Older Than the Nation

By: Rich Kane

If The Hartford Courant intends to serve a cake with blazing candles at its October birthday party, the city’s fire marshal will probably need to get involved. It’s not every day that a newspaper turns The Big 2-5-0.

Indeed, the Connecticut daily is marking its 250th birthday this year—not merely one of the oldest newspapers in the United States, but one that’s older than the country itself. And in a current print media climate with much uncertainty, that’s an anniversary to be roundly applauded.

“We’d been talking about how to mark the anniversary since early 2013,” said Courant editor Andrew Julien. “We asked ourselves, ‘what did we want to accomplish, what did we want to use the occasion to say, to our readers and the community?’”

The result so far has been a fascinating glimpse into not just the Courant’s past, but the history of the city, state and nation as well.

Themed looking-back anniversary issues have been published monthly since January and will continue through December, with special focus on topics such as the arts, weather, sports, crime and race. The city’s Fox affiliate has been airing Courant-branded “Hidden History” video segments, which can be accessed through a portal on the paper’s website. Historical cartoons lifted from the Courant catacombs are the paper’s contribution to the Throwback Thursday meme. Twitter users have gotten plenty of posting mileage from the #Courant250 hashtag.

And daily on the Courant website, there’s a “This Day in History” post, featuring screen grabs of old front pages with type sizes so impossibly small, you’ll swear that pre-20th-century newspaper readers went around squinting all day.

Julien notes that the anniversary has not only been a reason for looking back over 250 years, but it’s also been a platform for addressing questions Courant readers are grappling with in 2014.

“For example, a lot of people drive through Connecticut, and in the ‘50s, we moved to a suburban car culture, and that changed how we related to each other. You weren’t really running into people anymore one-on-one, and now people are asking how they can get that connection back,” he said.

On the business side, clients have also been partaking in the year-long party.

“Advertisers are extremely engaged and using our historic content as part of their messaging,” said Courant vice president of advertising Mary Lou Stoneburner. “We have gained quite a few new advertisers who wanted to be associated with the significance and importance of our anniversary.”

The sestercentennial commemorations will culminate in October with a gala celebration and an exhibition at the Connecticut Historical Society. The paper will mark its actual Oct. 29th birth date with a special edition.

“We’ve always been the storytellers of Connecticut,” Julien said, “telling stories of hope, triumph and tragedy, in black and white in the 1800s, in full color in the 1980s, and into digital platforms and technologies. This has been our consistent mission as long as we’ve been around.