''The Boston Courant'' was a

weekly newspaper A weekly newspaper is a general-news or Current affairs (news format), current affairs publication that is issued once or twice a week in a wide variety broadsheet, magazine, and electronic publishing, digital formats. Similarly, a biweekly new ...

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

, whose coverage focused on issues of local interest to the Back Bay,

Beacon Hill Beacon Hill may refer to: Places Canada * Beacon Hill, Ottawa, Ontario, a neighbourhood * Beacon Hill Park, a park in Victoria, British Columbia * Beacon Hill, Saskatchewan * Beacon Hill, Montreal, a neighbourhood in Beaconsfield, Quebec United ...

Downtown ''Downtown'' is a term primarily used in North America by English speakers to refer to a city's sometimes commercial, cultural and often the historical, political and geographic heart. It is often synonymous with its central business distric ...

Fenway Fenway Park is a baseball stadium located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, near Kenmore Square. Since 1912, it has been the home of the Boston Red Sox, the city's American League baseball team, and Boston Braves (baseball), since 1953, i ...

, South End, and Waterfront neighborhoods. It had a circulation of over 40,000. The ''Boston Courant'' announced its closure in February 2016 after losing a wrongful termination lawsuit.Back Bay newspaper's famous refusal to put up a Web site has driven it out of business , Universal Hub
/ref> In April 2016, the former publisher debuted the ''Boston Guardian'', with similar editorial content and neighborhood coverage. An

African-American newspaper African-American newspapers (also known as the Black press or Black newspapers) are newspaper, news publications in the United States serving African-American communities. Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm started the first African-Americ ...

by the same name was founded by

George Washington Forbes George W. Forbes (1864-1927) was an American journalist who advocated for Civil rights movement (1896–1954), African-American civil rights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best known for co-founding the ''Boston Guardian'', an Afri ...

in 1890 and discontinued some time after 1900.

Establishment

Publisher David Jacobs created the ''Boston Courant'' (as the ''Back Bay Courant''—the newspaper later expanded its coverage to include the South End, Bay Village, Fenway, and Beacon Hill) in 1995, with his wife Genevieve Tracy as associate editor. In a ''Boston Globe'' article,Diaz, Johnny
"The Weekly Battle: Alternative papers, like big dailies, cut back as ad sales slip"
''The Boston Globe'', March 4, 2009 Jacobs stated that the Courant experienced double-digit growth from 2008 to 2009.

Sections

The paper introduced a

real estate Real estate is property consisting of land and the buildings on it, along with its natural resources such as crops, minerals or water; immovable property of this nature; an interest vested in this (also) an item of real property, (more general ...

section in 2008, named "Open House". Later renamed the "Real Estate Guide", the section featured editorial copy and advertisements from Boston real estate agents as well as maps of upcoming open houses.

Online

In 2004, the publisher, David Jacobs, paid a

web designer Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code an ...

$50,000 to put the newspaper online, but the site never launched due to the lack of a profitable business plan. Jacobs believed that if the ''Courant'' had a website some of the readers would abandon the print format, crippling profitable advertising sales.

Successor publication

In April 2016, the previous publisher of the defunct ''Boston Courant'' debuted a reborn publication under the new banner of the ''

Boston Guardian The ''Boston Guardian'' was an African-American newspaper, co-founded by William Monroe Trotter and George W. Forbes in 1901 in Boston, Massachusetts, and published until the 1950s. In April 2016, an unrelated publisher launched its own ''Boston ...

'', serving the Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Downtown, Fenway, South End, and North End/Waterfront districts of Boston. The new publication's title stirred up some controversy over the alleged appropriation of a historic journalistic name.

References

External links