PSA: Herald and Bristol Press go under?

As the Hartford Courant has reported today, the Herald (New Britain, CT) and the Bristol Press newspapers, owned by the Journal Register Company, are up for sale.

Or they should be.

Instead of trying to sell the papers as the assets to the communities they serve that they are -- or that they would be if they were properly staffed in any department, or, say, had a Web platform chosen by actual people instead of by some sort of bizarre lottery that included only terrible, terrible options, as though by a robot determined to take over the world by inflicting alternating tedium and confusion on readers -- JRC seems determined to let the Herald and Bristol Press go down without any kind of fight.

They're not in negotiations with any buyers, said publisher Ed Gunderson, according to the Courant, and it seems they're not interested in beginning any.

JRC announced that it wanted to sell the Herald building months ago, to make way for a greenway, residential and retail buildings in the center of New Britain as part of the city's revitalization plan.

They're also not interested in printing the only story in town today -- their own -- despite the Courant's coverage, ABC Channel 8 filming outside the building this morning, and multiple calls and visitors who knew the news but didn't have the inside scoop.

But that's the Journal Register Company way; it was listed as one of the ten worst companies of 2006 by 24/7 Wall Street for their decision to pay 415 million for a group of Michigan papers, for which 274 million of the price was assigned to "Goodwill."

Not the nonprofit organization that you and I love for used furniture and clothes, that is, but corporate charity.

As though they'd decided that making money, in a business that was losing newsroom employees and press operators and everyone who works in the newspaper industry, by the dozen, was overrated.

In September 2005, according to 24/7 Wall Street, JRC's stock was trading above $20 a share. In 2006, when the article was written, it was down to $5.74. This year it dropped below a dollar, was de-listed, and dropped some more.

JRC's stock has been at a penny for a long time now, and in theory, they considered filing for bankruptcy (then didn't), so the writing has been on the wall for awhile.

But it's only upper-level JRC's idiocy in management and maintenance of the newspapers that's brought them to this move, and the most frustrating part of it all is that like Kenneth Lay or other Enron execs, or like the idiots who end up with golden parachutes from other companies, the jerks at the top get rewarded, and the people who suffer are the ones on the bottom.

Not just the employees, though, not in an industry that actually produces something (unlike Enron, which just seemed to sell shortages and fear -- and still failed, despite an infinite human capacity for these products). The citizens suffer. Local communities suffer. JRC doesn't care.

The alternative explanation to JRC being idiotically run is that it's being diabolically run. Maybe JRC execs are anti-newspaper. Perhaps they're anarchists, or rogue capitalists looking for monopoly in a post-regulation world, trying to garrote a free press before screwing the public.

More likely, they're a bunch of idiots in a room cavorting through big business like lords in a feudal society, wanting to exert small-minded control over an industry best run on big ideas like liberty, civic responsibility, and finding the truth.

JRC is painfully, ironically committed to a complete lack of transparency, not only in dealing with the public (the blackout on publishing a story in these papers about their own demise, for instance -- I mean, are people just supposed to wake up on Jan 13 and know, magically, that their papers will never show up again?), but in dealing with their own employees, and equally committed to constricting and obfuscating their business practices internally by circulating memo forms that don't make sense, that need to be signed by every level of management (guaranteeing nothing will ever get done) and yet that don't include enough sign-on lines to include all the required signatures; not allowing firing or hiring of employees without a labyrinthine process of proving they're necessary or incompetent, respectively; and adhering to a policy of positions themselves becoming defunct when the person occupying them (say, community/education reporter) happens to move on to another job.

The only explanation for handling a business in this manner is that the top tiers of JRC are full of men who decided to band together after meeting each other on a "choke fetish" Web site, and form a business they could choke to death. How else to explain the way they've dominated and gutted their company, making bad decision after bad decision while explaining nothing and listening to no one?

Or perhaps they were taking their cues from the Bush presidency.

Whoever let people like this into the American business mainstream should be ashamed -- and how.