JI editor sure doesn't sound like he's buying newspapers

Read Journal Inquirer Managing Editor Chris Powell's latest column and you sure don't get a sense that he's advising anyone to snap up The Bristol Press or, especially, The New Britain Herald.
In a lucid argument that state tax breaks aren't going to make a difference to newspaper owners, Powell points the finger at the real problem: that Connecticut's cities are too poor to support dailies anymore, except maybe in Stamford.
"The decline of newspapers reflects community disintegration," Powell correctly argues, and the way to save them is to fix our state, our society, ourselves.
"Newspapers don't need tax breaks," Powell says in the piece. "They need what the state itself needs, a middle class – self-sufficient households with two parents who are involved with their kids, schools, churches, civic groups, and such, interests that attach people to community and thus, almost inevitably, to newspapers, the chroniclers of community."
In New Britain, where The Herald is struggling, 40 percent of the residents speak something other than English as their first language, Powell says. How are they going to become readers of the community daily?
"New Britain is desperately poor," Powell says, and lacks the sort of rich suburbs that might make it possible for a daily to survive anyway.
"So among Connecticut's cities New Britain probably is least able to support a daily paper," Powell says, which ought to put to rest any thought that the JI is going to buy it.
On the other hand, Powell's column seems to contain a hint of interest in an old plan to come at The Hartford Courant from its fat, wealthy and uncompetitive suburbs.
I know that West Hartford, where almost everyone seems to get the Courant, feels that it's mostly ignored by the paper. The West Hartford News, the Journal Register Co.-owned weekly, doesn't fill the vacuum at all.
I'm not sure the JI has the financial werewithal or interest in trying to have some kind of JI West that could take the Courant on from the other side of the state capital, but it might.
Maybe we'll know more in the coming week.
I'm skeptical the JI is coming to our rescue, but I do know that whatever happens to us, Hartford's decisionmakers should pay attention to Powell's policy prescriptions.
We don't need the whole state to keep slipping down the slippery path that has swallowed up too many of its cities and too many of its residents' dreams.
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Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com

JRC slams the doors shut on 16 Connecticut papers

The New Haven Independent has the story about the Journal Register Co.'s sudden announcement yesterday that it would close the doors on 16 weeklies near the Elm City.
The company laid off 21 employees one week before Christmas without any warning, the online paper reported today.
Some of the papers have been mainstays in their communities for generations but all fell on hard times since their takeover by the Pennsylvania-based JRC.
Look at that sign pictured in the Independent: "Reporting the life story of your community since 1877."
And now that story is done.
The JRC is nearly bankrupt, owing hundreds of millions of dollars it cannot pay back. Its stock trades for half a penny a share, making the whole company worth less than most houses in Bristol.
The company said nothing in public about its decision to shutter the papers, not even telling their readers in the final issue that it would cease publication. The papers that were closed are actually located in the JRC-owned New Haven Register's building.
The JRC has said -- because a federal law required it give 60 days notice -- that it plans to close The Bristol Press, the New Britain Herald and 11 Central Connectcut weeklies as soon as Jan. 12. It has notified employees at the papers that their final day is likely to be Jan. 16 unless the papers are sold.
There is at least a chance the papers will be purchased.
The broker handling the sale is apparently optimistic about reaching a deal, according to one source. Several sources have said that another newspaper company in the region, the Manchester-based Journal Inquirer, is talking seriously with the broker. It is not the only potential buyer, according to a couple of sources.
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Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.
Contact Steve Collins at scollins@bristolpress.com