January/February 2001

January/February 2001 | Contents

The Times of The Day

BY MATTHEW SCHUERMAN

The Day Paper: The Story of One of America's Last Independent Newspapers
by Gregory N. Stone
Day Publishing Company. 499 pp. $29.95

Throughout the twentieth century, as one newspaper after another was bought up by corporate chains or put out of business, a small daily on the shore of Long Island Sound lived a comparatively blessed existence. The Day, published in New London, Connecticut, was owned not by a family or by shareholders but by a trust operated by five board members who answered to no one but themselves. The terms of the trust made it almost impossible to sell, and without the pressure to produce dividends for stockholders, most of the profits were poured back into the paper itself.

This unique arrangement, Gregory N. Stone recounts, was dreamed up by Theodore Bodenwein, a German immigrant who bought The Day when it was struggling in 1891 and nursed it back to life. He was a businessman more than a journalist, and in fact scorned the muckrakers of his time. His business acumen led The Day to monopolize local news and play a central role in the life of the small city. In a world without television, the paper would post baseball scores in its front windows and project vote tallies on a wall across the street on election night. During a hurricane in 1938, The Day maintained the one connection to the outside world with a telephone line to The Associated Press. Bodenwein, fearing what would happen if his treasure fell into the hands of his heirs, who bickered with one another and did not know much about the newspaper business anyway, established The Day Trust in his will. When he died in 1939, his son contested the arrangement. But unlike Joseph Pulitzer's will, which was intended to keep the New York World from being sold, Bodenwein's stood up in court.

Sixty-two years later, The Day, where I worked as a reporter from 1994 to 1998, is reaping the bounty of trust ownership. With a circulation of about 45,000, its newsroom staff numbers around seventy, and its press is state-of-the-art. The Day consistently ranks among the best small papers in New England. (It also ended up on cjr's list of the top 100 dailies in 1999.) The paper long ago beat back the Hartford Courant from southeastern Connecticut and is now encroaching on territory held by the Gannett-owned Norwich Bulletin. Under the terms of Bodenwein's will, The Day Trust gives a portion of its profits to local municipalities and nonprofit groups through a foundation. This act of charity inspires in many newsmakers around town a certain awe, impressing upon them that The Day is engaged in a higher calling than grabbing headlines.

The Day's role in community life has not always made for sound journalism. In Bodenwein's era, the publisher would act as both counsel and publicist to the town fathers' latest projects. More recently, the paper has tried with uneven results to play both watchdog and cheerleader. After an investigation in 1969 irritated the Coast Guard Academy superintendent, The Day assigned an intern to write a puff piece on the school in recompense. The intern refused to write the article and was fired. In the 1990s, reporters were not afraid to go after big employers in the region. But when Pfizer Inc. decided to expand its research headquarters in revenue-hungry New London, The Day put its news staff to work on a commemorative section celebrating the pharmaceutical company's fifty years in the region. Bodenwein had also realized the ad revenues that special editions could generate, but his editions observed only The Day's own anniversaries.

The Pfizer supplement did not make it into Stone's book. But many other instances of dubious news judgment did, which says a lot considering that Stone is The Day's deputy editorial page editor and the newspaper published the book. In fact, the main drawback of the book has nothing to do with what is left out but rather with what is left in -- namely, numerous repetitions and tangents that a stronger editor would have cut. Stone describes newsroom romances that brought down two managing editors and documents the nepotism that persists to this day. He also goes so far as to call the current publisher, Reid MacCluggage, a self-promoter. These details may sound parochial to readers who are used to hearing about titanic struggles waged by the Sulzbergers of the world. But they are exactly the types of untold stories that hundreds of small newspapers experience every day, no matter who owns them, and which rarely get included in any accounting of how American journalism really works.

Matthew Schuerman is a free-lance writer living in Brooklyn.