6 November—Hearty congratulations are in order for Hearst Connecticut Media. It’s only two days after Election Day, yet today’s editions of the chain’s moribund Connecticut rags, including but not limited to the notorious HearstRepublicanAmerican, already have what Hearst evidently passes off as early in-depth coverage of Tuesday’s local elections, however dilatory, cursory, and only vaguely informative that coverage may actually be.

Even Litchfield’s election got a mention today, however cursory and only vaguely informative (limited to the contest for first selectman)—and, par for the course, rather than real coverage. Also par for the course, the other Litchfield County towns in Regional School District 20—Goshen, Morris, and Warren—didn’t even get so much as a mention. Nor did several other towns in the moribund HearstRepublicanAmerican’s underserved and consequently shrinking readership area.

Hearst’s website (hearstmediact.com) boasts that its “news products have a serious journalistic commitment to provide local, watchdog and investigative reporting that impacts the communities they serve.” But that’s intended to attract advertisers, of course, whose revenue is the life blood of virtually all print and other media, along with sales of obituaries—the bigger, the more lucrative—in newspapers. Revenue generated by sales to subscribers and other readers is essentially icing on the cake, and attracting and maintaining readership is primarily a means to the end of generating advertising revenue.

Hearst Connecticut Media, it must be said, does in fact publish some halfway decent investigative reporting. But that’s the exception rather than the rule. And its impact on the communities its “news products” serve is questionable at best.

Hearst’s publications in Connecticut—none of which can seriously be considered news products—are several daily and weekly rags and Connecticut Magazine as well as their digital offshoots. Fifty-four-year-old Connecticut Magazine has been a glitzy fluff gazette rather than a news product since well before Hearst bought it 2017. Hearst also owns 20 percent of Disney-ABC’s ESPN, which is headquartered in Bristol.

And Hearst’s “serious journalistic commitment” is a far more serious commitment to the bottom line of the Hearst family, which still owns and controls the media empire founded by William Randolph Hearst in 1887. As Hearst put it perceptively, succinctly, and rather brilliantly, “News is what people don’t want you to print. Everything else is ads.”