To hear Jay Lucas tell it, there was no better place to grow up than mid-century Newport, New Hampshire.
“It was an idyllic experience,” Lucas says, in one of a series of promotional videos he’s made about his relationship with his hometown. “We had what I would call a Main Street that was very much like a Norman Rockwell Main Street.”
This was in the 1950s and 60s, when textile mills were still fueling the local economy. In Lucas’s nostalgic vision, Newport’s downtown back then was full of friendly shopkeepers. Kids played ball in the street. Neighbors looked out for each other. At the time, Lucas played football and made honor roll. You can almost picture him in his varsity jacket, heading to the homecoming dance.
But fast forward a few decades, and that Newport has vanished, its economy hollowed out by the closure of its mills. Lucas — who, after graduating from the local high school, earned degrees from Harvard and Yale and is now a venture capitalist — recalled a dispiriting drive down the main drag with his wife.
“I looked at those same beautiful storefronts, and some of them were boarded up, some closed down, some second-hand stores. And I just said, ‘This is not the same town I grew up in,’ ” Lucas says in another video.
This literal car ride down memory lane is the origin story of what Lucas calls the Sunshine Initiative, an ambitious and amorphous campaign he and his wife launched in 2018 to try and revitalize Newport. They’ve documented their efforts in countless videos, posting shots of Lucas at ribbon cuttings, as well as offering motivational pep talks.
The Sunshine Initiative’s most tangible investment in Newport came in 2022, when Lucas purchased the local newspaper, the Eagle Times, from an out-of-state media conglomerate.
“I’m so excited about that because local news is everything,” Lucas said at the time. “Local news is what we all care about.”
But last month, just three years after the acquisition, the Eagle Times suddenly went dark after employees quit en masse. The paper’s closure frustrated subscribers and local officials. In the wake of the collapse, staff have claimed that Lucas repeatedly failed to pay overdue bills, and on occasion requested workers hold off on cashing their paychecks due to a lack of funding.
Suddenly, the positivity of the Sunshine Initiative was facing a different narrative: the local boy who had made good, and decided to invest in his hometown, appeared to have harmed the very community he was aiming to help.
‘A positive mindset’
After graduating from high school, Lucas attended Yale and then Harvard’s business and law schools. He took a job at Bain & Company, the consulting and private equity firm once led by Mitt Romney. Like Romney, Lucas entered politics, securing the Republican nomination for governor in 1998, a race he lost to Jeanne Shaheen.
After that, Lucas moved to Florida for a few years, then returned to Portsmouth, where, now 70, he runs a venture capital firm that focuses on the health and beauty sector.
Lucas has seemingly thrived, but his little hometown hasn’t. Along with economic stagnation, the opioid epidemic has further depressed Newport, which sits about 30 miles south of Hanover in Sullivan County. On measures like median income and poverty rate, Newport ranks well below the statewide average. Half of the children in its public schools come from families poor enough to qualify for free school lunches — more than twice the statewide rate.
But the Sunshine Initiative is less about statistics and more about vibes — that “Norman Rockwell” experience Lucas often refers to. The initiative’s website declares its commitment “to helping small towns thrive by encouraging a positive mindset and working together to create solutions.” Lucas’s videos talk a lot about the power of good energy and kindness in achieving results.
In a recent interview with NHPR, Lucas jumped at the opportunity to talk about one project he said best exemplifies what the Initiative aims for: when he helped organize a record attempt at sunflower bouquets.
On a Saturday morning in 2019, 339 people showed to make the bouquets on the town common, helping Newport secure the Guinness World Record, the kind of local feel good story at the heart of the Sunshine Initiative’s mission.
‘A way to give back’
A few years later, in 2022, a for-profit entity created by Lucas called Sunshine Communications went beyond community events and social media pep talks, and purchased the local paper: The Eagle Times, based in neighboring Claremont.
According to Lucas, the paper was losing money at the time.
“My goal was, if we could make it break even, that would be a great thing,” he said. “Or close to, let's say, close to break even. I viewed it absolutely more, and still do, as a way to give back to the community.”
The local paper fit perfectly with Lucas’ vision of restoring Newport to its mid-century glory: He recalls clipping his own photo and high school football scores out from the paper in the 1960s. But the Eagle Times, more recently, had lost its regular focus on local news, and was instead often printing nationally syndicated stories.
Under Lucas, the paper would again focus nearly exclusively on stories from the immediate area. The editorial staff welcomed their new owner, at least initially.
“Most papers seem to be struggling, and we seem to be doing all right,” said Katlyn Proctor, who held a number of positions at the paper in the decade before Lucas took over. “So it was exciting.”
In 2024, Proctor became the Eagle Times general manager. She said Lucas initially made monthly visits to the paper’s headquarters in Claremont, but that he became a less and less frequent presence in the office. He was largely hands off, she said, on both the editorial and financial side of the paper, which proved to be a problem.
“We had a lot of stupid operational things happen that caused us to take lots of hits,” said Proctor. “From November 2024 to April 2025, our phones were off. And I could not, for the life of me, get them turned back on with leadership.”
According to Proctor, Lucas was the only person at the Eagle Times who could cut checks or who had access to the paper’s financial records.
“So when bills needed to get paid, they were simply sent to Jay, where they went to die,” she said.
The Eagle Times fell behind on payments to the United States Postal Service, which delivered the paper, prompting a pause in service for subscribers. That was fixed, but then on June 6, the newspaper’s website froze because of another overdue bill. Employee email accounts were also down.
While the staff tried to figure out how to publish a newspaper and get it delivered, they received more news: There wasn’t enough money in the paper’s bank account for staff to cash their paychecks, as had happened previously.
“Jay asked me to hold them and to not hand them out at all,” said Proctor. (The paper previously used direct deposits for paychecks, but, according to Proctor, that was suspended after an overdraft.)
For the Eagle Times staff, that was the last straw. 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. In a video posted to his Facebook page in 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.
