Longtime Courant columnists Susan Campbell, Rick Green and Helen Ubinas will soon lose their titles as columnists and be converted into general assignment/analysts.
Starting in July, Rick will report on politics, Susan on social issues and Helen on breaking news.
There are those in the business — former Courant Editor Brian Toolan among them, as I recall — who think the strength of any great newspaper is in the personalities of its best columnists. In this case, Rick, Susan and Helen also happen to be among the paper’s most powerful writers.
It will be interesting to see how (if at all) the reading public receives this switch, and whether the writers themselves are empowered or embittered by the change. For their sakes, I hope the former.
(Of course, there are other media outlets that are beginning to have the means to support talents like theirs.)
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That is too bad. I agree completely that regular columnists are an important part of any newspaper’s voice. I do hope Rick continues to blog, however.
Terrible news. Terrible.
Wait, What?
Maybe the Courant continues to have a fear of success…
yeah, thats the ticket.
This is just plain wrong. All three of these columnist’s offer a unique and important perspective – what the HELL is the courant thinking?
I agree Jonathan. The Courant’s readers have been well served by Susan, Rick and Helen and are lucky to have writers of their caliber. But this isn’t the first time the people running the paper took the columns away from award-winning writers who had a huge following of readers — Tom Condon, Denis Horgan and Jeff Rivers. The talented writers survive; it’s the Courant’s readers and the Courant that are diminished.
I don’t understand how an organization that has spent a boatload on focus groups and studies (ALL of which have said that readers want local, local, local) still doesn’t get it. The things that sell newspapers are the things that make it special. Columnists give Courant readers something they cannot get anywhere else. I’d rather read Rick, Helen and Susan than 25 pages of boilerplate.
I don’t think the Courant has the tools to survive.
The Courant social IT platform stinks. Always has. Forums, Blogs, Columns, the Toxic boards and the 3 versions before those–they chose the worst technology available and required re-registration after re-registration as they went from one bad platform to worse.
Sometimes business is easy: as in “Lookie. HuffPo is the imdustry winner! Let’s emulate HuffPo’s look and style”.
Then there’s the “We kind of stink at this. Let’s stink worse!”
Yes there was limited perspective. Too limited,
I expect HuffPo wll do a CT state page at some point and create a Harford Patch page and acquire some local talent.
At that time the Courant leadership will still be floundering around selling ads and running wire service articles on the worst tech platform possible while milking the old distribution model to the bitter end.