In 2000, Times Mirror was acquired by the Tribune Company, which later combined the paper's management and facilities with those of a Tribune-owned Hartford television station.
Based on the notion that the daily publication was an offshoot of the weekly Connecticut Courant, the newspaper board adopted in 2018 the motto "Older than the nation" as its slogan.
[11] The first years of out-of-town ownership are described by Andrew Kreig, a former Courant reporter, in a book titled Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America's Oldest Newspaper.
A series of articles about sexual abuse by the head of a worldwide Catholic order, published since February 1997, constituted the first denunciation of Marciel Maciel known to a wider audience.
In late June 2006, the Tribune Co. announced that Courant publisher Jack W. Davis Jr. would be replaced by Stephen D. Carver, vice president and general manager of Atlanta, Ga., TV station WATL.
[16][17] After 2010, Courant has offered early retirement and buyout packages to reduce staff as it continues to experience declines in advertising revenue.
On November 18, 2013, Tribune appointed Nancy Meyer as publisher, succeeding Rich Graziano who left to become president and general manager of WPIX-TV (PIX11) in New York City.
[22] In 2018, the Hartford Courant joined more than 300 newspapers in releasing editorials in response to President's Trump's anti-media rhetoric, a show of solidarity initiated by The Boston Globe.
[25] In December 2020, Tribune Publishing announced that it would be closing the Courant's Broad Street newsroom by the end of the year with no current plans to open another.
[31] Nancy Tracy of the Hartford Courant was a 1984 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Feature Writing for her moving depiction of Meg Casey, a victim of premature aging.
[32] Robert S. Capers and Eric Lipton of the Hartford Courant won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism for their series on how a flawed mirror built at Connecticut's Perkin-Elmer Corporation immobilized the Hubble Space Telescope.
[33][34] The Hartford Courant Staff won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting for its coverage of a shooting rampage in which a state lottery employee killed four supervisors then himself.
[39] The Hartford Courant Staff was a 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for its comprehensive and compassionate coverage of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
[44] The Courant weighed in on the contentious and antagonistic 2016 Presidential Election, endorsing Democrat Hillary Clinton over Republican candidate Donald Trump.
[45] In August 2018 the Courant endorsed Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary as the only "credible" choice compared to rival Joe Ganim.
Gombossy charged that the Courant had spiked an article he had written about an ongoing investigation by the Connecticut attorney general accusing Sleepy's (a major advertiser in the paper) of selling used and bedbug-infested mattresses as new.
In his decision, Judge Marshall K. Berger Jr. remarked that newspaper owners and editors have a "paramount" right to "control [the] content of their papers," further observing that in his role at the Courant, Gombossy had "no constitutional right to publish anything.
[54][55] In 2018, the Hartford Courant began banning users of the internet in the European Union from accessing its website because of its absence of data protection compliance.