John Tabor, Jr.

Mr. Tabor started his newspaper career at his hometown newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after graduation from Yale back in the days of lava lamps and eight-track tapes.  After being a reporter at the Arizona Daily Star, he worked with Mead Newspapers to find a weekly to buy in a growth area to go daily.  Mr. Tabor did just that in Lake County, California from 1980-1986, and he learned the business from newsroom to mailroom as a part owner. He sold his “sweat equity” in 1987, and started a weekly to compete with the Thomson daily in Portsmouth, N.H. with backing from Ottaway Newspapers. He then worked three years as general manager of Ottawa’s daily Pocono Record.  Mr. Tabor returned to New Hampshire and merged Ottawa’s weeklies with the Portsmouth daily in 1997, to create Seacoast Media Group. Mr. Tabor and his wife Betsy have a daughter, Laura, 19, studying engineering at Dartmouth College, and a son, Max, 17, a freestyle skier and high school student.  You’ll catch him during free time on his daily run by the water, off skiing with the kids, cooking Mexican food or striped bass fishing.  Only one or two fellow employees have heard him play greatest hits of the 70s on guitar and their names are confidential.

Mr. Tabor has attended four API seminars: Management of the Weekly Newspaper, 1991; Executive Development Program, 1992; Executive Marketing Seminar, 2005; and Newspaper Next workshop in New York, 2006.