Susan Ovans

The Hull Times

Susan Ovans began her newspaper career in 1979 as part of the South Shore Chronicle’s “Around Town with Betty Bee and Her Girls,” contributing to the Hull, Mass. weekly paper’s small-town society column as “one of the girls.” She quickly became a force in the male-dominated local news business – an indomitable voice who later moved to the competing Hull-Nantasket Times as a feature writer and political reporter. In the spring of 1986 Susan started a new publication, the Hull Newsweekly. Because she could not afford the machinery commonly used to produce a newspaper at the time, she embraced an emerging technology, desktop publishing with Macintosh computers and was chronicled in Time magazine on June 30, 1986 as a pioneer in the industry. In the years since, she merged the Newsweekly with the now-renamed Hull Times and is its sole owner, publisher and editor. She has published a newspaper in the town of Hull for 30 years, giving voice to a wide range of residents on an even wider range of issues.