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Scouring 4,399 sources for Hartland news so you don't have to.
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Tourist spots report flat or lower visitor numbers
Found: 5 Days 1 Hour 12 Minutes ago
Boston Globe - Operators of several Connecticut tourist destinations say attendance was flat or slightly down this summer, despite the state's campaign encouraging residents to visit the local attractions....
Trooper Injured In Collision
Found: 5 Days 8 Hours 28 Minutes ago
Hartford Courant - A state trooper was treated for possible neck and back injuries at Hartford Hospital Sunday after his cruiser collided head-on in Tolland with a car driven by a Pennsylvania motorist....
Rell's 'Staycation' Program Ends, But Did It Work?
Found: 5 Days 12 Hours 39 Minutes ago
Hartford Courant - Ever since Doug Skow was a toddler, he's spent nearly every summer camping in New Hampshire. But because of the rising price of gasoline this summer, Skow and his wife, Donna, couldn't afford to drive their camper that far....
Trooper Injured In I-84 Crash
Found: 5 Days 17 Hours 28 Minutes ago
Eyewitness News - A trooper is injured when his cruiser and an SUV collide on an entrance ramp to Interstate 84....
Windsor's First Day Of Class Said To Go Smoothly
Found: 1 Week 3 Days 11 Hours 35 Minutes ago
Hartford Courant - The first day of school for more than 4,000 town students went smoothly, officials said. Tuesday also was the first day for principals in three town schools, including Windsor High School....
Tolland Town Hall Moves To Friday Closure
Found: 1 Week 3 Days 21 Hours 26 Minutes ago
Eyewitness News - As a result of energy costs going up, the Tolland Town Hall has cut Fridays from its work week....
City Schools Opening Some New Doors
Found: 1 Week 4 Days 6 Hours 59 Minutes ago
Hartford Courant - Mrs. Rubb ushered her 16 pupils to the rug, helped them practice saying "good morning" to one another, then pulled out a book: "The Night Before Kindergarten."...
Future of newspaper business rests in the hands of the readership
Found: 2 Weeks 17 Hours 2 Minutes ago
The Hour - Forty years ago this week the Journal Inquirer became a daily afternoon newspaper and published its first edition, merging the weekly paper that had served the Rockville area (the Journal, founded a hundred years earlier) and the weekly that for the last few years had served South and East Windsor (the Inquirer). My memory of the day, a Monday, is less than heroic, involving only my delivering bundles of papers to carriers in Tolland long after dark -- more than four hours late. While the new daily paper's press run was less than 4,000, getting even that many copies to subscribers while there was still natural light to read by proved too much on the first day.
The JI is now based in Man-chester, has 10 times as many subscribers, served 17 towns instead of the original five and delivers the goods more reliably. The paper has greatly democratized power in its circulation area, having helped to overturn political and bureaucratic cliques at the municipal level and having done the original investigative reporting and editorial clamor that led to the removal of a corrupt governor. The paper has publicized thousands of good causes and thereby has strengthened the communities it serves. Along the way it has made some enemies, as when it caught a zoning official in a conflict of interest and went on to win the unanimous decision from the Connec-ticut Supreme Court that stands as the governing precedent for press freedom in the state. But then a newspaper without enemies is only one that avoids controversy, and the most important news is often controversial.
For many years after the JI's founding, the big speculation in journalism in Connecticut was that the JI would be sold or closed. For in 1968 and thereafter it seem-ed inconceivable that a daily news- paper could start up and survive for long, much less grow and prosper. Yet the JI did so and remains in the hands of its original owners, the Ellis family of Manches-ter, even as the JI's immediate competitors met the fates often forecast for the JI. The Hartford Times was sold and then closed. The Manchester Herald was sold and then closed. The Hartford Courant has been sold twice and lately discontinued most local reporting east of the Connecticut River. Indeed, most daily papers in Connecticut have been sold to newspaper chains at least once since 1968, some as many as three times. While local ownership is no guarantee of good journalism, in Connecticut the trend away from local ownership to chain ownership has generally meant a decline in local coverage, and thus a decline in community.
Now, with new technology providing mechanisms for instantaneous electronic delivery of news and all sorts of information, and with the national economy collapsing, the newspaper business is under more financial pressure than it endured with the rise of radio in the 1920s and the rise of television in the 1950s. If they want, people now can spend all their free time on the Internet pursuing the particular topics that interest them most -- a sports team, the stock market, taxidermy, whatever. This is wonderful for connecting people with communities of interest around the world, but it also can disconnect them from their physical community, their town and their state, and from topics in which they don't have particular interest but probably should start taking some interest.
There will always be a compel-ling need for a mechanism of local community, something that re-quires people at least to glance at developments they would not otherwise go looking to learn about. It's hard to imagine what the mechanism is going to be if not a newspaper. Advertisers, especially local and regional ones, need such a mechanism as well, since for advertising on the Internet can provide little more than directories.
But local news is the most expensive sort of news, the news of use to the smallest audience. Few news reports from one town will be of much interest to anyone living in a town more than a few miles away. That's why a critical mass of people has to want to know what's going on locally and has to demonstrate that desire by reading newspapers, or there may not be any reliable mechanism enabling anyone to know what's happening close to home. That is, whether newspapers survive the latest blast of technological change may be a measure of a community's concern for itself.
Connecticut remains full of people dedicated to their communities, but there can never be enough. So where the newspaper business is going is largely up to you.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
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Ex-prosecutor to serve time for forgery
Found: 4 Weeks 1 Day 23 Hours 8 Minutes ago
Connecticut Post - MILFORD — A man whose job it was to put people in jail faces time behind bars himself after pleading no contest Wednesday to charges he stole more than $55,000 meant for victims and charities...
Man Accused Of Granby Burglaries Surrenders
Found: 1 Month 3 Days 2 Hours 24 Minutes ago
NBC 30 News - A Massachusetts man accused of burglaries in Granby surrendered to police Thursday....
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