Our failing cities need journalism, and readers

There may be a chickenand-egg situation here. There won’t be a better press without a better public, a public willing and able to pay for it, nor a better public without a better press.

Hartford’s City Council is worried about the future of the city’s newspaper, the Courant, whose management and ownership have been in turmoil on top of the stresses imperiling the newspaper industry generally.

Like most regional and local papers, the Courant today has much less staff, content and reach than it had a decade ago, and there are fears that its owner, Tribune Publishing, which is offering all its properties for sale, will relinquish the paper to the chain’s largest shareholder, hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which shows little interest in journalism and civic life.

So the City Council is preparing a resolution urging Tribune and Alden to stop diminishing the Courant. “This is our paper,” City Council member Marilyn E. Rossetti says, and its decline is “a travesty.”

But then Hartford is Connecticut’s capital city and has been declining for decades longer than the Courant has. Indeed, as a business matter the Courant long has done better by Hartford than the city has deserved.

It’s simply a matter of demographics. Hartford’s population is about 122,000, a third smaller than in the 1950s. Thirty percent of its residents are impoverished and almost 22 percent foreign-born and thus less likely to be fluent in English and attuned to civic affairs.

While West Hartford next door has only about half Hartford’s population, only 7½ percent of the suburb’s residents are poor and only 17 percent are foreign-born. As a result the Courant long has had far more subscribers in West Hartford than in Hartford, subscribers in West Hartford are far more valuable to advertisers than subscribers in Hartford, and downtown West Hartford has supplanted downtown Hartford in important respects.

Being so poor, having a political class dominated by government employees and others drawing their livelihood from government, and lacking a strong middle class independent of government, Hartford is far more vulnerable to political corruption and so needs journalism more. But journalism isn’t free, and with its awful demographics the city can’t afford it. Serious journalism can’t make money in the city.

To acknowledge Hartford’s awful demographics and their impact on business conditions is not to disparage its residents. For like Connecticut’s other troubled cities, Hartford is only what all of Connecticut makes it, and impoverished and dysfunctional cities are actually part of the state’s longstanding policy and social contract.

Connecticut’s poverty and education policies fail chronically but their primary objective long ago ceased to be to elevate and educate the poor but rather to sustain the government class ministering to them. This supports the state’s political regime, and those not directly dependent on the regime tolerate this policy failure as long as they can escape its pernicious consequences — crime, bad schools and political correctness — by moving to the suburbs.

Amid the failure of poverty and education policy, the best Connecticut’s intelligentsia can propose is just to spread the dysfunctionality around, to prevent any escape from it as it grows.

In this sense the suburbs may need journalism more than Hartford and the other troubled cities do, since the suburbs are home to the people with the capacity to understand policy failure and to support change — middle-class people employed outside government, people who pay more in taxes than they get from government in income.

Why do these people accept the failure of government to reverse the decline of the cities? Maybe it’s because their journalism is just as content with the awful social contract as the government class is. Or maybe they are just as demoralized by policy failure as city residents have been.

In any case, there may be a chicken-and-egg situation here. There won’t be a better press without a better public, a public willing and able to pay for it, nor a better public without a better press. But how can Connecticut achieve either when most students now graduate from its high schools without ever mastering high school work and are not prepared to be citizens, much less newspaper readers?