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39 CHAPTER THREE Rebooting the Register Randall Beach walked into the coffee shop where I was waiting and stuck that day’s New Haven Register in front of my nose. A veteran reporter and columnist for the Register, Beach had asked that we meet at a spot near New Haven Superior Court, where he spends much of his working day. Thin, white-haired, and tieless, Randy Beach looked like a reporter. It didn’t take long for us to find each other. What had Beach all worked up was page A3, an advertising-free sanctuary set aside for New Haven news. Or at least it had been ad-free. On this day, in the early spring of 2011, a good deal of space was taken up with ads, intruding on one of the few places in the paper where readers knew they could find a decent amount of city coverage. He also told me he had learned that the width of the paper would soon be shrunk as a cost-cutting move, making it as narrow as the Hartford Courant. That weekend I got out a ruler and determined that the Register was twelve and a half inches wide, the Courant eleven. Twelve and a half is fairly typical these days, though narrower than most newspapers were, say, a decade ago. The New York Times is twelve inches wide. Eleven is narrow indeed—and, by summer , the Register had in fact shrunk to that width. Beach’s career spanned the heights to which the newspaper industry had risen in the 1970s all the way down to its current precarious state. A native of Westchester County, New York, he had been with the Register off and on since 1977. In those days New Haven had two papers, the afternoon 40 CHAPT ER THREE Register and the morning Journal-Courier, both owned by the heirs of John Day Jackson. The Jacksons were notorious for their right-wing politics and authoritarian style. The Hartford Courant once reported that the family patriarch “was disliked by many of his readers” and “was widely criticized for publishing only those stories he wanted to see in type.”1 In Beach’s telling , though, the Jacksons represented something of a golden era for New Haven newspapering. “At least the Jacksons were of the community. They cared about the community. They didn’t care to spread their wealth to the reporters,” he said. “But you can’t replace that hometown ownership.”2 In those days reporters at the Register and the Journal-Courier shared desks. Beach worked from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., and would be leaving for the day as Journal-Courier reporters were beginning their shift. Despite the common ownership (and furniture), the two papers competed. “You’d try to cover up your notes and not talk too loud when the Journal-Courier people came in,” he said. What Beach remembered most fondly were the time and available resources . There was no twenty-four-hour news cycle, no Internet. Reporters wrote their stories on electric typewriters. A full-time reporter covered nothing but higher education. Another reporter covered utilities. The paper had several bureaus in the suburbs; by 2011 there was none. “In retrospect ,” Beach said, “it looks so relaxed.” There is little time for journalists to relax today, either at the New Haven Register or anywhere else. Newspaper owners are trying to hang on and find new ways of making money before technological advances, cultural and social changes, and a faltering economy sweep them away. And the Register has embraced an online strategy that represents what many believe may be the future of newspapering. The Register—against all odds, given its long and not particularly distinguished history—found itself in 2011 at the forefront of a closely watched attempt to reinvent the newspaper business. Its corporate owner is the Journal Register Company, based in Yardley, Pennsylvania. Under John Paton, its charismatic chief executive, JRC, as the company is known, has embraced what Paton calls a “Digital First” philosophy. It’s even the name of Paton’s blog. The idea behind “Digital First” is to morph as quickly as possible from a business model that is dependent mainly on print to one in which both the journalism and the revenues are focused on the Internet. It is a model that makes an old print guy like Randy Beach uneasy, and Paton himself has admitted there is no guarantee it will work.3 But given the...

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