Chicago Boilerplate At The Courant And Mooning The Conn Atty Gen

It’s not your peepers.

Readers of The Hartford Courant can be forgiven for imagining that their eyes need a tuneup. Yes, pages do look different from one another. The typeface changes. Headline styles vary from, here, all words Beginning With Capital Letters to, there, others beginning in lower case. The type is often considerably darker on some pages, more dense.

Put aside the eyedrops, it’s only Hartford’s news blowing in from the Windy City.

Large sections of the Hartford Courant are actually now done in Chicago, Illinois. Having dumped so many copy editors at the command of the Central Standard Time bean-fumblers, the Hartford paper is provided with much of the day’s news from out there in exchange. Whole “modules” arrive electronically — edited, designed, headlines-written, typeset. The “locals” put it into the paper.

Despite the goofy appearance — which will likely be fixed by making the Courant change its own prefered style to match the Chicagoans’, the distant tail wagging the nearby dog — this isn’t entirely a bad thing. People at The Chicago Tribune know how to edit stories. They do not choose stupid material, even favoring their own as they do. And, because it comes from higher headquarters, the country mice in Connecticut daren’t decline or change it, so the paper has a lot more national and international news than it might have otherwise.

But …

There’s always a but.

…  what it means is that, even more, the local autonomy, the local decision-making, the local tastes and judgments are diminished enormously. This is not a matter of McDonalds’ hamburgers meeting an established but consistent level of quality everywhere among the franchises. This is a matter of the beef coming from far away at the expense of the local cooks who might know better what seasoning is favored. The local cooks — the local writers, editors and bosses — are instructed not to poach on materials and subjects beyond the Connecticut’s watershed.

Maybe the Connecticut editors, knowing best what works in the neighborhood, would have chosen the same stories — but maybe not. Maybe the local yokels would have given another story a bit of display, maybe they would have emphasized a story’s effect differently. Maybe some needed local copy editor might still have a job, might still be around to note, on some other story, that it is “Asylum Avenue” not “Asylum Street,” or something. Maybe local interests would have a voice in their local paper. Maybe.

Sadly, I think as a proud 25-year veteran of 06115 ZIP code and an even longer veteran of the news game, that is not at all the way it’s going here, or across the depleted Tribune empire. They’re air-mailing it in.

The ancient Hartford Courant has been owned by outsiders for decades and the worry has always been that outside influences would trump the community’s needs. But while the money came and went to faraway cities the news contents of the various “properties’ was determined where the people who read it live. Owners so far away that you need the Hubble Telescope to see them might say (or might not say) that the paper’s lofty editorial position should be Republican or Vegetarian but they did not say “you must use this one-column head on the third story on page five.” That changes.

(Earlier, Connecticut’s attorney general cranked up an oft-cranked eyebrow at the congealing of power at the newspaper and the co-owned television station. He asked if this mightn’t mean that the precious, independent decision-making wasn’t being reduced. Somehow he was assured that, “oh no, not at all” – at exactly the same moment that the “oh no” people were trumpeting in staff memos, public statements, job descriptions, assignments and every other sort of obvious and open action that all journalistic, commercial, administrative resources were exactly being consolidated. They’re proud of it; they brag on it; they carry it out with an eager vengeance. In effect they gave the finger to the attorney general. They mooned Richard Blumenthal. They dismissed an appropriate query from a high Connecticut state official as if to suggest that the attorney general was more interested in being seen asking the question than paying the slightest bit of attention to the mocking duplicity of the answer itself.)

So it goes. Downhill.

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