Consumer watchdog Mike Boguslawski, whose career started at The Bristol Press, said Friday that he's in the paper's corner.
Boguslawski said he is "really outraged" that the Journal Register Co. would even consider shutting down the historic daily.
"We have to do everything we can to save our paper," Boguslawski said from his brother-in-law's home in Florida.
Boguslawski developed a statewide reputation as a television consumer advocate -- a career that ultimately took him to Los Angeles and beyond -- but he said he's always "missed my hometown."
He plans to move back to Bristol in early January because he has taken a job as the director of consumer relations for American Home & Property Services of West Haven, a company that collects yearly fees from homeowners with the promise to repair water and sewer lines running between the street and houses.
Boguslawski said it's a brilliant concept for a business and is proving wildly successful. He's meeting with the Bristol water department next month to talk about its prospects locally.
Boguslawski said that he doesn't understand the opposition to the concept of the government bailing out newspapers.
He said that journalists wouldn't kowtow to government officials even if they receive big money from them.
He said that reporters have always tweaked the powerful and they don't care about the cash.
Boguslawski said he remembers a time on Connecticut TV when he did a story assailing a business that had purchased $1 million worth of advertising just two days earlier.
"I worked 'em over," Boguslawski recalled.
"It's just a roll of the dice" who gets lambasted in the press, he said, and money has nothing to do with it.
Boguslawski said he'd like to see the federal government pony up 80 percent of the money needed to save local newspapers, with the state and municipalities chipping in 10 percent each.
"What do you besides a paper to tell what is going on in a community? We'd have nothing," Boguswlawski said.
*******Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com
