The passing of four-term Connecticut U.S. Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman this week reminds me of the first time our paths crossed early in my journalism career 40 years ago.
Look closely over Lieberman’s left shoulder, and you’ll see a very serious young journalist (me) listening and scribbling in her reporter’s notebook at the governor’s press conference at the State Capitol in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 8, 1984. Gov. William O’Neill was announcing an appeal Lieberman filed after the State Superior Court ruled on grants for local schools.
Deep in my newspaper morgue of over a thousand clips, I recently unearthed this faded AP Laserphoto on dry silver paper of the press conference in the capitol rotunda. I’m a college intern at the New Haven Journal-Courier, assisting the Capitol Bureau Chief James Mutrie, Jr.
AP Laserphoto
AP photographer, Ron Scardacchi, took the photo, which was sent out over the wire hours later to newspapers across the state. You can see the JC’s State & City Editor’s red grease pencil markings cropping the photo for a 26-picas-wide image for a story on page 25.
The new AP Laserphoto technology was announced during the Associated Press 1973 annual meeting at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City. According to The New York Times, the new process was described as “a new system of facsimile photo transmission by wire, using laser beams.”
It was still cutting-edge technology in journalism in the 1980s. The Laserphoto replaced the original wire photo introduced by AP in 1935.
The Press Conference
The press conference included Attorney General Joe Lieberman, Gov. William O’Neill, and Education Commissioner Gerald Tirozzi. The state was appealing a recent Superior Court decision forcing ithe state to spend more on local public schools through the Guaranteed Tax Base system of grants for local schools.
Lieberman was appealing the court’s decision and was quoted in the New Haven Journal-Courier article as saying the court’s order “interfered with the independent activity of a coordinated branch of government—namely the legislature.”
Lieberman and Gov. O’Neill argued that the ruling interferes with the orderly functioning of local government regarding education budgets.
Golden Age of Journalism
Forty years ago still felt like the golden age of journalism. The New Haven Journal-Courier was the morning sister paper of the afternoon New Haven Register, which still produced five daily editions. I remember the afternoon of March 31, 1981, when Reagan was shot, and the city editor actually yelled, “Stop the presses,” just like in the movies. The newsroom was still in its old Orange Street location in downtown New Haven.
When the paper moved to a new computer-filled state-of-the-art newsroom later that year, each paper had two separate shifts. Dozens of reporters covered distinct beats like education, environment, criminal justice, law enforcement, city government, and state government. Each suburban town had a dedicated reporter. The features desk, where I worked for a semester, had its editor, reporters, and even a theatre and music critic. The building featured a cafeteria to feed journalists on deadline.
By the late 1980s, the writing was on the wall for newspaper consolidation. On March 26, 1987, the New Haven Journal-Courier, the second-oldest newspaper in the country behind the Hartford Courant, published its last edition.
