What city will be the first to lose its newspaper? Two small towns in Connecticut appear on their way to that distinction after Journal Register announced Monday that it will shutter The Bristol Press and The Herald of New Britain in January.
As they say in obituary-speak, both properties have been in declining health for some time — and so are most of the rest of Journal Register’s 22 dailies.
A terse announcement floated the possibility that a last-minute buyer might come forward over the next two months. It is a safe bet, however, that both papers are losing money, have no immediate prospects for getting better and hold no appeal to a buyer.
Journal Register Company itself was delisted by the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year and its so-called “pinksheet” stock trades at a penny a share. Management wasn’t talking about the closings, but the story is an open book on skinflint practices coming home to roost.
Whenever JRC bought a paper, it slashed news staff and cut salaries of those who remained. Advertiser service was nothing special either.
In its heyday, Journal Register claimed some the highest profit margins in the business as a result of operating cheaply. Then-CEO Robert Jelenic boasted to a Forbes reporter in 2001 that managers checked reporters’ odometers to be sure they were not padding expense accounts.
When my fellow news business blogger Alan Mutter did an overview of the company’s impending failure in April, the post occasioned an extraordinary comment string. One former reporter wrote that you would be fired if you left before your work for the day was finished, but you would also be fired if you put in for overtime.
Journal Register championed “clustering” — owning a number of papers close to each other to allow pooling business functions, some reporting and printing. It used the profits and borrowed money for acquisitions and to buy top-of-the-line new full-color presses.
Under JRC’s milking reign, the Press and Herald had lost roughly half of their circulation and are now each below 10,000 — this in cities close to Hartford but with 60,000-70,000 population and distinct ethnic identities and changing demographics.
While Journal Register stock performed adequately early in the decade and got the occasional “buy” recommendation from Wall Street number-crunchers, some of my smarter analyst friends noted two flaws. Of course running on the cheap made for a paper less appealing to readers and ultimately less valuable to advertisers. It also left the company little wiggle room to cut more in hard times. And the current ad revenue storm comes as the company tries to handle debt it took on over-paying in 2004 for a group of suburban Detroit dailies.
One twist in the current situation is that strong suburban coverage has also been one of the casualties as Tribune’s Hartford Courant goes through its own rounds of newsroom buyouts and layoffs. Should some of Journal Register’s Michigan or suburban Philadelphia papers fail, neither the two Detroit papers nor the Philadelphia Inquirer is in shape to provide much coverage.
The Courant story on the proposed closings led to a lengthy and lively comment chain. Some trashed the failing papers for skimpy coverage, misspellings and grammatical mistakes.
That drew a signed reply from one of The Herald’s remaining reporters, James Craven. “You may consider the paper ‘a rag’ or ‘a tattered shell’ or disparage its appearance,” he wrote, “but please don’t condemn the staff…
“While tiny compared to what it once was, (the staff) made every attempt to cover the stories that were important to the reader. Whether it was a city council meeting you were too busy to attend or an event at a senior center — we were there…
“The Herald will not be the only paper to go the way of the radio drama, but it will be missed.”
UPDATE: Since this article was posted last night another shoe dropped at JRC. The company announced today that it was putting several of its Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Michigan dailies up for sale. (It did not specify which but said The New Haven Register is not for sale.)
