In troubled times a newspaper was born with the help of longtime activist Ralph Nader and part time Connecticut resident. Nader put up $15,000 to help launch The Winsted Citizen and hired a veteran Connecticut journalist, Andy Thibault, to put it together.
There are an estimated 2,500 newspapers that have closed in the United States since 2005 according to a report issued last year by the Northwestern/Medill Local News Initiative.
Join students from USJ’s Digital Media and Communication program as they learn from news and business staff about the startup Winsted Citizen newspaper and how they went from nothing to a published local newspaper in just a few weeks. The guest panel will include Advertising and Circulation Director Rosemary Scanlon, Editor and Publisher Andy Thibault and other members of the paper staff including Reporter Reynaldo Cruz Diaz, a Cuban sportswriter/photographer seeking asylum who recently interviewed U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal about the Russian offensive in Ukraine.
Date: March 24 at 11 a.m.
This event is FREE and open to the public
Location:
University of Saint Joseph
McDonough Room 200
1678 Asylum Ave.
West Hartford, CT 06117
Carpooling strongly encouraged
About the Editor Andy Thibault Editor and Publisher of The Winsted Citizen:
Andy Thibault, editor and publisher, teaches Basic News Reporting/Writing, Investigative Reporting and Communication at the University of New Haven. He covered the Boston Marathon bombing trial gavel to gavel for the NBC News Investigative Unit, was a research consultant for the HBO series “Allen vs. Farrow” and was credited with helping to free a woman unjustly imprisoned for first-degree murder in 2013. The Connecticut Council for Freedom of Information cited Thibault in 2014 with the Stephen A. Collins Memorial Freedom of Information Award for “his many contributions to the cause of open and accountable government and a free and vigorous press in Connecticut.” He is the author of two collections of newspaper columns and a history of the Connecticut State Police as well as co-author of a memoir by the master counterfeiter Louis “The Coin” Colavecchio. Thibault also served as a member of the Litchfield Board of Education and chair of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust, a non-profit which awarded $215,000 in cash to teenage poets and writers over 17 years, sending state champions and parents to the Dublin Writers Festival.