Goodbye to The Boston Courant
Karma, sometimes, is a bitch.
Goodbye, The Boston Courant, or, The Back Bay Courant, when I worked for it in the late 1990s: Back Bay newspaper’s famous refusal to put up a Web site has driven it out of business
I could write a very, VERY long blog post or maybe even a short book about my experience working for the owners of The Back Bay Courant as an ad rep and contributing editor before they screwed me over by jacking up their ad rates and trying to re-negotiate my work agreement to all-commission while still expecting me to perform all the other contributing editor duties for free (being “the mayor of Newbury Street,” as they called it, going to public events and being active in the Back Bay and Fenway, plugging the newspaper, attending meetings, gathering news, etc.).
I decided, instead, to quit and they wrote a nasty letter to me when I demanded my final payment.
In other words, it is absolutely NOT SURPRISING AT ALL to read that they screwed over another one of their employees who later sued them and won and are now closing down the newspaper for good.
That all said, I really liked both David and Gen and liked what they were doing (before they did what they did to me). The managing editor for many years – her name is slipping my mind at the moment – was a great person, too, and really was the grease in the gears of the operation. I also always thought sewing up all the neighborhoods – or many of them – into a single print edition was a good idea. I pitched a revival of The Boston TAB to Patrick Purcell when I went to work for CNC after he bought the papers but he didn’t bite.
The Courant though was always reliant on its real estate connections to continue to stay in business, connections that lavished large sums of money for Home of the Week spreads and full-page ads. I’m sure, as the Boston real estate market changed, so did the company’s bottom line as it tried to stay alive as a print-only business.
In some ways, as well, I am what I am today because of that experience, even though it put me in a treacherous financial position at the time – just walking away from a job with nothing else lined up.
I hope that this decision gives them both a lot of time to relax and enjoy their home in Rockport that they love so much. I truly wish them the best.
