Charles Kochakian retired as editorial page editor of the New Haven Register on Friday and was deservedly celebrated by colleagues and community leaders for his leadership on issues facing Greater New Haven and Connecticut over the past several decades.
In a well-done tribute by the Register’s Ed Stannard, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. described Kochakian as holding “true to a compass that served to build a great community and a great region.”
We’re pleased to welcome several key new staff members at The Register Citizen in Torrington.
Tom Cleary has joined us as co-managing editor.
Peter Paguaga has been named sports editor.
And Kate Hartman has started work as a staff reporter covering the city hall beat in Torrington.
Cleary was most recently a breaking news reporter for the Connecticut Post in Bridgeport and part of the breaking news team that drove digital news content and managed social media accounts at Hearst’s Connecticut newspapers.
Tom Cleary
Prior to joining the Connecticut Post in December 2010, Cleary worked as a reporter for the Fairfield Citizen. He is a graduate of Fairfield University, where he was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, the Fairfield Mirror. He was previously managing editor and s
Peter Paguaga
ports editor of that paper.
Paguaga is a graduate of Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, where he served as sports editor of the Southern News.
He has worked as a freelance reporter a the Babylon Beacon and The Daily Voice in Babylon and Mamaroneck, N.Y., and served as a media intern for the Bridgeport Sound Tigers hockey team.
For three years, Paguaga was “Sparky the Dragon,” a mascot who entertained at New York Islanders NHL games.
Hartman is a graduate of Temple University, where she concentrated in magazine writing.
Kate Hartman
She has worked as a freelance writer for Philadelphia Weekly, the Reading Eagle and the Philly Post and as an intern at Philadelphia Magazine, Barks County Living Magazine in Pennsylvania and The Hampstead and Highgate Express in London.
You can follow Cleary on Twitter @tomwcleary, Paguaga at @PetePaguaga and Hartman at @HartmanRegister.
This morning the company I work for, Digital First Media, announced that one of our daily newspapers, the Oneida Daily Dispatch in upstate New York, will switch to a three-day publishing cycle.
Our employees and readers in Connecticut might be wondering if this is a possibility for the New Haven Register, The Register Citizen or The Middletown Press. The short answer is, “I don’t know,” “unlikely in the immediate future,” and “I’m not afraid of it if that day comes.”
In the past, print circulation revenue’s share of the pie vs. advertising revenue has scuttled discussions of reducing print frequency of our dailies in Connecticut. I’ve done the math.
But that math is changing across the country, and if the day comes when it makes more sense for us to publish five days, or three days, instead of seven, why wouldn’t we make that switch?
The impetus for change in Oneida came from a competitor’s switch to three days. The Advance Publications daily in Syracuse is switching to three days, and we contract with Syracuse to print and deliver the Oneida Daily Dispatch.
Considering the difficulty of finding a new printer and distributor, we did the math on our own switch to three days and it made sense.
Here are the other reasons it makes sense:
Unlike what you might have heard about the New Orleans Times-Picayune‘s switch to three days, where local journalism resources were gutted, newsroom staffing in Oneida will remain intact.
At the same time, our newsrooms in Connecticut are taking over page layout for the new three-day Oneida print edition. With the same size staff, and no print edition layout sapping the resources of a small newsroom anymore, Oneida will have significantly more resources than before to devote to local journalism.
Oneida’s staff plans to use this new capacity to do more local enterprise and investigative reporting, more comprehensive coverage of local government and new local human interest features.
In considering this issue about reducing print frequency, note that the web audience of newspapers such as the Oneida Daily Dispatch, Register Citizen and Middletown Press is six or seven times the size of their print editions. The launch over the past year of iPad and iPhone/Android apps in Oneida and our other daily newspaper markets is causing that gap to accelerate. Our local news coverage is being introduced to a significantly wider audience through mobile and tablet platforms. In Oneida, those apps present a dynamic alternative for consuming local news as print frequency is reduced.
With the increase in breaking, multimedia and interactive local news coverage, the daily print edition is more and more “outdated.” Printing seven days is about a declining print readership habit, not at all about timeliness of news delivery.
The big question is whether local journalism will improve, decline or stay the same when dailies make this switch to three days.
It’s exciting to see Oneida take a different path than New Orleans by maintaining staffing and being freed up to do better local journalism as part of this switch.
Basic health and safety is something we should be able to take for granted arriving for work each day.
We expect no less for the reporters, photographers and editors who help us bring you the news each day.
So it is with great concern that we call attention to the assault of a young reporter outside the Middlesex County Courthouse in Middletown on Monday. She was there just trying to do her job – reporting on a bomb threat at a local school that sparked fear and chaos in the wake of the mass shooting last month in Newtown.
For that, she was shoved to the ground, from behind, and had to be taken to the hospital for evaluation.
Connecticut State Police have since arrested the father of the young man accused in the bomb threat case and charged him with assault.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time something like this has happened to a journalist in The Middletown Press. In fact, it happened earlier this year on that same sidewalk when someone shoved one of our photographers, grabbed her camera and spit on her. She was there to cover the case of a local man accused of stabbing alpacas at a local farm a sex assault trial.
It’s been a difficult and at times scary few months for our journalists in Connecticut. We were working around the clock, under makeshift conditions, and out in the darkness and rain to keep readers connected to emergency information during Hurricane Sandy.
And then we confronted something a million times worse in covering the Newtown shooting and the funeral after funeral that followed for victims who reminded us of our own children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews.
Our reporters and photographers press on in the face of insults, constant second-guessing and critique, and anger from those who do not want a light aimed at their situation.
The Journal News, a daily newspaper across the border in New York, recently hired security guards to protect its journalists from death threats in the wake of its decision to publish a list of all gun permit holders in its coverage area.
Media organizations are far from perfect, and much has been written questioning the wisdom and rationale behind that newspaper’s gun list. But we’d urge people who speak up for gun rights from a “keep government power in check” standpoint to reflect on our country’s most powerful weapon against unlimited government power. It’s the free flow of information about what the government is doing – the kind of work our journalists in Middletown do in covering the police and courts, and although arguably misguided in this case, the Journal News’ use of the Freedom of Information Act.
We applaud the Connecticut State Police for taking the assault on our reporter seriously on Monday and making an arrest. A crime was committed, of course, and they did their job to enforce the law. But they also recognized, implicitly, that reporter’s place alongside police, prosecutor, judge and defense attorney in the process of delivering justice and protecting the public’s interest.
There will be a lot more to say – at some point – about what has been both the worst and best week of our careers in journalism. Our main concern right now is to make sure that the rest of the story of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and its aftermath is told. That’s going to take quite some time, and quite a bit more effort and resources. And to make sure that the people on our team, after nine days of interviewing witnesses to unspeakable horror and covering 6-year-olds’ funerals, are dealing with their own grief and trauma.
But I wanted to pause and take note of how remarkable it was for us to see our entire company come together to help us cover this story. More than 100 journalists have been involved in the New Haven Register’s Newtown coverage over the past week, including 55 reporters, 17 photographers and 10 main editors on the ground in Connecticut contributing to our coverage.
A number of Register reporters and editors worked straight through from first word of the shooting Friday morning to the editing of the story about the final funeral eight days later.
Digital First Media sent 29 reporters and eight photographers from 17 different daily newspapers in Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Colorado and Connecticut, including a team of six from the Denver Post, six from the York Daily Record in Pennsylvania and five from the Lowell Sun in Massachusetts.
The company’s national news office, “Thunderdome,” sent five reporters, five editors, two web producers and a video specialist, and devoted more than a dozen others to help from afar on editing, web production, data and interactives.
And throughout, we had access, advice and assistance from company leaders who’d unfortunately done this before.
Jim McClure, editor of the York Daily Record and East Region editor for Digital First, organized the influx of support from out-of-town journalists for us and was on the ground in Connecticut drawing on his experience covering a 2001 machete attack on a Pennsylvania elementary school. Photographer Tom Kelly IV of the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pa., came with experience covering the Nickel Mines Amish elementary school shooting in 2006.
Helping at our makeshift newsroom just outside of Newtown this past week was Mike Topel, national editor at Digital First Media’s Thunderdome office in New York. He helped lead the AP’s coverage of Columbine in 1999.
Frank Scandale, Digital First’s vice president of print production, helped lead the Denver Post’s Columbine coverage as metro editor. He offered advice from afar and then arrived in New Haven mid-week to help plan a special print edition encapsulating more than a week’s worth of coverage for the Sunday newspaper.
And we were also able to turn to Denver Post Editor Greg Moore, who led intense coverage of the Aurora movie theater shooting earlier this year, and Digital First Editor-in-Chief Jim Brady, who was leading WashingtonPost.Com during the Virginia Tech massacre.
Journal Register Co. recently welcomed three new reporters in Connecticut.
Mike Bellmore and Ebony Walmsley have joined the staff of the New Haven Register, and Sarah Bogues has joined the staff of The Register Citizen.
Mike Bellmore
Bellmore graduated cum laude in the spring from Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.
He was a New Haven Register intern in 2011, and has also written for the Southern News, Hamden Community News, CTIndie.com and ColonyofGamers.com.
He is a Hamden native who will be covering Hamden and North Haven for the Register. He can be reached at 203-789-5716 or mbellmore@nhregister.com. Follow him on Twitter @bandango.
Ebony Walmsley
Walmsley holds a degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University, where she was a staff writer for The Chronicle and served as secretary of the Black Student Union. She has interned for the Westerly Sun in Rhode Island and freelanced for RI Local magazine.
She will be covering Guiford and Madison for the Register. She can be reached at 203-789-5734 or ewalmsley@nhregister.com. Follow her on Twitter @nhebony12.
Sarah Bogues
Bogues graduated from Central Connecticut State University in the spring with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. At CCSU, she was a staff writer for The Recorder, managing editor of the Helix literary magazine and president of the college’s chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
She will be covering New Hartford, Barkhamsted, Harwinton, Burlington and Canton for The Register Citizen. She can be reached at 860-489-3121, ext. 328, or sbogues@registercitizen.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarahbogues27.
Ben Doody will re-join Journal Register Co. in a few weeks as managing editor of our Connecticut cluster.
Ben is presently digital news editor of Hearst’s Connecticut newspapers, including the Connecticut Post in Bridgeport, the Danbury News-Times, the Greenwich Time and the Stamford Advocate.
Ben Doody
Previously, he worked for JRC as assistant sports editor at The Trentonian in New Jersey for more than three years, and he was chosen as an inaugural member of JRC’s “Idea Lab” thanks to his innovative work there with social media, live blogging and comprehensive local and college sports coverage.
Ben holds a bachelor’s degree in English and journalism from Fairfield University and was editor-in-chief of its weekly newspaper, the Fairfield Mirror.
While still at the Trentonian, Ben started to cross over to become more involved in regular news coverage vs. just sports, and at Hearst, he started out as morning news editor overseeing breaking news coverage statewide before being promoted to a wider digital news role.
In the new role with JRC Connecticut, he’ll help the group editor coordinate statewide news coverage and continue our reorganization around breaking news, community engagement and investigative and enterprise reporting. He’ll also lead the cluster’s transition to redesigned print editions and redesigned web sites and oversee training and career development of Connecticut newsroom staff.
Matt DeRienzo is group editor of Journal Register Company's publications in Connecticut, including the New Haven Register, Middletown Press, The Register Citizen of Torrington and non-daily publications including Connecticut Magazine, the Litchfield County Times and West Hartford News. Contact him at mderienzo@journalregister.com.
