera swoops past a plaque with Lucas s name on it, in recognition of a pledged $25,000 donation.
Oh my goodness gracious, Lucas says in the video, as he steps into the center s indoor basketball court.
But as of the time of publication, a town official confirmed that Lucas had never donated the money he pledged. And the plaque bearing Lucas s name has been removed from the community center wall.
When confronted about this failed pledge, Lucas said he would be funding that shortly, but declined to explain the delay.
It was the only time during our interview that Lucas didn t seem to be smiling.
People want to hear what s going on
The closure of the Eagle Times is a loss for Lucas, but also for the employees and subscribers of the paper.
I always felt like if we were able to pay the bills ourselves, things would be fine and the Eagle would still be running today, said Proctor, the paper s former managing editor.
Like Lucas, Claremont Mayor Dale Girard remembers reading the Eagle as a kid.
Now, with it gone, he says there s a hole that s not easy to fill.
We have city council meetings and a lot of the information that seems like very trivial stories, people want to hear about what’s going on, he said. And now it’s not showing up any longer.
While Lucas said he d love to bring back the Eagle Times, he also has his eyes set on even bigger goals. Earlier this year, he formed a new entity that has applied for non-profit accreditation with the state of New Hampshire, which would allow it to collect donations. He has dubbed it the American Sunshine Movement, and laid out an ambitious goal of bringing the tenets of the Sunshine Initiative to 1,000 towns nationwide: Our mission is to help revitalize those communities and in doing so help transform the lives of Americans in the next generation, he said.
In other words, Lucas wants to do what he s done in Newport for struggling communities across the country.
I think we learned a lot so far, he told me.
