HARTFORD, Conn.– After trying to buck a national trend of media closures and downsizing, a small Connecticut newspaper founded earlier this year with the help of Ralph Nader has succumbed to financial problems and will close.
An oversight board voted Monday to close the Winsted Citizen, a broadsheet that has served Nader’s hometown and the surrounding area in the state’s northwestern hills since February.
Andy Thibault, a veteran journalist who led the paper as editor and publisher, announced the closure in a memo to staff.
“We beat the Grim Reaper every month for most of the year,” Thibault wrote. “Our best financial month resulted in our lowest deficit. Now, unfortunately, our search has become the impossible dream. It sure was great – despite countless stumbles, obstacles and heartache – while it lasted.”
Nader, 89, the noted consumer advocate and four-time presidential candidate, did not answer the phone at his Winsted home Monday morning.
The Citizen’s fate is similar to that of other newspapers that have collapsed at an alarming rate due to declining advertising and circulation revenues. The U.S. has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers since 2005, including more than 130 confirmed closures or mergers in the past year, according to a report published this month by the Northwestern/Medill Local News Initiative.
By the end of next year, about a third of U.S. newspapers are expected to have closed since 2005, the report said.
In an interview with The Associated Press in February, Nader lamented the losses of the long-gone Winsted daily newspaper he produced as a child and a modern successor that ceased publication in 2017.
“After a while it all solidifies and you start to lose the history,” he said. “Every year that you no longer have a newspaper, you lose that connection.”
Nader had hoped that the Citizen would become a model for the country. He said people were tired of reading news online and missed the feeling of holding a newspaper to read about their city. He invested $15,000 to start it up, and the plan was to have advertising, donations and subscriptions support monthly editions.
The newspaper published nine editions and listed 17 reporters in its early mastheads. The motto is: “It’s your paper. We work for you.”
In his memo to staff, Thibault said the Citizen managed to increase advertising revenue and circulation but could not overcome an “unsustainable deficit.”
“Many staff members became donors of services rather than wage earners,” he wrote. “This was the result of undercapitalization.”
The money problems seemed to have started early. Funding for the second edition fell through and the Citizen partnered with the online news provider ctexaminer.com, which posted Citizen stories while the newspaper shared CT Examiner articles, Thibault said.
Thibault said CT Examiner has agreed to consider publishing work by former Citizen staffers.
The Citizen was overseen by the nonprofit Connecticut News Consortium, whose board of directors voted to close it Monday.