When Gannett shut the Allston/Brighton/West Roxbury/Roslindale Transcript Tab in print a couple weeks back, it said readers could keep getting their news online.

Boy, howdy, they weren't kidding: The site is now providing news that hasn't even happened yet, and won't for another 33 years: Read more.

Bob Sprague of Arlington reports GateHouse has found a new way to make money: Have people sign up for 52-weeks subscriptions to its newspapers, then tell them, oopsies, we're ending your subscriptions several months early, so send us more money.

A reader of GateHouse's Transcript took a look at the annual circulation form in the paper the other week and was shocked to see how few people now take the paper: In a neighborhood of roughly 30,000 people - about 12,000 households - barely more than 200 people now subscribe (and only 8 people bought it at a newsstand).

Dan Kennedy reports GateHouse Media, which owns most of the suburban papers in eastern Massachusetts, is offering buyouts to workers.

Dan Kennedy reports GateHouse Media has begun sending subscribers to its weekly newspapers a new magazine-ish thing - and then adding the cost of it to their bills, which means their subscriptions start running out sooner. And because many subscribers have their bills set to auto-renew, they might not even notice what's going on.

CommonWealth details the suburban media chain's latest financial filings, which warn of possible bankruptcy but reassure us that should that happen, the top two executives - one of them our own Kirk Davis - will get nice severance packages.

David Ertischek, editor of GateHouse's West Roxbury and Roslindale Transcript, is leaving to become editor of Patch's soon-to-emerge West Roxbury site. He joins Neal Simpson, who stopped covering Brookline for GateHouse so he could start covering it for Patch.

Ed. note: You have to read the Transcript's story about Ertischek leaving. Seems nobody else was available to do it, so he wrote it himself.

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Patch, AOL's attempt at a national network of community sites, recently went live in Needham, giving that town's online news consumers three different places to read about Peter Smulowitz and the guy charged with trying to kill his young child - whom Wicked Local says is a girl, Boston.com's Your Town says is a boy and Patch says is a child.

All three sites are very similar in what they seem to be doing: News, sports, calendar listings, information about the town (Patch helpfully notes which officials are "important officials"). In other words: Recreating a traditional weekly community newspaper, from back in the day when stuff like that was called "local" insteady of "hyperlocal." Wicked Local and Your Town have more depth at this point, having been around longer, and their writing is a lot more polished. Wicked Local is bloggier, Patch makes its employees volunteer in the town and is encouraging local folks to generate some user content (i.e., write for free), Your Town links to stuff on other sites (and has what appears to be dead forums - the most recent post was from almost two months ago).

Ultimately, of course, the question is whether even a well off town like Needham can support three full-time Web sites - are there enough advertisers who want to reach those 30,000 people?

If you live in Needham, how do you get your local news these days?

Yeah, so? We're talking about Kathy Carr, wife of Man of the People Carr, who penned a hate letter to Wellesley parents. Why Wellesley? Oh, that's where the Carrs live. What? You expected they lived in Dorchester or Chelsea?