In Connecticut's capital city, the end of an era at 285 Broad St.

Yahoo

27-01-2025

A staff photo taken outside the Hartford Courant headquarters on the occasion of the newspaper's 250th anniversary in 2014. (Photo courtesy of Joseph F. Nunes)
This commentary first appeared on CT Mirror and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
The impending auction of the Hartford Courant's longtime home at 285 Broad St. is a testament to an unmitigated greed that has ended the storied newspaper's physical presence in the city it had always called home.
The occasion warrants a review of how such a historic treasure has become essentially homeless while its owners reap millions, operating as their own oligarchy.
The Courant – the nation's oldest continuously published newspaper — had maintained a Hartford footprint since 1764, when founder Thomas Green led a team of oxen from New Haven to Hartford, dragging a printing press discarded by his former boss, Benjamin Franklin.
The newspaper quickly grew into a vital force in the city through seven successive relocations, culminating in its move to 285 Broad St. in 1951. It was the perfect move at the right time, positioning the Courant for tremendous growth during the boom years after World War II. The easy access to the new East-West Highway (now I-84) gave the traditionally conservative Courant delivery advantages that soon allowed it to overtake its liberal-leaning rival, the Hartford Times.
The Courant paid $500,000 for the so-called Terminal Building in 1945, historical accounts show. It would take five years to get the site ready.
The building already had an interesting history. It was built in 1929 for L&H Motors, a distributor for the initially popular Hupmobile, which soon fell out of favor because of production issues. Heublein Inc. moved its headquarters there in 1933, when the liquor manufacturer's fortunes rose with the repeal of Prohibition. It produced cocktail lines there for five years before moving to 330 New Park Ave.
The Courant's new home formally opened on March 4, 1951, drawing Gov. John Lodge, top state and city officials and local celebrities. Thousands of area residents toured the plant during a month-long open house.
It was at 285 Broad St. that the Courant blossomed as an innovative, beneficent, family-like business that enjoyed steady growth and journalistic excellence.
The Courant's success at the time was largely due to the leadership of Col. John R. Reitemeyer, who started inauspiciously as a campus correspondent at Trinity College in 1917 and rose to publisher in 1947.
Reitemeyer foresaw that local news in the fast-growing suburbs was critical to the Courant's success. So he invested heavily in expanding the regional news operations throughout the state. The Hartford Times, an afternoon paper still ensconced in the inner city, tried to catch up but was checkmated by the emergence of TV news and delivery trucks stuck in rush-hour traffic.
But perhaps the key to the Courant's growth was the employees' all-for-one work ethic and shared mission, enhanced by the opportunity to become company shareholders.
Reitemeyer helped nurture that teamwork through a Voting Trust Agreement 'for the purpose of encouraging greater employee ownership and maintaining the benefits of local management of the company,' as a Courant prospectus later described it.
Such a noble effort seems so ironic now.
The Voting Trust, adopted Sept. 22, 1947, put Courant employees first in line to buy available shares of the company's restricted common stock. There soon followed a profit-sharing plan that provided annual bonuses, an education assistance plan, a defined-benefit pension plan and other benefits.
The Courant had become a model workplace.
'It is men and not machines which make a newspaper, and a newspaper becomes great only through the loyalty, the devotion and the ability of [its employees],' publisher Reitemeyer said in 1948, at the inaugural meeting of the Thomas Green Club, for employees with 25 or more years of service.
The Courant became an indispensable part of the region's social fabric, not only thorough its news coverage but in how it helped thousands of carriers grow into responsible adults.
I was one of those paperboys whose morning route taught me about human nature, community, perseverance, how to make ends meet. And starting in 1970, as a journalism intern from Northeastern, I couldn't have found a better place to ply my trade than my hometown newspaper.
I viewed our collective work at The Courant as a vital social service, the proverbial beacon of democracy cutting through the fog, especially in the wake of Watergate. We kept readers informed about everything, from mundane school lunch menus to scintillating scientific breakthoughs, from late-night zoning meetings to municipal corruption scandals.
We all felt the grandeur of the Courant's unique history – 'Older than the nation, as new as the news,' as the slogan went. In the newsroom, we spoke truth to power, always striving to root out the truth, 'with malice toward none,' as legendary sportswriter Bill Lee titled his column.
Every day there would be something in the newspaper, however innocuous, that would change people's lives, I often reminded colleagues. And that would be validated time after time.
The end began inauspiciously when longtime editorial page editor Bill Foote died in 1976. His estate had to sell back its 22,500 Courant company shares, as stipulated in the 1947 Voting Trust Agreement. For most employees, myself included, it was the first opportunity to become a company shareholder, at the reappraised price of $33 a share.
The response was huge. For the first time, the number of individual shareholders nearly tripled, exceeding 500. But that also created a conundrum, requiring the paper to make some financial data public, which made it a takeover target. Within months, media conglomerate Capital Cities Communications offered $133 per share.
After much internal wrangling, those who wanted to keep the paper employee-owned won a decisive vote in October 1978 over those who argued that they had a fiduciary obligation to maximize their return on investment. But then the pull of self-interest became irresistable.
Within eight months, Times Mirror Corp., publisher of newspapers that included the Los Angeles Times, made its own offer — $200 per share. Courant shareholders voted overwhelmingly in favor of accepting the offer, and several longtime employees became instant millionaires. It wasn't necessarily greed coming into play, Courant editor Richard S. Mooney said. 'At that price? It was more: 'What kind of idiot am I to turn this down?''
Many shareholders believed it was in the Courant's best interest to choose its own suitor, and most believed Times Mirror, with its dedication to top-quality journalism and deep pockets, was the best possible outcome.
On the business side, Times Mirror quickly increased the Courant's advertising rates, which were among the lowest in the country. With the demise of the Hartford Times in 1976, Courant advertisers had nowhere else to go, was the prevailing sentiment. 'Gotcha!' as one Times Mirror executive put it.
Times Mirror soon brought in editor Mark Murphy to streamline the Courant, helped by carloads of 'Beach Boys' who rode in with him. Murphy closed most of the local news bureaus in an effort to give the Courant more gravitas as a national newspaper. It backfired. Scores of picketers marched outside 285 Broad St. protesting 'the Un-Hartford Courant,' and Murphy was soon gone.
I was one of those paperboys whose morning route taught me about human nature, community, perseverance, how to make ends meet. And starting in 1970, as a journalism intern from Northeastern, I couldn't have found a better place to ply my trade than my hometown newspaper.
Times Mirror then lured editor Michael Davies, 39, from Kansas City. The British-born, Georgia-raised journalist immediately spent millions rebuilding the local news network with a mix of trusted Kansas City 'chiefs' and homegrown talent.
The Courant soon excelled in photography, design and depth of coverage. It won two Pulitzers Prizes and a host of national and international awards. And The Courant was pouring much of the profits back into the business, including a $27 million expansion in 1984-85 featuring state-of-the-art offset presses. For years employees got annual bonuses at or near six weeks' pay.
Newspaper profits were at an all-time high, until the unrelenting advertising rate hikes hit a tipping point industry-wide. They spawned an online competitor called Craigslist, and huge chunks of newspaper revenue evaporated. The dawn of the internet brought similarly dark clouds on the threshold of the new century.
Financial troubles began brewing in Los Angeles, rippling through Hartford. And greed reared its head. Dissatisfied members of the Chandler family ownership group wanted to cash out before their fortunes sagged under foundering CEO Mark Willes, whom they had brought in from General Mills. When Tribune Company obliged by acquiring Times Mirror for $8 billion in 2000, the Chandlers bid Willes cheerio and raked in billions.
Eventually, plummeting profits, despite constant staffing cuts, led to Tribune's disastrous sale to private equity mogul Sam Zell for $8.2 billion in 2007. An avid biker, Zell's tenure had the Courant enduring one vertiginous wheelie after another before the wheels came off in 2008, when Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy.
As the Chicaco Tribune later reported, Tribune executive got nearly $150 million in cashed-out stock and other payments, while the company was saddled with a $13 billion debt. Courant employees started wearing a T-shirt that said 'The Chairman of the Board walked off with $41 million and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.'
The convoluted proceedings in 2012 led to senior debt holders assuming control of Tribune's properties, including the Courant's building at 285 Broad St. When Tribune Co. spun off its newspapers to form Tribune Publishing, the Courant was forced to pay rent for what had been its own property, including for use of the presses.
Tribune Publishing was rebranded as 'tronc' from 2016-18 under chairman Michael Ferro, himself a venture capitalist, before he sold his 25 percent share to the hedge fund Alden Global Capital in November 2019 for $117.9 million. Alden Global Capital, a division of Smith Management LLC, went on to buy the rest of Tribune Publishing for $635 million in May 2021. It has become the nation's second-largest newspaper ownership group after Gannett, with more than 200 newspapers, including the Courant.
Hedge funds like Alden, with their cutthroat business practices, 'were the sharks that smelled blood in the water and struck, transforming the debt to equity and then dismantling the newspapers piece by piece,' journalism academic Margot Susca writes in 'Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy.'
These new owners have turned their backs on what Susco sees as the raison d'etre of newspapers, serving democracy, in pursuit of unrelenting greed. It's gotten to the point where the ultrawealthy investor class now controls most of the nation's newspaper properties through such hedge funds or private equity firms, she says.
The 'current' owner of the Courant property is listed as 285 Broad Street Hartford LLC, which is part of Alden Global Capital's real estate division, Twenty Lake Holdings, as reported Dec. 16 by the Hartford Business Journal.
The shell company took title shortly after the Courant's physical presence in Hartford ended on Dec. 27, 2020, during the height of the Covid pandemic. That's when then-owner Tribune Publishing shuttered the newspaper's offices, forcing employees to work from home. (WTIC-TV, Fox 61, has remained as a tenant in the mostly unoccupied property.)
The heart of the Hartford Courant — its thundering presses — was metaphorically ripped out in early 2022, when a work crew cut a hole in the side of the pressroom and perfunctorily removed the dismantled press machinery, which reportedly was sold for scrap.
But the final nail on the Courant's historic run at 285 Broad St. may well be hammered Jan. 27-29, when the property, as listed on the auction website Ten-X, will be auctioned off, with an opening bid of $700,000.
Joseph F. Nunes worked in the Courant newsroom for 38 years, as a reporter, a state desk editor, city editor and copy desk chief. His updated history of The Courant ran in the newspaper's 250th commemorative edition in October 2014.
This article first appeared on CT Mirror and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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