A reader reports that the comments on Alaine Griffin’s story about the engagement are gone.

I don’t know how the paper’s  managers arrived at their change of direction. In any event, given the awful nature of many of those comments — all posted anonymously — it was the right thing to do, even if belatedly. Allowing hurtful, mean and potentially damaging remarks by anonymous trolls is the height of irresponsibility on any newspaper’s part. . . and readers recognize that.

A technical note, however: The pages are still accessible for anyone who bookmarked the comments link. (I will not provide the link to prove my point, but suffice to say I just checked.) Somebody might want to fix that.

Someone, I thought, values fair play and good journalism over page views, the currency that drives online advertising.

I guess I was wrong.

More than 90 comments about Dr. William Petit’s engagement announcement include both pro and con, but also some really awful stuff that would be libelous if Petit were not such a public figure.

Here is a brief sample, chosen not to embarrass Petit, but to highlight the kind of crap The Courant deems worthy of its readers and the surviving victim of an unspeakable series of crimes:

This clown let his entire family get murdered and only saved himself, who cares what he does or who he marries. He is the dfinition of a coward in my book. I would have been dead along with my family trying to save them myself, not getting married to some bird 3 years after my entire family dies. I hope he burns in hell

My friends in the business tell me that The Courant’s competitors have elected to modify their posting policy to prevent a phenomenon that brings discredit to any news agency that hosts it.

Sadly, the management at the Courant can’t seem to grasp a fundamental concept of fair play that — more than page views –  is crucial to the newspaper’s credibility, reputation and long-term survival.

If this Sam Zell suit prevails, then a lot of former Tribune folks should get their jobs back — with back pay.

Meanwhile, here is another recounting and reminder of the unconscionable deal concocted by a bunch of greedy bastards who walked off with millions at the expense of a many decent people and a great institution.

An excerpt about the LBO:

“Tribune received, and the shareholders gave, no value whatsoever in exchange for the shareholder transfers. To the contrary, Tribune only received the dubious honor of repurchasing its own stock, and a bloated debt load that increased to more than $13 billion – billions more than Tribune was actually worth, and nearly ten times the company’s cash flow for 2006 or projected cash flow for 2007. This highly leveraged capital structure was nothing short of reckless.”

In the HARTFORD COURANT the controversy surrounding the 24 state employees who may have lied to get food stamps has generated more than 10,000 words of coverage and two major editorials.  By comparison the potential lack of heating assistance for 78,000 Connecticut families has received about 2,000 words while the extraordinary move by Jepsen and Malloy to limit access to early childhood education has received a paltry 1,000 words.

The jist of his argument is that an imbalance in the paper’s coverage of an assortment of issues suggests some news judgment that leaves something to be desired.

These things are always subject to the interpretation of different people with different values; and Pelto is probably not aware that the greater the pressure for a newsroom to produce copy, the more likely there are to

be bulges in coverage and reportorial output. Certainly the remaining few Courant news staffers are under  more pressure to produce than ever before.

But in a larger sense, what it says to me is that the newsroom at 285 Broad Street is skewing more toward breaking and “popular” news (and photos of hot women) and less toward the political and issue-oriented news that are the focus of two significant media players: CTMirror.org and CTNewsJunkie.com.

This is not surprising given Courant-parent Tribune’s dire financial situation and its effort to survive in the general readership market — a market that may be evaporating as a consequence of the Digital Information Age.

No disrespect to the Courant’s political team, who are among the state’s most skilled and accomplished; but it is beginning to be out-gunned by the CTMirror crew, who are mostly former Courant journalists themselves.

These new sites are moving into territory described by one of Pelto’s readers:

…somewhere within the last five or six years or so I found myself reading [The Courant] less and less (and not just because there was less and less of it to read). At some point, I don’t recall exactly when, we stopped subscribing. The paper had become so thin and shallow. But the Courant’s dramatic decline has left a void.

The only thing CTMirror hasn’t gone heavy into is the longer-term, computer-assisted investigation that is the hallmark of a great journalistic institution.

I suspect that will happen someday, too.

I have said before and will say again: if the creditors are going after anyone, it ought to be Dennis FitzSimons and his cohorts who helped engineer the “going private” transaction and walked away with millions.

It was FitzSimons, after all, who wrote as he left the company:

…completing this “going private” transaction is a great outcome for our shareholders, employees and customers. Work on the transformation of Tribune will continue — out of the glare of the public markets — and employees will have the opportunity to share in the very real upside of that transformation.

(February, 1965, P.A. 82, S. 1; P.A. 10-32, S. 149.)

History: P.A. 10-32 made a technical change, effective May 10, 2010.

It just uses new technology.

Case in point:

In the interest of spreading the Courant and Fox61 Gospel into social media, all CT1 employees are required to Tweet regularly. Six tweets is OK. More than six is “good.” Anything less is “Under goal.” Lately, I hear, the number of daily tweets has been falling off — so managers have been asked to prod their underlings to be more productive.

A manager now maintains a master spread sheet tracking each employee’s Twitter productivity.

This has a familiar ring to it, I think. It reminds me of when there were story and brief quotas; and when we were required to log each and every correction, then later read about our cumulative record in our annual evaluation.

It was Journalism By Quantity. Considering the caliber of the professionals I was working among, I thought was petty and short-sighted then. I still do now.