Spiked: how chain management corrupted America's oldest newspaper.

SPIKED:

How Chain Management Corrupted America's Oldest Newspaper.

By Andrew Kreig. Peregrine Press. 229 pp. $19.95.

There's no busier buzzword in American journalism today than "local.' Newspapers owned by multinational corporations want to carve out a new Main Street niche, giving an ironic twist to Rene Dubos's famous axiom, "Think globally, act locally.' From Gannett's U.S.A. Today down to small-city dailies, hometown is hot.

But as Andrew Kreig's embittered chronicle of one prominent newspaper demonstrates, "local' as interpreted in the smoothly competitive corporate culture of today's newsrooms doesn't necessarily mean better journalism--or even more local news.

Kreig outlines the recent history and identity crisis of The Hartford Courant, founded in 1764 and the most influential paper in New England after The Boston Globe. He'd been a reporter at The Courant for nine years when, in 1979, its local shareholders sold out to the Times Mirror Company for $106 million. At the time, The Courant was a lot like Hartford itself: complacent, middling conservative and dull. Its pages were filled with old-school city reporting along with impenetrably detailed, scarcely edited accounts of civic life in ninety-one of Connecticut's 169 towns.

In 1981, Times Mirror revolutionized The Courant's staid pages. A new editor from the Los Angeles Times, Mark Murphy, rampaged into Hartford describing his charge as "an embarrassment to the profession. …