MANCHESTER, Conn.

STATE LEGISLATORS from Bristol and New Britain, Conn., have asked state economic-development officials to facilitate purchase of the daily newspapers in those cities, the Bristol Press and New Britain Herald, whose owner, Journal Register Co., plans to close them soon if buyers can’t be found. Tax breaks might be available.

While this is how government usually responds to troubled businesses, tax breaks make a big difference only to the largest and most capital-intensive operations, not to newspapers. Taxes have been choking Connecticut since 1991 but they are not choking newspapers particularly. No, newspapers are being choked by the recession — declining advertising revenue — and, perhaps just as much, by declining demographics.

Real incomes in the private sector in Connecticut have been falling for more than a decade. So has involvement in public life, as measured by, among other things, participation in elections. Only about a third of the voting-age population now votes in municipal elections, the high point of community life.

Connecticut’s cities are now so impoverished that probably only Stamford, in the heart of Fairfield County’s Gold Coast, has enough literate and self-sufficient residents and business activity to support a daily newspaper on its own without a large number of suburbs.

New Britain is desperately poor. The first language of 40 percent of the city’s residents is something other than English. So among Connecticut’s cities New Britain probably is least able to support a daily paper. Indeed, even the state’s capital, Hartford, has a daily, The Courant, only because the paper has no competition in the city’s western suburbs. While Hartford has twice the population, the city is so poor that the Courant sells more papers in West Hartford. The paper would be more aptly named the West Hartford Courant.

Newspaper figures like these are good measures of the disastrous but unacknowledged failure of Connecticut’s urban and social policies.

Newspapers don’t need tax breaks. They need what the state itself needs, a middle class — self-sufficient households with two parents who are involved with their kids, schools, churches, civic groups, and such other interests that attach people to community and thus, almost inevitably, to newspapers, the chroniclers of community. The decline of newspapers reflects community disintegration. That’s the problem that Connecticut’s legislators should be working on, but they don’t even see it yet.

Chris Powell, a frequent contributor, is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.