They recalled a cherished community institution that died an unceremonious death — and welcomed a new one by the same name.
The setting was Ansonia City Hall. There, community leaders and journalists gathered Tuesday afternoon to welcome Connecticut’s newest professional online-only daily newspaper, the Valley Independent Sentinel.
The site is the newest daily news outlet published by the Online Journalism Project, which also publishes the New Haven Independent. It was seeded by a $500,000 two-year grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to the Valley Community Foundation.
Speakers at the event focused on the role that a local daily plays in binding a community like the lower Naugatuck Valley together. They returned time and again to the role that the old daily Ansonia Sentinel — a newspaper housed next door to City Hall, which published for over 100 years — played in the lives of people in Ansonia, Derby, Shelton, Oxford and Seymour. That paper’s out-of-town owners closed it suddenly, with no notice, on Dec. 24, 1992. To this day it’s remembered as the “Christmas Eve Massacre.”
Derby Mayor Tony Staffieri, who’s from Italy, spoke of how he learned to read English by peeking at the comics pages when he home-delivered the Sentinel as a boy. He also developed his first political skills by hitting up subscribers for tips.
The keynote speaker was Connecticut’s chief appellate court judge, Joseph P. Flynn, who grew up in Ansonia with Sentinel news ink in his blood. His parents met at the Sentinel; they were reporters there. His father served as editor for over 20 years. His uncle edited the paper, too. Flynn himself delivered the paper as a schoolboy.
He spoke Tuesday about the importance of a locally-based daily news outlet that builds a community’s identity and aspirations, rather than have the community’s news “patched on to some other place.” (Click on the play arrow to watch part of his speech.) And he wished the new Valley Independent Sentinel well in living up to that tradition.