Register Owner Promises 10 New Hires

As print-daily newsrooms continue to shrink across the nation, the New Haven Register’s new corporate boss said he plans to add reporters and increase local coverage.

Hearst Corporation President Mark E. Aldam offered that statement in an interview with the Independent Wednesday, two days after his company purchased the print-daily Register, Middletown Press, Torrington Register-Citizen; Connecticut magazine; and 11 weeklies from Digital First Media.

Hearst won’t reveal how much it paid for the publications. Citing ​“a person familiar with the matter,” a Bloomberg News article put the price at ​“under $50 million.” That probably overstates the actual price; a broker shopping the properties was asking $32 million, according to New Haven city government Development Administrator Matthew Nemerson, who had sought to put together a team to buy the Register. That price represents an astounding collapse of the paper’s value, mirroring the decline of newspapers’ value nationwide in the face of declining ad revenues in the internet era; New Haven’s Jackson family sold just the New Haven paper (and its now-shuttered sister daily) reportedly for close to $200 million back in 1986. And that was in 1986 dollars.

While he declined to discuss the sales price, Hearst’s Aldam did speak about some of the company’s editorial plans for the newly acquired newsroom, including ​“more local coverage than New Haven was offered in the last ten years.”

“It is safe to say there are ten journalists that will be added” to the staff, Aldam said. ​“There’s a lot of work to be done. There are some communities that are under-served. Our customers are subscribing to the Register, and we’re not covering them as effectively as we should be.” (One reporter, Kate Ramunni, has been laid off; Aldam said Digital First made that decision before the sale to Hearst. On the business side, Hearst canned Register Publisher Kevin Corrado.)

Hearst already owned the major Connecticut dailies south of New Haven, in Bridgeport, Norwalk, Stamford and Greenwich. Expanding to New Haven made sense, Aldam said: The company can ​“economize” on non-editorial costs like production, distribution and transportation in a larger contiguous region. Meanwhile, he said, the company aims to ​“step up” its coverage of the state. ​“We need to be more enterprising. We need to provide better coverage and deeper coverage of the state, the governor, mayors, and Yale.”

Aldam said the company plans to build on the ​“good nucleus” of its state government team, which is anchored by veteran Capitol reporter Ken Dixon. He said that the company will probably publish that team’s stories in the New Haven paper rather than continue to print stories from the CT News Junkie site. (“We’re going to do our own news reporting. That outsourcing at the Capitol will not stand for long.”) The Register used to have its own dedicated reporters at the state Capitol; it laid off its last Capitol-based reporter, Greg Hladky, in March 2008.

Hearst intends to preserve the Register (weekday circulation of 41,646, Sundays, 70,926, according to the New England Newspaper & Press Association) and the Middletown (4,444 weekdays, 2,790 Sundays) and Torrington (3,832 weekdays, Sundays 4,369) papers as distinctly branded publications rather than collapse them under a shared masthead with the CT Post, Aldam said. He said that Helen Bennett will continue as the papers’ editor. (She also edits Connecticut Magazine.) Aldam added that he plans put together over the next few months a longer-term plan for the company’s news operations across the state.

Newsroom Laboratory For Change

Given the history of corporate takeovers in the New Haven Register’s newsroom, reporters might have reason to take a wait-and-see approach to Aldam’s promises to invest more in news.

They heard similar promises in 1986 when a national chain led by Ralph Ingersoll Jr. took over the paper from the Jacksons. At first, the paper did embark on more ambitious journalism, fueled with junk-bond financing promoted by Ingersoll’s friend Michael Milken. Then junk bonds crashed, along with the Register, and waves of layoffs ensued. An investment bank took over the remains of Ingersoll’s chains — and continued cutting costs.

Digital First Media made a new round of promises when it took over the Register. It promised a bold experiment in making newspapers viable in the Internet age: A shift to ​“digital-first” multimedia reporting that would generate 10 times as many pageviews as print did — and therefore allow the company to make up in ​“dimes” the dollars it used to be able to charge for print ads.

Again, an energetic period of experimentation and ambitious news reporting ensued. But the dimes didn’t end up matching the dollars: The company reorganized and declared bankruptcy twice.

The newsroom cuts continued — as they did in legacy-media print newsrooms across the country, which overall have only half as many reporters as they did in 1990. (That figure doesn’t include the explosion in new-media enterprises.) By 2014, Digital First had abandoned a chain-wide reporting initiative, ditched a plan to move the Register newsroom to downtown New Haven, and shrank the Register’s once 110-strong newsroom to 40 positions as it set out in quest of a buyer.

21st Century Strategies

Meanwhile, Hearst has gone on a media buying spree. It bought $2 billion worth of properties in 2016 and continuing in 2017.

As a media company with a news mission — as opposed to an equity fund and hedge fund like Alden Global Capital, which owns Digital First and has a mission of stripping assets to maximize resale prices — Hearst has longer-term incentives to invest in reporting. For instance, in Connecticut, it has emerged as the main competitor to the Tribune Co., which owns the Hartford Courant, for the statewide conventional print-daily market. This week’s purchase greatly expands its territory, putting it in a stronger position to compete with Tribune for both stories and advertising dollars. (Hearst also owns 30 TV stations and cable TV networks like ESPN, A&E, and Lifetime.)

Hearst made good on its promises to reinvest in news coverage in Texas after buying the Houston Chronicle, according to this report by the Poynter Institute.

City government’s Nemerson said he’s heartened by the prospect of greater investment by Hearst in New Haven journalism.

Nemerson said he had tried to put together a team of ​“wealthy community leaders who believe that a strong free press is very important” to buy the Register, which was founded in 1812, when he heard it was for sale. He said he was concerned that an out-of-state chain like Gatehouse Media would buy it and strip the newsroom staff even further.

At the time, Nemerson envisioned a different strategy for saving the Register: eventually having it run by a not-for-profit charitable foundation, the route that Philadelphia’s print dailies have taken. The not-for-profit public-interest journalism industry has grown as the for-profit legacy print-newspaper industry has withered.

Nemerson said he talked up the project with two groups of potential investors: Fairfield County-based ​“former Yale Daily News people who have gone on to successful careers but have a connection to New Haven as undergraduates”; and New Haven’s ​“usual [philanthropic] suspects when you think of Long Wharf and the Arts & Ideas Festival and the CTMirror.”

He couldn’t collect enough commitments to cover the $32 million asking price as well as the millions more that would need to be invested in the newsroom, Nemerson said. (He said Digital First had a ​“carve out” for Hearst, meaning it negotiated directly with Hearst while other suitors went through Reed Phillips III, the investment banker hired to broker the deal, who couldn’t be reached for comment for this article.)

“The issue is moot,” Nemerson said Wednesday. Hearst is a good company that is making an investment in the property. This is somebody doubling down on Connecticut. This is a good outcome I think — assuming that they follow through with this.”

Christopher Peak contributed to this story.