Hartford Courant to lay even more people off

Hartford Courant

I was just on the Hartford’s Courant cool new blog Cityline.  Three of the five posts had something to do with the Courants favorite money maker, Mayor Eddie Pérez.  Eddie is stepping down from two boards, Ada Miranda wants to be BOE Chair, and our favorite “I hate Hartford so much I’m gonna make a living off of it” journalist muses how they are privy to super duper secret stuff that many new months ago.  What I didn’t see is that the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper on astro turf when away games are held on Tuesdays after 7pm is about to announce yet another round of layoffs at what once was considered one of the best newspapers in the region.

Less than seven months from a cut in staff of upto 25%, the Hartford Courant is faced with possibly cutting upto another 20%.  On the heels of an earnings report which states a 30% decline in sales, employees won’t even have the chance of a possible buyout like back in June of ’07.  Mind you, upto a couple years ago, this venerable paper was still making a tidy profit…just not a big enough profit to placate the monster known as Tribune Corp.  The owner of the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, television stations and the Chicago Cubs have come into Hartford, CT, and is on the verge of completely destroying what had been a multiple Pulitzer winning publication.

Heck…The old Hartford Courant was the most recent American newspaper to win the Society for News Design’s World’s Best Designed newspaper award in 2005.  But that didn’t stop them from killing the award winning design and replacing it with some orientation challenged print piece which looks like a USA Today graph sans color.

It’s not easy to sit here and vent against the Courant.  I have to remind myself that I’m not venting against the Courant but against Tribune Corp.  The Courant that I know is filled with a host of talented reporters who take pride in their work.  Reporters who know the city and the state, who establish sources the same way a cop nurtures a stool pigeon.  Reporters who did their job and if they happen to win an award, it meant that much more because you were judged amongst other reporters doing the same thing in another city.  Now what you have are a handfull of mega corps who own all the media where each overworked, underpaid journalist is out for that “knock ‘em dead” scoop NOT to better the reputation of the paper, but to validate their very existence within the paper.

Back in June, a friend of mine and I walked to Kenny’s/Red Rock to get some greasy, to-go fixins.  Little did we know we were walking in on one of the biggest wakes this side of Dublin.  The Courant had a company wide Adios to all the people who either took the Adios package or were victims of the Adios layoffs.  It was a sad sight as even the survivors couldn’t celebrate.  They knew then that this was only the beginning.  Big Brother had ordered a certain amount of blood squeezed from this particular turnip and the first round of layoffs did not come close to meeting that mark.  Let’s hope that this round squeezes just enough out that Tribune goes and picks on another “subsidiary” and leaves us alone.