13 December—Arthur Carter was 93 when he died last Sunday. In addition to everything else he did, he founded the Litchfield County Times in 1981. LCT was a broadsheet weekly to be proud of back then: top-notch reporting, top-notch editing, diligent proofreading, magnificent double-crostic puzzle. Worthwhile advertising, too. It was always a pleasure to contribute to, participate in, and read the Litchfield County Times.

That ended when Arthur Carter sold LCT to the Journal Register Company in 2001. JRC had in 1998 bought Housatonic Valley Publishing, which, among other creditable and really local rags, produced the weekly Litchfield Enquirer, from a group headed by Walter (“Trip,” of course) Rothschild III.

Suffice to say, JRC’s new chain-mentality, bean-counting business model motivated reduction and consolidation of facilities as well as the mass exodus of staff from LCT and other publications across the board, although some good people stayed on in a vain effort to preserve at least something of serious local journalism. Sadly, though, it was downhill for LCT, as it was for all JRC’s newspapers.

And JRC itself essentially folded in 2013 and sold its assets to an especially despicable hedge fund called Alden Global Capital. Through the Tribune Publishing Company, which is bought in 2021, Alden also owns and has desecrated the Hartford Courant.

Alden Global Capital, being a predatory hedge fund—all hedge funds are predatory, of course—isn’t in the journalism business. But, through buying—raiding, stealing, take your choice—distressed newspapers and stripping their juiciest material assets, it’s none the less America’s second largest newspaper chain after Gannett. You may recall that Alden had attempted an unsuccessful hostile takeover of Gannett (now called USA Today Co.) in 2019.

Getting back to the Litchfield County Times, then, it’s one of the juiciest-material-asset-stripped moribund newspapers Hearst bought from Alden. Just like it bought the moribund RepublicanAmerican from the Papes. At least Hearst purports to be in the journalism business, however tangential it may be to bean counting. So that makes the Hearst Litchfield County Times a sister rag of the Hearst RepublicanAmerican. Is that a big wow?

As for Arthur Carter, a few years after he’d started the Litchfield County Times, he shifted his interest to the New York Observer, another weekly. He sold that to Jared Kushner in 2006. And after Jared’s father-in-law slithered into the White House, Jared sold it to his non-Trump brother-in-law. It went from broadsheet to tabloid and then to online only.

Good timing. Arthur Carter knew what he was doing . . .