Bard Bites the Dust

The Stratford Bard, the Elm City Newspapers' news 'weakly,' has published its last. Elm City Newspapers is itself owned by the Yardley, Pa.-based Journal Register Co. (JRC), whose flagship daily is the New Haven Register. Other local weeklies similarly shuttered include the Milford Weekly, Shelton Weekly, Orange Bulletin, West Haven News and Hamden Chronicle.

Many daily newspaper companies are feeling severe financial stress, as the number of U.S. dailies continues to decline, from 2,400 eighty years ago to less than 14,000 today. But the JRC has been particularly mismanaged. In 2003 the company took on a mountain of debt to buy a newspaper group in Michigan -- about five minutes before the U.S. auto industry fell off a cliff. According to today's Yahoo! Finance snapshot, the company is showing debts of $646 million on annual revenues (trailing 12 months) of $428 million. Not good, people! And it's stock (de-listed by the NY Stock Exchange when it fell too low last year) was trading for $0.004 -- less than HALF A CENT. To place in perspective: This very day, you can buy a can of Diet Coke, or 200 shares of JRC stock. Personally, I think the soda is a better investment.

I teach a college course on this stuff, so I do tend to get up on a high horse in pontificating about media stuff. But here's what it means: Now Stratford has just one weekly, the Stratford Star (itself owned by a chain), and like many suburban chain-owned weeklies they basically have about one real news person covering town government. Now, in a town of 50,000, how can one person cover a town government that continues to get larger and more complex and where there are many places for people in government to hide information from the media -- and, by extension, from us. Of course, there's also the Connecticut Post (chain-owned, needless to say), but they are experiencing their own 'issues.'

Here's the point (alert: pontification ahead): a half-century ago most newspapers in Connecticut were owned by families who live and did business in their hometowns. If you didn't like something the paper printed, you could probably confront the publisher in the supermarket, or church, or at the country club, and give him (it was 99% 'hims') a piece of your mind. Now, almost all of the papers are owned by out-of-town chains who don;t give a $%#@ about Stratford or anywhere else -- they just want to Hoover the ad dollars out of mom-and-pop businesses. and when there are fewer media choices, readers and advertisers BOTH suffer.

— Michael Bingham