The news from Hartford

stunning. The Courant used to be a great sports section

 

Jesus fucking Christ.

You knew Boston sports were next on the cutting block when they cut the Yankees coverage last year.

There are some great fucking writers being cut there.

Jesus fucking Christ.

The sports section of my youth--the one that made me want to become a sportswriter--is dead.

Fucking asshole beancounters, all of them. Rot in fucking hell.

 

I'm looking at the prep cuts... the prep editor AND two writers?
If the trend is toward hyperlocal, why do you cut the one area that not only understands it but has been doing it for years?

 

Terrible.

 

If they cut Boston sports, and New York sports, and three HS jobs, what is there left to cover in Hartford? The Whalers? oh wait.

Bad news for all.

 

Because they make too much money. Can't have that.

 

I wonder what Bo Kolinsky would've said if he saw that the high school coverage he gloriously covered for 30 years was ripped to shreds.

Just incredible.

 

I'll echo Bob -- What the hell are they putting in the section? Rec softball results? I guess the softball team will be reading but who else? It's so shortsighted.

The decline in ad sales is a business side problem. Why is it being "solved" through editorial gutting?

 

I had a courtesy interview there in 1983; there was no opening, but the SE let me come in for a talk because I was vacationing about 100 miles away. Paid the mileage and offered to pick up the rental-car cost, but I told him that was unnecessary as I'd be using the car not only for vacation but for courtesy interviews two other places. He shrugged as if I were nuts not to take the money anyway. Six years later I talked with a different SE about a job, and at the time people were getting yearly bonuses of about six weeks' pay. I was already pretty far along in talks somewhere else and went there instead, but, geez, Hartford must have been a good place to work at the time.

 

Damn, damn, damn. Just fucking awful.

 

It seems clear from an outsider point of view that staff coverage of the Yankees and Red Sox (and Giants and Jets and Patriots etc....) by the Hartford Courant is very nice for the guys who got to do it, but redundant for the readers of the newspapers, who have more on the Red Sox and Yankees from the New York and Boston papers and ESPN than they ever could reasonably consume. This is a great example of a chance for a newspaper to turn to the local market and actually report on things its readers cannot get elsewhere (and I have no idea what that possibly might be). Its like coverage of the Redskins by the Times Dispatch, Daily Press and Virginian Pilot. My question as a reader of those sections always was why? They never could come close to the Post and others. Their resources were much better spent on the state and local colleges and the things in their back yard.

All that said, I feel for the folks out of a job. This is a time of painful transition for a lot of good people. I hope it works out as best it can for every one of them.