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http://www.courant.com/features/lifestyle/columnists/hc-susancolumn.artsep29,0,3715343.column

Here's Hoping This Treasured Paper Is Always Free To Be Au Courant

Susan Campbell

September 29 2006

Dear David Chase,

You don't know me, but I am a 20-year employee of The Hartford Courant, America's oldest continuously published newspaper, a newspaper that I love and one that represents an idea that I love even more.

I am writing because there is talk that you and your family are considering purchasing The Courant, or at least considering being part of a new ownership team should The Courant's present owner, Tribune Co., sell.

We can get into a discussion about the merits of local vs. absentee ownership of America's media - and I'd be happy to do that. Call me? But what I'd like to do is talk about the kind of boss I want to work for. That is cheeky of me, I know. But after 27 years in the news business, cheeky is all I've got.

When newspapers do what we're supposed to do, we are a vital part of our democracy, as much a part of the landscape as town meetings and campaign signs. When we are hitting our marks, people want The Courant in their homes. They may throw us across the room in anger some mornings, but they keep coming back. When we fulfill our mission - to use the highest journalistic standards to inform our fellow citizens about what is going on so they can make good decisions about their lives - we create a product that sells itself.

In this I am a big fan of that old populist John Dewey when he answered Walter Lippmann's call for an oligarchy back in the last century.

Dewey, a Vermont native, said an oligarchy is precisely what we don't need, and even though it is true, as Lippmann said, that democracy is a messy and tedious business, the alternative is something far less. Dewey knew that, to have a true democracy, we must have an unencumbered press. Otherwise we have a citizenry that relies too much on self-proclaimed experts. Otherwise we have a disenfranchised citizenry that can't even bother to vote; we have a society whose members all go slurp from the corporate trough, content when we ought to be angry, and angry when our favorite reality show is interrupted for a news break.

And the reading public sees right through it when we don't do our jobs.

(Can you hear, as do I, the strains of "This Land Is Your Land" swelling in the background? Cue the band, won't you?)

I'm sorry. It's hard not to get corny in this, the only job I ever wanted. My idea of democracy was forged watching my grandfather - Lloyd Marrs, Citizen - shake out the Joplin Globe every morning while he listened to the radio farm reports. You read the newspaper, and you go vote; read the newspaper, and go vote.

Here is where you come in. Knowing the local landscape as you do, you can set realistic profit goals. You can give allegiance to your hometown company and pour more of its profits - and we always make a profit - back into the enterprise. You can attend to the business end of things and then - and I mean this with the greatest respect - step the hell back and let us do our jobs. History is littered with the corpses of rich men who wanted to dabble in journalism. Journalism is not for dabblers.

And if you take the plunge, I can promise you this: The Courant will be like no other property you've owned. You will have employees who are tenacious and question everything - at least we're supposed to. You may not understand why we are so contentious, but at least you'll have fun.

And you will - I promise - make money.

My fondest prayer has been that distant owners will finally tire of us, as a cat will with a mouse. Local ownership isn't the only answer to pulling us from our much-publicized unease, but I think it's a good start. So yes. Cue the band.

Susan Campbell is at scampbell@ courant.com. or 860-241-6454.

More dinosaur noise. It's almost a continuous bellow - much like a cattle stampede...

http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=11857
Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 9/29/2006 12:58:30 PM
Title: If Journal Register buys the Courant...
Posted By: Jim Romenesko

From FRANK SPENCER-MOLLOY: Newspaper analyst John Morton says that a flailing Tribune Co. is less likely to sell off a prestigious giant such as The Los Angeles Times. It is more apt to cut loose smaller papers and cites in particular The Hartford Courant, Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time. These, he says, would be a likely acquisition by the Journal Register Co., which already owns several Connecticut newspapers.

If so, this will augur the end of days for journalism in Connecticut. News will be what floats in over the transom and comes across the police-radio band. What remains of investigative and in-depth critical beat reporting, already seriously eroded, will disappear, if the Journal Register’s longtime minimalist modus were to be adopted at The Courant, the state’s largest paper by far.

Over the past decade – the last six under Tribune dominion – The Courant has hemorrhaged people and quality, perhaps to an extent greater than any other Tribune paper. Editors disbanded the specialties desk (where I once worked) and cut back or dissolved beats in law, courts, environment, medicine, consumer affairs and public-utilities. State capital coverage has shrunk, and a number of suburbs that once got daily coverage get less or none. A Sunday magazine-like section was just killed. The movie reviewer is no more.

Still, the paper seems to have committed to continue doing some investigations and published earlier this year a fine series exploring the military’s combat use of mentally ill soldiers. But in the event of a Journal Register takeover, expect these, too, to be cut, accompanied by further across-the-board bleeding out.

This takeover would deepen further the news vacuum for Connecticut citizens, who deserve to know more about their state than can be conveyed by the nightly house fire TV news opens its broadcast with.

It will also diminish the public forum in which newspapers and the public express their opinions. Connecticut is a blue state, but you wouldn’t know that by reading the editorial pages of the state’s newspapers. Although the state voted two-to-one for the Democratic presidential ticket in 2000, virtually all the state’s dailies backed Bush. That includes the anti-union, anti-consumer Courant editorial board, which is so reflexively pro-business, it might as well have a dedicated incoming-fax line from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

That will only get worse if Journal Register rules the state. Its papers already toe the company’s centralized conservative line, going so far as to publish the same editorials in its different papers.

It will be sad day all around.