Far be it for me to question the marketing decisions of a business colossus as successful as the Cayman Islands’ holding company that owns the Hartford Business Journal.
After all, the powers-that-be are smart enough to rent Cohen — a prelude to the Golden Age of Business Journalism.
Still, I might propose a re-thinking of the “Hartford” thing, in Hartford Business Journal.
In a world where the place that you call home means so little, except to your tax accountant; in a world where human and financial capital relocate at the flick of a market twitch; in a world where the label that a second-tier city offers little if any allure; the return-on-investment that comes with printing “Hartford” on your business newspaper every week is open to question.
It’s not that Hartford is any more noxious than a million other places to live; it’s just that there are a million other places to live — and many folks have lived in many of them, all in one lifetime. The affection for Hartford, such as it is, may last only as long as the current consulting contract is in force. Then? On to Albany or Worcester or Butte.
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No Place Like Home
Last year, a columnist in the Sunday magazine of The New York Times described her husband this way: Born in Manhattan, early years in the San Fernando Valley, preteen years on the outskirts of Rome, home schooled by his Canadian mother, father was American born in Shanghai to a Russian mother.
Not Mr. Joe Average, to be sure, but not as unusual as one might think — especially for the readership of a publication like the New England Metro Yankee Greater Hartford Business Journal.
The issue came up in a very tiny way in Missouri, home to many military families that wander the globe in defense of liberty. The state legislature this year approved a measure that allows local school districts to waive “mandatory” high school government classes, if the students had taken similar classes in other states.
The kids will miss out on knowledge about the glories of state and local government, as practiced the Missouri way, but, in the end, so what? How long will they be in Missouri?
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Removing City Identity
Of course, the more ominous matter of population mobility in places such as Hartford is the escape to warm and happy locales where taxes are low — and you can buy a bottle of wine in a grocery store on your way to the cockfight, where you can smoke indoors.
Between 1990 and 2000, the Hartford metro area lost 40,000 white residents, according to Census Bureau figures — and the Connecticut-New York-New Jersey tri-state metro region lost almost 700,000.
And within some regions, of course, the white and middle-class black flight to the suburbs went on, unabated, calling into question even further the value of saddling a publication with a “city” name.
Consider the old Bridgeport Post, which in an audacious change of identity, has become the “Connecticut Post.” Up north a bit, the Springfield paper has managed to lock the name Springfield in a desk drawer.
While the Hartford Courant clings to its urban identifier, the Republican-American has shed “Waterbury,” as the New Britain Herald has become The Herald and the Torrington Register has become The Register.
For a business publication without much consumer advertising, there may be less compelling incentive to escape the urban label and seek out the green lawns of the suburbs. But there is still a sense of stubbornness about the name that may not reflect the reality of suburban office parks and professionals who meander from suburb to suburb, from region to region, from state to state, with “Hartford” barely on their agenda at all.
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Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
