“Newspapers always break your heart,” is a familiar lament of reporters and editors who have endured cutbacks, layoffs and the falling of our temples of the Fourth Estate. For those who have ever been lucky enough to ply the trade of wordsmanship, when a newspaper closes or is sold, it makes one wince of what they used to be – a vital part of the community.

Tuesday, we found out that the evil Journal Register Co. was announcing it would shutter the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press, two papers where Bob Conrad and Bob Douglas used to break stories that were read across the state.

In its cold, calculating way, the suits at the Journal Register laid out the familiar arguments that are affecting newspapers across the nation – dwindling subscriptions, a recession and a move toward web-based information.  And, to no one’s surprise, the news was broken by the Hartford Courant. There was no mentioned of these closures in either edition of the Herald or Press.

It is a poignant reminder of how the media earth has shifted over the last 20 years and where it will end up is anyone’s guess. But it is shifting.

A half a lifetime ago, I was a reporter for the Torrington Register-Citizen. It was my first real job and I loved every second of it. I wrote about high school sports, covered Torrington City Hall during a Grand Jury investigation, filled in on the cop beat and helped firemen find a body thrown clear of a car wreck and before coming to Hartford to cover the Capitol and all its trappings of politics, deceit and payback.

When I left to join the dark order of politics and governance, I took pride in the fact that I never had to cover a Board of Education meeting. Zoning Board of Appeals? No problem, but BOE meetings were deadly.

The Register-Citizen, with a circulation of over 20,000, covered almost all of Northwest Connecticut. We had five reporters covering Torrington, with bureaus in Winsted, Litchfield and Canaan. Our sports desk had three full-time people and many stringers so parents could follow all their high  teams, complete with statistics, standings and photos. All of these ended up in countless scrapbooks throughout Litchfield County.

We were young, made deadline and settled the world at the Five C’s tavern across Water Street, often downing a few with our best sources. And then, the next day, we would do it all over again. Sometimes a reporter would do two or three stories and a side-bad and it got into the paper. We carried scanners on our hips, raced out in the middle of the night to cover a domestic or a fire and always grabbed a fresh copy in the parking lot when the first press run was over.

Once, one of our editors, realizing a major gaffe in a headline that would have sent an obscenity out to thousands of readers, actually walked over to the big red button and shut down a print run.  It caused complete bedlam but we could say we actually witnessed someone stopping the press.

The Register was a union shop and employed second-generation press men before pagination came in. Our computers were white on black screens and there was no spell check, making my editor’s life a total misery.

We competed with the reporters at the Waterbury Republican and the Courant and feared getting beat on stories. Sometimes we did, but we often spent weekends in the summer playing softball against each other and trading information over a pizza at the Berkshire Cafe.

Then in the mid-1990’s, the Journal Register Co., a hedge fund with no newspaper people to speak of within its ranks, came to town looking to buy a community newspaper. They had already taken over the New Haven Register. The owners of the Register, the Miller family of Pittsfield, MA, who also owned the famed Berkshire Eagle, were up against it financially and sold their most profitable paper. Pete Miller, the rumpled old man who had presided over the merger of the old Winsted Citizen and Register,  loved the paper as did his two sons. The Register was called the “cash cow” of the Miller chain and it killed him to give it up, but they did.

After assuring everyone that all would be the same, the Journal Register gutted the newsroom, closed the bureaus, pulled the Capitol reporter and cut the pages from around 48 to 24. They added a Sunday edition that was merely a pile of ads with little more than wire copy.  Ad rates went up dramatically. Hey, they thought, what are these yokels going to do? It worked well for the shareholders and the corporate types at the Journal Register Co.

The Register used this model after picking up the New Britain Herald, the Middletown Press, the Bristol Pres and then a dozen Connecticut weeklies, including the fine Shoreline papers. The approach was simple and basic cutthroat economics –  the locals and their businesses had nowhere else to go to advertise. People wouldn’t miss news if they were given the bare minimum of space for obits, sports, and public notices. The Journal Register Co. centralized its printing and distribution, sold off the other press operations and dispensed with any community responsibilities. It was all about making money. Nothing wrong with that, but now even the Journal Register has hit a wall and the fire sale is on.

The long-term trends and other poor investments across the country has caught them short. Their stock, which once traded in the 40’s, is now worth a cent. Yes, one penny – what a paper cost when the Titanic went down.

That is small comfort to the people of New Britain and Bristol plus some of the weeklies that will surely follow along the shore.  And while they assure their readers that the Middletown Press, the Register Citizen and the New Haven Register will soldier on, the die is cast. The R-C has half the circulation it once did.

There is no law that says every town has to have a rag. Any form of communication has to be able to sell a product and make money. Newspapers aren’t charities and someone will eventually figure out how to make money with a web-based product. That provides some hope to people looking to find out if their neighbor’s son is okay in Iraq, if the football team has a chance this Saturday, or if someone broke 300 at Skytop Lanes.

But these closures are part of an even bigger problem. Newspapers have all been gutted and are left to print national wire and other trivial information bought from services. The retrenchment at the Courant, coupled with non-compete agreements among the other papers, means you have little quality information being produced without any hint of accuracy much less objectivity. This benefits the political class, because they do their work with few eyes and ears on them and fewer stories. That duty shifts to television and radio which has an even smaller window on the complicated drudgery of government.

All were are left with are  talk radio, blogs, rumors and paid political media. Odd, in a time of unlimited information stimulating users 15 times an hour, that we know so little about the people in our town. Where is Marshall McLuhan when you need him?

Newspapers, they break your friggin’ heart every time.