Hartford Courant - History

History

The Connecticut Courant began as a weekly on October 29, 1764, started by Thomas Green. The word "courant," borrowed from the Dutch, was a popular name for English-language newspapers. The daily Hartford Courant traces its existence back to the weekly, thereby claiming the title "America's oldest continuously published newspaper" and adopting as its slogan, "Older than the nation." (The New Hampshire Gazette, which started publication in 1756 and all but disappeared into other publications for most of a century, trademarked the title of oldest paper in the nation after being revived as a small biweekly in 1989. See also, The New York Post as oldest daily, and Time magazine's view of "oldest" claims.)

The Courant was purchased in 1979 by Times Mirror, the Los Angeles Times' parent company. The first years of out-of-town ownership are described by a former Courant reporter in a book titled Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America's Oldest Newspaper. One criticism was that the new owners were more interested in awards, and less interested in traditional Courant devotion to exhaustive coverage of local news.

The Courant won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for inquiring into problems with the Hubble Space Telescope (a Connecticut company was involved in the construction), and it won a 1999 Pulitzer Prize in the Breaking News category for coverage of a 1998 murder-suicide that took five lives at Connecticut Lottery headquarters. A series of articles about sexual abuse by the head of a worldwide catholic order, published since February 1997, constituted the first denunciation of Marciel Maciel known to a wider audience.

In 2000, Times Mirror and the Courant became part of the Tribune Company, one of the world's largest multimedia companies. Ironically, along the way, the Courant also acquired the Valley Advocate group of "alternative" weeklies started by two disgruntled Courant staff members in 1973. Under new ownership, it is co-owned with two local television stations: Fox affiliate WTIC-TV and The CW affiliate WCCT-TV.

The Courant is the most recent American newspaper to win the Society for News Design's World's Best Designed Newspaper award (awarded in 2005). In 2006, the paper's investigation into mental health and suicides among Americans serving in the Iraq war was featured in the PBS documentary series Exposé: America's Investigative Reports in an episode entitled "Question 7."

In late June 2006, the Tribune Co. announced that Courant publisher Jack W. Davis Jr. would by replaced by Stephen D. Carver, vice president and general manager of Atlanta, Ga., TV station WATL. In March 2009, Tribune replaced Carver with Richard Graziano, who was given a dual role as Courant publisher and general manager of Tribune's two Hartford television statons. In May of the same year, Tribune announced that Jeff Levine, a newspaper executive with a background in marketing, would become "director of content" and that the editor or "print platform manager" of the Courant would report to Levine as would the news director of WTIC-TV. Shortly after that, the Courant's two highest ranking editors were let go.

In recent years the Courant has offered early retirement and buyout packages to reduce staff as it continues to experience declines in advertising revenue. There have also been layoffs; the Courant announced in June 2008 that it would lay off about 25% of its newsroom staff. Moreover, in September 2008, it would reduce the number of pages in its weekday editions.

An unspecified number of newsroom layoffs were again announced in July 2011. Newsroom staff peaked in 1994 at close to 400 staff, down to 175 staff by 2008, and 135 staff in 2009.