I'm thinking of buying the Knoxvilile News Sentinel, just like Denis Horgan bought the Hartford Courant recently.
Of course, Denis was dealing with Tribune Company (which owns the old L.A. Times syndicate, which owns the Courant)... not with the News Sentinel's parent company, Scripps, where better business heads may prevail... Actually, Horgan's article explains how he bought the Courant twice. The first time, it was because of a rainy day... like it is today in Knoxville. So I'm going to follow his model for that first purchase. I don't know about the second version.
His second purchase says more about the Tribune folks:
A delegation from Chicago banged at my
door after midnight and surrendered. "All right, you win. Here's the
deed." Foggily, I paid them with a lottery ticket to the next
PowerBall: "Maybe this will pay off $150 million. Most likely it will
pay nothing whatever," I said. "Hey, those are better odds than most of
what we're doing," they replied.
(At this point, you should go back and read Horgan's essay to get the joke about his buying the paper, then being compelled to buy the paper.)
Speaking of The Courant, when I discovered that "couranteer" was a legitimate old synonym for "newspaperman," I registered the Internet domain "http://couranteer.com" as a shortcut to this weblog. It's partly out of nostalgia for my 11 years working for the Nation's Oldest Newspaper of Continuous Publication... which, when I left, was also the nation's oldest independently-owned newspaper. "Oldest" always seemed to be the paper's claim to fame. The "independent" part was something it didn't brag about as much -- unfortunately, considering the ways things are going with these bottom-line-obsessed big media chains.
 Having left Connecticut a dozen years ago, I've ceased to be a regular Courant reader. But I visited its website during a recent class discussion and found one thing that annoys me: The paper doesn't seem to be sure what its name is anymore. When I was there, it was "The Hartford Courant," with "The..." in the blackletter nameplate at the top of page one, and "The" capitalized as part of the name whenever the paper mentioned itself in print. However, the last time someone redesigned the front page, they dropped the "The" from the nameplate. (My compulsive browsing has discovered that although the company publicizes its website as "http://courant.com," it also owns http://thecourant.com.)
This little obsession with "The" began when I pointed out the AP style for referring to newspapers' names: "Capitalize the in a newspaper's name if that is the way the publication prefers to be known." (Examples: The New York TImes, but the News Sentinel, although AP doesn't require the italics.)
When I visited http://courant.com to find another example, I discovered that the newspaper's nameplate has changed, deleting "The" -- but writers still capitalize "The", both as The Hartford Courant and The Courant, in articles on the website. (I think capitalizing "the," even when Hartford isn't mentioned, is one way the 21st century paper marks its continuity from the 18th century days of The Connecticut Courant & Weekly Intelligencer.)
Perhaps the designers chopped "The" off the nameplate to make it fit on today's trendy narrower pages, or so they could squeeze in a little modern color by putting the colonial Courant's "Heart and Crown" signboard -- with a red heart -- between the remaining two words, even if the crown doesn't exactly fit a post-colonial paper. I don't know whether Denis Horgan cares about any of this business much more than my students care about the AP Stylebook, but when he really takes over, I'll keep an eye on http://courant.com to see what changes.
Correction: Oops... Apologies to Denis Horgan and to anyone who read the early edition of my RSS feed. For about 15 seconds this article was on the Web with "Paul" in place of "Denis." Why? A subconscious slip of the blog, probably because I've been talking about Pulitzer Prizes recently. The late Paul Horgan was a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner from Connecticut, a Wesleyan University historian. I interviewed him for The Courant about his second prize. And, yes, eagle-eyed journalism students, Denis Horgan uses just one "n." That's not another slip on my part.
11:25:21 AM 
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