Hearst Connecticut Media Group has reported it is in talks to acquire the Journal Inquirer, an independently owned daily newspaper in Manchester, Hartford County.
“In anticipation of an agreement to acquire the Journal Inquirer, we are excited about the prospect of integrating the Journal Inquirer into the Hearst Connecticut Media Group,” said Mike DeLuca, the company”™s group publisher and president, in a statement published in his newspapers.
The Journal Inquirer was founded in 1968 by Neil and Elizabeth Ellis in 1968 with the merger of the weekly Rockville Journal and South Windsor Inquirer. The newspaper, a tabloid that is published six days a week, has an estimated circulation of approximately 31,000.
The Journal Inquirer has generated controversy over the years from columns by former managing editor Chris Powell that some readers considered to be hostile to Blacks and Hispanics. In 2013, Powell published a column which blamed the decline in traditional newspaper publishing on “households headed by single women who have several children by different fathers, survive on welfare stipends, can hardly speak or read English, move every few months to cheat their landlords, barely know what town they”™re living in, and couldn”™t afford a newspaper subscription even if they could read.”
Last March, Powell”™s column “Hayes pretends health crisis is racism when it’s poverty” defined U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes as “formerly a single teen-age mother.” In April, his column “Faulty presumption of racism may nullify rules for driving” Powell cited unidentified “criminal-justice data, which shows that all crime is racially disproportionate, with members of minority groups committing more of it.”
DeLuca did not say if Powell would remain a columnist under Hearst”™s ownership, but claimed his company would “remain steadfast in our commitment to preserving the integrity and quality of local journalism.”
Photo courtesy of the Journal Inquirer
