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The Fairfield County Weekly was distributed throughout Fairfield County. Its average weekly circulation was 26,708 in 2011.

Hartford Advocate

The Hartford Advocate was published in Hartford, Connecticut and had a circulation of 37,779 in 2011.

The Hartford Advocate was founded in 1974 by Geoffrey Robinson and Edward Matys to fill a void in investigative and beat reporting in the capital city of Connecticut. For example, The Hartford Courant, where Robinson and Matys had previously worked, did not routinely cover one of the city's largest industries, insurance. The founding editors included managing editor Dick Polman, recruited from the New London Day, and city editor Bruce Kauffman, from the Courant where as a police and general assignment reporter he discovered that a heavily traveled bridge around the corner from the state capitol was being held up by a telephone pole.

Gail Collins reported on state government and politics; she is now an op-ed columnist at The New York Times. Another early reporter was David Lieberman, who was later an editorial writer for the Courant and covered the media business for USA Today.

Polman left the Advocate after some five years to become a columnist at the Courant and later joined The Philadelphia Inquirer as national political correspondent. He also taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Kauffman later worked for CNN, taught at Emerson College in Boston, Morehouse College in Atlanta and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He also worked for the North County Times, one of two daily newspapers in San Diego County, California.

In a history of the alternative media, A Trumpet to Arms, author David Armstrong described the Advocate as a bastion for the "new muckrakers." The author explored the paper's examination of the behind-the-scenes power exercised by the corporate elite in Hartford. Kauffman had reported that top banks and insurance companies, including Travelers, were funneling the bulk of city pension fund money into companies that propped up the apartheid regime in South Africa. The city of Hartford would end up divesting the South Africa–related investments.

Polman notes, in the acknowledgements for "Dateline: Connecticut," "I had originally hoped to thank the publishers of the Hartford Advocate for allowing me to reprint some of my 'Subject to Change' columns, but they denied me access to my work, citing my 'gravitation' to the Courant."[3]

In the 1980s and '90s the paper included a full-time photographer, Nicholas Lacy, and an array of colorful editors and reporters, including Ric Hornung (who was known to eavesdrop on City Hall denizens by hiding in the lunch truck and taking notes on their conversations), Janet Reynolds (who later became publisher), Jayne Keedle, Susan White Patrick (ESPN Sports Center star Dan Patrick's wife), Leslie Riva, and Edward Ericson, Jr. The paper's reporting on city hall corruption in the early 1990s led to the City Manager's ouster and several criminal convictions.[4] Later stories about High Sheriff Al Rioux helped lead to his conviction on federal wire and mail fraud charges[5] and the abolition of the county sheriffs' offices statewide in 2000.[6]

Advocate Weekly Newspapers formerly published the Valley Advocate, a similar alternative weekly, in Easthampton, Massachusetts, covering the greater Springfield area and the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. It began as an independent newspaper in 1973 and was sold in late 2007 to Newspapers of New England, parent of its competitor the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Massachusetts.[2]