Danbury NewsTimes and New Milford Spectrum Bought Up by Hearst

ctblogger at HatCityBLOG catches a blurb on the sale of pretty much the only source of dead-tree media in the Danbury/New Milford area:

The game of musical chairs is being played again.

Bridgeport (AP) -- Hearst Corp. has purchased the Connecticut Post in Bridgeport and seven weekly newspapers in the state from MediaNews Group Inc.

[...]

The weeklies that Hearst acquired are the Darien News-Review, Greenwich Citizen, Fairfield Citizen-News, New Canaan News-Review, New Milford Spectrum, Norwalk Citizen-News and Westport News.

With the acquisition, Hearst also assumes management of three daily newspapers in Fairfield County: The Advocate of Stamford, Greenwich Time and The News-Times of Danbury.

What will this mean for the News-Times? Hearst is a totally different outfit from MediaNews Group so expect to see some changes. As for their on-line content, all the newspapers in the MediaNews family basically had the same format and look so you might see changes in the layout of the News-Times online edition as well.

Whatever the case, lets just say that there's no love lost between bloggers and the shameless MediaNews Group for obvious reasons and I'll take anything other than that company in Connecticut.

To say there is no love lost is certainly no misrepresentation of the truth. The people - left, right and center - have given up on the media. These papers systemic failures grounded in their ideology of putting corporations' needs over the needs and rights of the readers these papers are supposed to be protecting as a crucial and fundamental aspect Democracy in a free nation have allowed a continued corruption of the political system they should be holding in check.

To the great benefit of corporations - and incompetent, criminal and failed politicians and their continued radical policies - these papers have enabled and cheered on failures like: the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq based on a pack of lies; the deterioration of privacy rights in a nation that used to be a model of freedom to be emulated worldwide; the destruction of civil dialog on a myriad of important issues facing this nation - only to be buried by trivial aspects of celebrity pop culture; even further destruction of civil dialog by lending what little space they devote to news - as opposed to the vast quantities of space devoted to advertising, infotainment and further advertisements camouflaged as news - to extremist views that are so far removed from the public interest and meant only to divide the nation further for political purposes.

In the long run, I don't see there being any great benefit for the local area. Perhaps with a new layout online they might incorporate a better system of controlling the constant flow of local bigoted hate-mongers that flood their comment sections? But in the end, it is just one homogenized and sanitized corporate view being replaced by another homogenized and sanitized corporate view.

Unless they seriously invest in local assets to actually cover the local and national news with real, hard-nosed journalism that truly, realistically and faithfully benefits the people they are supposed to serve... The medias' shameful and merited decline into extinction will continue regardless of who owns these papers.