Mary O’Leary posing questions at last month’s U.S. Congressional debate.
Joe Amarante, Randall Beach.
More than a century’s worth of knowledge about the city is exiting the New Haven Register newsroom, as three top reporters are taking buyouts.
The reporters — Mary O’Leary, Randall Beach and Joe Amarante — plan to leave their posts by year’s end.
They took buyouts offered by the paper’s current owners, Hearst Connecticut Media.
All three started at the Register (or its sister paper, the late Journal Courier) in the 1970s. And they never lost their passion for the job.
A city native, O’Leary began working there in 1970. She covered North Branford, Madison, and Guilford, then moved to New Haven city coverage along with stints covering the state Capitol and gubernatorial and U.S. senate campaigns. She is considered among the state’s most dogged political and government reporters. She also served as a leader of a labor organizing drive in the 1970s that, while failing to lead to certification of a union local, improved pay for reporters.
O’Leary survived the sale of the paper to a series of corporate owners, including junk-bonders and hedge funds that slashed newsroom staffing before declaring bankruptcy. (The paper’s current owners have revived a commitment to reporting.) She documented the city’s transition from factory town to a 21st century eds-and-meds economy step by step, and offered context.
Her last day on the beat will be just before Thanksgiving.
“I’m conflicted,” O’Leary said Friday about her decision to take the buy-out, which was “too good to pass up.”
“I still like doing” the job, she said. “I love New Haven. It’s a fantastic city.” She has enjoyed “following it and informing people about all the good things that are happening here and the help it needs to continue going.”
O’Leary cited one upside of the move: Once the pandemic eases, she’ll be able to visit her grandchildren more often in Oregon.
Amarante, another hometown reporter, started working at the company full-time in 1976, after starting out as a college intern. He made his mark as a features writer and entertainment editor who never lost his sense of wonder and humor, whether writing about TV or music, fatherhood, or a new building project on an old downtown mini-highway. When he wrote a lifestyle column, his most popular pieces had to do with Italian slang.
“It’s been a wild ride at times. Especially when colleagues on either side of me would be cut down in one of the layoffs under previous owners,” Amarante reflected Friday. “The irony is that these owners and managers, at Hearst, have been among the very best we’ve had. They’re focused and professional.”
“I think the pandemic has taken away a lot of the fun in covering arts, travel, dining and entertainment since so little is happening. So many shows were canceled, so much disruption. But I hope to resume writing about those topics in some media when it’s safer for folks to come out of their bunkers,” he added.
Randall Beach began working at the Register in 1977 and, outside of a few detours to other media outlets, has hung in through all the corporate changes as well.
He carved out a dual identity as both a rock-solid breaking-news reporter (he may have made a factual mistake once or twice in his thousands of stories, though none have been independently discovered as this story went to press); as well as a columnist shining a light on the personal side of life in New Haven.
In recent years he has served as the Register’s court reporter, including covering the Cheshire Petit family murders, along with maintaining his weekly personal column.
“It’s been a great community experience. I’m going to miss the community aspect of it and the rapport with the readers,” he said Friday.
Beach also wrote about music (introducing the rock beat to the paper back in the day). That love will keep him busy post-Register: He’s working on a book about New Haven’s historic rock club, Toad’s Place.