In the southwest corner of Connecticut, the fate of two newspapers — the Advocate of Stamford and the Greenwich Time — last week caught the eye of Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, because they’ve also caught the eye of a national newspaper chain that already owns the Connecticut Post and Danbury News-Times dailies.
Consolidation of media power frequently draws the ire of those concerned about monopolistic practices. But Connecticut is a state where national chains already dominate the newspaper business. The question that some are wondering about isn’t what happens when big corporations swap newspapers, but what will happen to the last of the Nutmeg State’s family-owned papers?
Once dotted with many family-owned newspapers, only four Connecticut dailies remain in the hands of the families that founded them. It’s unclear whether all will have upcoming generations willing to take on the business, but the current ruling generations sound – for the most part – optimistic about their chances for surviving, one way or another.
To keep from sinking and eventually selling out, those families have bought nearby weeklies and shoppers to consolidate advertising revenue and cut costs.
“It’s like putting a moat around the castle,” said John C. Peterson, principle of the Essex-based Peterson Media Group, a newspaper consulting firm. Advertisers prefer to get broader coverage in an area, and dealing with one company allows them to do that.
“It makes good business sense to print multiple products out of a single printing facility,” said Eliot White, publisher of Meriden’s Record-Journal, which has bought up publications in surrounding communities such as Berlin, Southington, North Haven and Plainville. The Whites have also broadened their geographic base by purchasing the Westerly Sun daily in Rhode Island.
Such moves also consolidate overhead and drive up revenue. White points out that while companies like the Record-Journal buy up nearby newspapers, expansion also allows them to form new publications and expand others, creating better service for the community.
While media watchers groan over giant companies buying up multiple news outlets in one community, smaller companies don’t experience the same chorus of voices decrying media monopolies.
“There probably should be more public concern,” said Kevin Crosbie, publisher of the family-owned Chronicle in Willimantic, but smaller papers with closer ties to the community often don’t incur the same ire as large, far-flung conglomerates. The Crosbie family itself has taken ownership of three surrounding publications — both in terms of management and editorial content — but Crosbie said those publications’ former owners all had decided to sell and had approached the Chronicle to make a deal.
“It all depends on how good a citizen you are,” Peterson said. Smaller publishers are much more closely connected to the community; those close ties often create a level of trust between publisher and readers.
Heeding The Call
Dailies aside, some other publications also remain in the hands of families, such as the Vernon-based Reminder weeklies, which cover 62 towns across the state. Another standout is Hersam Acorn Newspapers in Fairfield County, in which two families combined forces and publications. With seven regional newspapers previously in hand, the company purchased seven more Fairfield County papers this summer from Milwaukee-based Journal Communications Inc.
For these families, hanging on to the newspaper is more than just keeping a business afloat, Peterson said – it’s about a calling to uphold an independent voice with a stake in the community, and keep it from becoming just a commodity that functions as a cash cow for stockholders.
Yet many such families have given in to financial pressures over the years, selling their papers to large companies and ending traditions that were begun well over a century ago. In many cases, selling to such companies brings an expectation of declining quality.
In the past two decades, for example, the Doench family sold the Middletown Press, the Brown family sold the New Britain Herald, and the Barnes family sold the Bristol Press, all to the Journal Register Co., which also owns the New Haven Register and the Torrington Register Citizen dailies. In the case of each of the three greater Hartford dailies, circulation has plummeted to a shadow of what it was before the sale.
There are “good steward and not-good stewards” of journalistic integrity, Peterson said, but family news media tends to have a stronger stake in their communities that national media companies just don’t have.
Regardless of ownership, competitive pressures have had an overall effect on many newspapers’ editorial quality — with fewer resources dedicated to reporting, coverage has gotten weaker.
If growth and profits are key ingredients for continuing a family-run newspaper, one other element is necessary: younger generations.
While the Wall Street Journal’s family, the Bancrofts, owned the newspaper for years while its management was in other hands, Crosbie said that’s a rarity in family-owned operations. Most families are too closely tied with the newspaper’s editorial content, and are loath to give it up.
For Crosbie and William Pape of the Republican-American in Waterbury, the question of succession is an open one. Both have children reaching young adulthood, but it remains to be seen whether they will assume control once their fathers step down.
“There’s no grand scheme that I could tell you about,” Pape said.
Elizabeth Ellis, publisher of Manchester’s Journal Inquirer, also has two daughters and grandchildren in college — possible fodder for succession, but Ellis declined to speculate as to who was likely to take over, or if anyone in her family wants to do so.
As for White and the Record-Journal, the line is clearer: White himself took over from his father and mother. Now White’s daughter, at age 25, is being groomed for ownership. She’s worked eight summers at the paper, gone through a training program at the Connecticut Post in Bridgeport, and has already begun management-level work in the family business.
