20 Years With The Little Paper That Could

Over the years, The Hartford News and its predecessor, the Southside Neighborhood News, have been many things to many people: watchdog, cheerleader, advocate, bulletin board, entertainer, sounding board and even comedian. But, after 20 years of ups and downs, staff changes, name changes, different looks, different owners and countless long nights, the paper can rightfully lay claim to being one thing above all other - a survivor.

The paper was founded in 1977 to give residents of the area south of Capitol Avenue a community paper of their own (see story on the founding of Southside Neighborhood News).

Lee Paquette, Southside's first editor, said that from the very beginning, the paper made a conscious effort to "report the news straight and save our opinions for the editorial page." Because Southside was an outgrowth of HART (Hartford Areas Rally Together), and in fact shared office space with the organization in the early days on Park Street, many people originally thought the paper would be little more than a mouthpiece for HART and other neighborhood groups. The first few issues of the paper changed a lot of minds. "A lot of people were surprised at the quality of the newspaper...that we were a decent, fair, competent newspaper that came out regularly," Paquette said.

Paquette said the paper's focus was on what was directly effecting neighborhood people, and there was never any shortage of stories. Southside rose in popularity because it covered issues and stories that the mainstream media was ignoring. One of the first issues the paper took on was auto insurance rates, which were (and are) much higher in Hartford than in the suburbs. "It was a very hot issue in the neighborhoods at the time, but the [Hartford] Courant really wasn't dealing with it," Paquette said.

While some slight changes were made in the insurance laws, Hartford's high auto insurance rates continue to be a problem.

Southside also went after more traditional news stories, of course, and soon became a force in city politics. One of the first big political stories the paper broke involved the 1979 mayoral race between incumbent Mayor George Athanson and Deputy Mayor Nick Carbone. "We were the first to indicate that Nick didn't have a chance," said Paquette. That opinion was based on what he termed "an extremely unscientific poll." Southside staffers called about 100 city residents at random and asked for their opinion on the race. Support for Athanson was so strong, Paquette said, the race was judged to be over before it started.

Over the years, Southside continued to cover the shifting alliances and infighting at Hartford City Hall, including the battles between Carbone and Deputy Mayor Robert Ludgin, the emergence of Thirman Milner, the city's first African-American Mayor, and later (after becoming The Hartford News) the rise and fall of Mayor Carrie Saxon Perry. Bill Doak, who started at Southside in 1980 as a student intern from Trinity College and left in 1987 as editor, said the paper never had any set agenda in terms of its political reporting. "We tried to be objective about what was going at city hall...sometimes it was flattering to the city and sometimes it wasn't." Doak is now editor of the East Hartford Gazette. But there is more to a city than social causes and battling politicians and the paper was always full of features on neighborhood people, businesses, cultural and community events and film and restaurant reviews. In 1978, Southside offered to do the official program for the first Franklin Avenue Festa and promoted the event heavily in the paper. "It was another case of us paying attention to something that the mainstream media wasn't," said Paquette. The Festa would go on to become one of the biggest events in Connecticut during the early and mid 80's. Eventually, said Doak, the Festa got too big and out of control that many local residents and merchants felt it was hurting the neighborhood more than helping it. After much discussion among residents, merchants and city officials, all of it reported in Southside, the Festa was shut down but it has made a comeback in recent years on a smaller scale.

While the paper's reputation grew more and more solid, its financial stability was another matter. Initially, SINA (the Southside Neighborhood Institutions Alliance) and a few other institutions had provided funding, but Pawlowski said it soon became apparent that this wouldn't be enough and the paper would have become self-supporting. To increase advertising sales, he said, "We had to focus on making it [Southside Neighborhood News] a more marketable vehicle...we had to get out and sell ads, we had to hustle." Because the paper had been started for idealistic rather than financial reasons, many of its staffers found this new approach "an extremely tough route," said Pawlowski.

The paper had originally focused on the Frog Hollow area, but Pawlowski said the decision was made to expand coverage of the South End area more because there were more viable businesses there at the time. Southside also began to publish more and more special issues in order to attract advertisers. In addition, revenue was raised by Southside Media, the company Pawlowski had created to publish the Southside Neighborhood News and which soon became one of the city's busiest publishing and graphic design firms.

Southside Goes City-wide: Birth of The Hartford News

Keeping Southside afloat during the late 70's and early 80's was always a struggle, said Pawlowski, who added that the city's poor economy at the time didn't help matters. Fortunately, the paper was still around in the mid 80's, when Hartford experienced one of the biggest economic booms in its history. As the city grew, so too did the Southside Neighborhood News. The paper had left its Park Street offices behind and was now located on Wethersfield Avenue. Talk began of expanding the paper city-wide and coming out on a weekly basis. Southside Media was already publishing the Hill Ink, which covered the Asylum Hill area. Pawlowski said he worked out a business plan for the expansion and had begun to increase the size of the staff. "The reality of it was the economy of Hartford at that time was literally exploding, a lot of development was happening. Economically it seemed to be the right move," he said. Pawlowski and many others both at the paper and throughout the city also felt that Hartford had a real need for a city-wide community newspaper.

In 1987, the paper did in fact go city-wide as The Hartford News. Pawlowski, however, decided to postpone coming out weekly for the time being. The Hartford News continued Southside's policy of reporting what was going on in the city's neighborhoods, although there were now a lot more neighborhoods to cover. Steve Walsh, another Trinity College intern, started at the paper in 1984 and left in 1993 as Managing Editor, said, "Hartford had the major media and then it had Southside and later The Hartford News. We were more of a community-based voice. We could call things as we saw them and weren't afraid to knock things around a bit."

One of the biggest issues during Walsh's time at the paper was the closing of South Catholic High School in 1991. A special edition of the paper was published on April 24, 1991, with an editorial blasting the Archdiocese of Hartford for its "lack of commitment to urban Catholic education" and predicting that closing the school would deal a major blow to the neighborhood. Despite this and a massive community-wide effort to prevent the closing, the Archdiocese went ahead with its plans and sold the building to the city. It is now South Middle School. "It was a real emotional and moral let-down. South was one of the things that really made this community work," said Walsh. In 1989, Pawlowski had sold The Hartford News, now located on Franklin Avenue, to the husband and wife team of Lynne Lumsden and Jon Harden, both of whom had been in the publishing business in New York City. Lumsden's father was the late Arthur Lumsden, who ran the Hartford Chamber of Commerce for many years. Shortly after they took over the paper, Lumsden and Harden began publishing The Hartford News on a weekly basis. As the paper had risen with the city's fortunes in the mid and late 80's, so too did it suffer along with Hartford's economic collapse in the early 90's. The paper's staff was decreased through attrition and the production process had to be speeded up by a switch-over from chemical-based to computer generated typesetting. In 1994, the paper moved to its present location at 191 Franklin Avenue. In 1993, Mike Peters, who had once worked part-time for Southside as an account executive, was elected Mayor of Hartford over Carrie Saxon Perry. Peters called for the city to pull together in order to work its way through the economic crisis. The Hartford News became somewhat more positive in tone and began to rely more heavily on photographs. In 1994, Janice Rossetti-Ford, who had been active in the Hartford community for many years, came on-board as a photographer, reporter and account executive. Janice, with camera in hand, soon became a familiar sight at schools throughout the city. Don Rully, a graduate of Syracuse University, also arrived around the same time as a free-lance writer and soon worked his way up to Associate Editor. In addition to political and general reporting, Rully added a regular sports column to the paper entitled "Eye on City Sports." The Hartford News made two more additions to the paper earlier this year, one looking back and one forward. "Tony DeBonee's Hartford," a series of photos of Hartford in years gone by was placed prominently on the front page and quickly became one of the paper's most popular features. In February, we began publishing El Reportero, a Spanish-language community paper, as part of The Hartford News. While many readers objected to the inclusion of El Reportero, we at the paper were willing to make the effort because they felt getting community news out to the widest audience possible is a major mission of The Hartford News.

The Hartford News will continue to change in order to reflect the needs and interests of the community it covers. Keeping the paper in business has always been difficult and probably always will be but, as the city begins to show signs of recovery, chances of The Hartford News celebrating its 30th Anniversary in 2007 seem better than ever. As Bob Pawlowski, the founder of the paper, said, "After 20 years and a lot of struggle to keep it going, I really think the paper has a bright future, a very bright future."