Folks… I have just updated the contact list on the Membership page, but am missing many newbies personal email addresses. Send them along and I will add them.
The updated file includes contact info from people like Fran Silverman, Norine Schiller, Kyrie O’Connor, and Jesse Hamilton.
(The list on the blog page, by the way, is not nearly as comprehensive.)
I will soon add another list of “friends of refugees,” and welcome addresses for that as well.
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The refugees should band together to start a new online Connecticut newspaper. The Courant has made a spectacular mess of its website (no matter that its future lies online — it’ll screw that up, too). It’s such a disorganized hodgepodge that it looks like all the online staff does each day is regurgitate everything from the newspaper onto the front page and blast red and yellow paintballs at it to add some color. You can’t view the site’s front page without being ambushed by annoying ads. (The ads are remarkably inventive in how they block you from reading anything.) It’s like walking through a loud, colorful Turkish market surrounded by pickpockets. The red banners look like someone forgot to change them back to the right color after Valentine’s Day. (The color was probably mixed from the blood of former staffers.) Try to find anything (blogs or reader comments, for example) and you’re led down countless blind alleys. (Reader comments about the Courant are probably quickly deleted anyway.) As for the news, it’s what you might expect from a paper that’s been stripped to its briefs.
I agree with Alfred R.
I have proposed the idea several times in the past, as have other people. Given how fallow the job (and freelance) market is, and how idle we’re likely to remain for a long while still, why not busy ourselves with an online paper that would cost very little to set up (we could even solicit donations from readers to help defray expenses) and to which we can contribute stories as often as we can and for as long as we can?
If volunteering is what some of us are considering, why not volunteer for that?
At the very least it would keep us in practice and give us something to add to our resumes and clip files. It would also give us a platform for covering stories that we might then sell freelance to other outlets.
And I believe we could in time become the go-to site for coverage of the Hartford area. One has yet to be established – the barely usable courant.com is it for the moment, but only by default.
I know of several papers overseas that were started by laid-off or disaffected journalists (the terrific Independent in the UK is one) and all are still around. Such publications, in fact, seem to have a better record of success than those started by businessmen.
Perhaps we should start assembling a list of those who are interested in pursuing this?
To all my friends at The Courant with whom I proudly worked for many years, my heart goes out to you. I was an early purge for the paper, when The Middletown Extra was deemed indeed, extra, and my heart was broken and image shattered. It took me a long time to recover from what I felt was somehow my fault – none of this has anything to do with your wonderful work, fine people – I wish I could relieve some of the pain of this terrible time and these heartbreaking cuts. My heart goes out to you all, and Fran and Paul and Tracy are right – there is life after The Courant. Stay strong. Amy Nixon