GANNETT KING OF THE GOUGE-IT NEWSPAPER OWNERS!!!!

 From Gannett

To dammit!!!

In FOUR years Gannett reduced from 27,600 employees to 11,200 employees.

Politicians, major corporations and the weathiest Americans must be giddy that 16,400 watchdogs of democracy are gone!

Gannett is not slashing employees. It also is torching newspaper throughout America. In 2019 Gannett owned 261 daily and 302 weekly newspapers. By the end of 2022 Gannett had 217 daily and 175 weekly newspapers.

Digital newspapers are far less profitable than printed versions people can hold in their hands.

 

Detroit Free Press, which lured BJ management to it decades ago because of its reputation, went from 217,471 circulation in 2018 to 103,606 in 2022 – a 52.4% drop!

Arizona Republic (74.7%), Indianapolis Star (74.5%) and Louisville Courier-Journal (74%), one bluebloods of journalism, makes the Free Press plunge look anemic by comparison.

Even Gannett’s USA Today went from 579,692 paid subscriptions in 2018 to 134,629 in 2022.

Wonder what the future holds for the BJ, a Gannett newspaper that began in 1897 with a merger of the Summit Beacon, born in 1839, and the Akron Evening Journal, founded in 1896.

Charles Landon Knight bought the BJ. John S. Knight, best newspaper owner in American history, took over with his father passed away in 1933 in the throes of great debt and the Great Depression and built it into the Knight Newspapers empire of more than 30 newspapers.

It's downhill for local newspapers today with no brakes and no sympathy for thousands tossed into the streets without a job.

EVEN BILLIONAIRES CAN'T RESCUE PRINT MEDIA

 $$$Billionaires flounder in

Attempts to save print media

Even billionaires haven’t been able to save print media from suffering a similiar fate as horse-and-buggy manufacturers when Henry Ford introduced automobile assembly lines to America.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million but it did little to rescue the Post from its misery.

 

Biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong bought assets including the Los Angeles Times for $500 million but improvement is barely a ripple.

 

Salesforce Founder Marc Benioff bought Time for $190 million and its still struggling to break even financially 5 years later.

 

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar granted First Look Media, including The Intercept, $250 million in 2014 and has exited the business entirely.

ADD PARADE MAGAZINE TO PRINTING EXIT PARADE

 Parade joins print demise parade

Parade Magazine, which first appeared in print in 1941 with Marshall Field as its creator, will end its print life after the November 13 edition.

Parade will join the parade to digital-only (online) media.

The Arena Group, which also has Sports Illustrated, bought Parade this year and quickly lost interest in print versions.

By 2013, Parade was the most widely read magazine in the United States with a circulation of 32 million and a readership of 54 million. No any more. More amazing crash than the 1928 stock market version.

New York Herald Tribune publish John Hay Whitney purchased Parade in 1958. Booth Newspapers became the new owner in 1973. By 1976 it was an Advance Publications subsidiary.

Newspapers are dying at the rate of two every week in America. 2,500 have closed since 2004!

Only trees are benefitting from the switch from rolling newspaper presses to online versions. Certainly not democracy, which is losing its watchdogs of political obscenities and financial immorality.

GANNETT LAYS OFF 400, CEO BUYS $1.2 MILLION OF ITS STOCK

Gannett lays off 400 while its CEO bought $1.2 million in Gannett stock. That’s today’s America and the newspaper situation.

 

Gannett laid off 400 employees and eliminated 400 open positions. That’s Gannett’s solution to a dismal second quarter $54 million loss despite $749 million in revenues.

Executives were not spared. 3 of the 10 were eliminated from the executive team.

Non-union employees were dumped far more than union workers. A message there for the value of being in a union?

Gannett CEO Harry Reed, who was paid $7.7 million in 2021 while Gannett’s median salary was $48,419, bought $1.2 million worth of Gannett stock, or 500,000 shares, immediately before the layoffs.

There’ll be no pity party necessary for Harry, because Gannett is wild about Harry. Unfortunately, the 400 employees didn’t get that same warm embrace . . . just a boot in the butt. 

GANNETT'S $54 MILLION LOSS MEANS MASSIVE LAYOFFS

 

Gannett loses $54 million in 2^nd quarter

Massive layoffs coming

Gannett, which owns the BJ and more than 200 other newspapers, reported a $54 million loss for the second quarter. Massive layoffs are coming.

Digital newspaper just don’t draw near as much advertising dollars as printed newspapers.

The BJ began in 1839 as the Summit Beacon. Charles Landon Knight, John Shively Knight’s father, bought the BJ in 1907. The BJ moved to 44 E. Market Street in 1927. JSK became editor and publisher in 1933 when his dad passed away.

If you want to read more, go to

Gannett reports disastrous financial results; layoffs are coming - Poynter

AN UGLY TALE OF MANAGEMENT PREFERRING PROFITS OVER INTEGRITY

 Price of integrity in Athens:

Firings and resignations!!!

Nearly every professional journalist at the Athens News and Athens Messenger, in the shadow of Ohio University, has either resigned or been fired because management sided with a shady advertiser rather than protecting its readers.

Adams Publish Group is the culprit. In Klamath County in Oregon at the Herald and News APG lost its entire staff. Maybe APG stands for Appalling Putrid Gutless.

The wealthy Adams family purchased the Athens newspapers in 2014 so it didn’t take the ugly corporation long to destroy, dismantle and demoralize.

APG Media of Ohio president Mark Cohen declined comment. Look for exodus from its 27 daily newspapers, more than 90 non-daily and more than 220 media-related products and associated websites in 20 states to be next to take the burn-it-to-the-ground hit.

The Adams family – I can hear Lurch in the background in the TV series based on Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoons even though they left one d out of their Addams name – buys newspapers like trinkets. Integrity, morality and superb media investigations are foreign to the Adams family, though.

They fired editor Corinne Colbert for exposing companies claiming to sell high-value collectible coins that ran ads in the Athens newspapers! Isn’t that the media’s job, to expose frauds? Some readers who called Colbert said she never got the coins they ordered but the frauds kept their money. Colbert complained to management, which shrugged their shoulders and said they couldn’t do anything about the ads (they own the damn papers, don’t they?).

 

So Colbert published an article in the two newspapers explaining the ads to their readers. Two days later, the axe fell on Colbert’s head and she was out of a job.

 

To paraphrase “The Addams Family” theme song:

They're creepy and they're kooky
Mysterious and spooky
They're all together ooky
The Adams family

Strange
Deranged
The Adams family

 

You better hope the Adams family doesn’t buy the newspaper in your town. It won’t be long before you won’t have any respectable, moral and honest reporter and editor left.

 

Strange, deranged indeed. Maybe they’re related to Trump or in business with him?

 

Just another reminder that money and power corrupt.

BJ JOINING TREND TO END PRINTED NEWSPAPER, ONE DAY AT A TIME

 No printed BJs on Monday. Which day is next?

One day down and only 7 more to go before the BJ no longer delivers printed editions.

BJ management announced that there will be more BJs printed on Mondays, starting March 7.

BJ Editor Michael Shearer, perhaps tongue planted deeply in his check, said “Print remains an important part of our overall strategy.”

Tell that to Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, next on the chopping block.

Blame USA Today, which is calling the shots for Summit County readers now.

The print editions may be dead, one day at a time, but BJ readers can go online to read the obituaries. Which I do every day by simply check the cadre of funeral homes in the area. The obits appear on funeral home websites before they do in the BJ so it’s old news by the time the BJ prints them. Or, in this case, doesn’t print them on Mondays, for now, and neverdays eventually.

Who’s next? Tuesdays?

No longer will senior citizens know what day it is by picking up their BJ at their doorsteps. Digital editions is an important part of the BJ’s overall strategy.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is printed only on Sundays, which makes it a weekly if you don’t have access to the Internet for the digital hand-me-down version.

McClatchy, which once owned the BJ (a revolving door situation in recent decades), stopped printing on Saturdays at every one of its newspapers by 2020.

Wyoming has NO newspaper printed 7 days a week when Lee Enterprises’ Casper Star-Tribune dropped Mondays and Tuesdays as printed editions.

The Tampa Bay Times, once a big deal, had only Wednesday and Sunday printed editions.

Southern Newspapers, with 10 newspaper in Texas and 1 in Oklahoma, has cut back to only 2 to 5 days of printed editions a week, depending on where they are located.

And those who deliver newspapers go from an everyday job to a wherever the owner/publisher feels like it job, in Arkansas the carriers have to find other work 6 days a week.

Why not end the charade and have NO printed newspapers anywhere in America? Instead of chopping off one day at a time to soften the blow.

WILL REPUBLICANS TORPEDO MONEY TO IMPROVE LOCAL NEWS COVERAGE?

 $1.67 billion to help local news coverage and democracy

President Biden and Democrats understand the value of strong local newspapers even if they make life difficult for politicians by pursuing the truth.

 

 

If the $2.2 trillion House-passed social safety net and climate package makes it through the Senate, where it faces a stiff challenge, it will provide $1.67 billion over the next five years for newspapers, websites, radio and TV stations, and other outlets that primarily cover local news. If eligible, they could reap up to $25,000 for each locally focused journalist they employ in the first year and $15,000 in each of the next four.

There are now 200 U.S. counties without a newspaper, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina, and more than 2,100 papers have shut down since 2004. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of journalists at newspapers fell to 31,000 last year from 71,000 in 2008.

Media outlets funded by political action committees would not be eligible. The same holds true for news organizations that do not carry media liability insurance or fail to disclose their owners. News publishers with more than 1,500 employees at a single location also would not qualify, under the terms of the bill. 

Local News Outlets May Reap $1.7 Billion in Build Back Better Aid - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

 

 Good grief! Is there no end to the calamity!

The silver lining that gave hope to newspapers around the country – “It can’t get any worse” – has been drowned by the dark clouds of the coronavirus, which has closed more than 60 newsrooms in America in 2020.

Among entities that has their claws on the BJ over the decades:

Sound Publishing in Washington state laid off 70 people in its Washington and Alaska newsrooms. Sound Publishing owns 49 newsrooms, and the layoffs make up 20% of its workforce. Sound also suspended four print publications in Kitsap County and reduced staff.

Seven McClatchy newspapers will move out of their newsrooms and work remotely for the rest of the year. They are the Miami Herald, the Charlotte (North Carolina) Observer, the McClatchy D.C. office, The State in Columbia, South Carolina, The Modesto (California) Bee, the Merced (California) Sun-Star and the San Luis Obispo (California) Tribune. McClatchy furloughed 4.4% of staff at its 30 papers around the country.

And in Ohio:

Three copy editors took buyouts at the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, Poynter. It is owned by Gannett.

Cleveland Scene in Ohio laid off five staffers.

Mount Vernon (Ohio) News, which was locally owned, was sold to Metric Media LLC, cut down to two print days a week and took down its paywall online.

It didn’t matter whether the newspaper was large or small, either.

Hell, the birthplace of the Pulitzer Prizes,  the St. Louis Post Dispatch, eliminated a digital sports editor position. It is owned by Lee Enterprises.

Tribune Publishing announced permanent pay cuts of between 2% and 10% and executives will take pay cuts. Tribune newsrooms include the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, The Baltimore Sun and The Virginian-Pilot. It also had furloughs.

When newspapers suffer, so does democracy. They are the watchdogs who shine the public spotlight on corruption by politicians and businesses. Without newspapers, it’s a field day for the big, the bad and the ugly in America.

To read depressing details of the carnage, click on Here are the newsroom layoffs, furloughs and closures caused by the coronavirus - Poynter

Chatham gets McClatchy with -- Ha! -- no-layoffs promise

New Jersey-based Chatham Asset Management hedge fund, McClatchy’s biggest debt holder and shareholder, purchased McClatchy’s 30 newspapers for $312 million. A federal bankruptcy court approved the sale.

Chatham promises no layoffs for a year. The same Chatham that laid off 1,600 employees after taking over Postmedia, Canada’s largest newspaper chain. The hedge fund run by Anthony Melchiorre also owns American Media Inc., publisher of the National Enquirer.

McClatchy employees better be sending out their resumes now!

The Miami Herald, once the flag newspaper of Knight Newspapers, will be included in the eventual newsroom bloodbath.

Chatham beat out Alden Global Capital, another hedge fund that buys and guts newspapers through its MediaNews Group subsidiary.

McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder Inc. for $4.5 billion in 2006 at the worst possible time, just before the newspapers financial freefall, and slid into financial woes and bankruptcy rapidly after 163 years of owning newspapers. McClatchy went from an 1857 California Gold Rush start to down the toilet, dumping $1.4 billion in pensions onto the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

Previously, Knight Newspapers merged with Ridder. The Knight success story began with the Akron Beacon Journal and grew to more than 30 newspapers.

Hedge funds buy newspapers for the assets, decimate the staffs, suck out all the money they can and leave a shell of a newspaper.

Newsroom employees, like at the BJ and the Kansas City Star, have ownership bounced around like a pinball machine. This will the Star’s 5^th ownership. The BJ isn’t far behind.

Killer stalks in the hedges

Hedge funds are the bane of good journalism.

They take over newspapers, siphon away their journalists, suck out what money is left and move on to their next cadaver.

Alden Global Capital, described as “the hedge fund that bleeds newspapers dry,” is one of the financial corporate cannibals with the McClatchy newspapers within reach of its fangs.

It plucked the Pottstown (Pennsylvania) Mercury, which despite its small circulation had two Pulitzer Prizes, for its blood-sucking vandalism.

The first thing hedge funds do is pillage the staff of employees. They’re not interested in having newspaper pursue the truth and hold corrupt politicians and businesses’ feet to the fire.

They only want to extract every penny they can and then toss the Fourth Estate on the garbage pile.

Pottstown is only 40 miles from Philadelphia but it might as well be on Mars. Its iron and steel industries are gone. So are all but 23,000 of its population.

Alden Global Capital makes $160 million a year shredding newspapers.

If you want to read the story told too often in America today, this one about the mercurial rise of Alden at the expense of those who gave their lives to journalism in Pottstown, go to

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/us/alden-global-capital-pottstown-mercury.html?referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR36CA6ZNpOFO9V32RH-XV4qP281-9SNP4eVaFdafnjyFuNvpJqQqHPLCjQ

Knight Foundation 
Nixes buying McClatchy

The Knight Foundation decided not to make a bid for the collapsing McClatchy newspapers. Knight Foundation, created by John S. Knight, the best newspaper owner in American history, and JSK's brother James Knight, specializes in grants and investments, not operating a business.

The scary thing about the McClatchy situation is that means hedge funds will own about 40% of daily newspaper ownership.

Unlike JSK, who wanted to make a profit but not at the expense of good journalism that JSK and Thomas Jefferson embraced, hedge funds are in it to make a profit. Period.

Even if means buying, cannibalizing and reducing newspaper staffs to zombie (smaller than skeleton) size.

Fortress Investment Group swallowed up Gannett/Gatehouse, Alden did the same whale imitation with MNG Enterprises and Chatham probably will gobble up what's left of McClatchy.

That’s not good for the public’s right to know. Corrupt politicians and corporations have a field day when there’s no viable media to keep the fox from guarding the henhouse.

McClatchy paid $6.5 million in 2006 to buy Knight Ridder Newspapers, then America’s 2^nd largest newspaper group. Worse timing in history.

Newspapers were on the verge of a freefall. McClatchy took a decade staggering toward its inevitable bankruptcy.

The court ordered McClatchy to choose a rescuer by Wednesday, July 8.

Check out the article by the Nieman Lab, which benefits from Knight Foundation money, at

https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/07/newsonomics-theres-no-knight-in-shining-armor-coming-to-rescue-mcclatchy/?fbclid=IwAR34ZS16U7xDjFfdvDTSC1O772DYaL9gqoIun4JsGm1dcOQukNuD1_qIfNY

How Newhouse turned

newspapers into outhouses

for its reporters and editors

It’s old news to those reading this BJ Alums blog from the PD perspective but Prospect.org does an excellent job of detailing how the Newhouse family’s Advance Publications nationally created a union-busting template for media conglomerates.

At least 36,000 journalists and support staff have lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic in America.

Newhouse's Advance eliminated every union job at Local 1 of the American Newspaper Guild!

The PD went from more than 700 total members to NO Guild members. The work was transferred to the scab Cleveland.com .

The Newhouse family brought in hired guns – some with actual weapons -- to beat down union members at its newspapers all over America, much like coal mine operators in West Virginia hired Pinkerton goons to beat up, shoot and intimate United Mine Workers Union members in the 20^th century.

Newhouse is #1 in putting out the most newspaper people out of work than any publisher in history.

When it comes to morality, John Knight had more on a pimple on his ass than the entire Newhouse family.

JSK was a good businessman, but he was a great owner and editor first.

This article has a lot of details about the horrid history of Newhouse and its mistreatment of its editors and reporters.

Click on the blue https://prospect.org/labor/busting-the-guild-in-cleveland/?fbclid=IwAR3Stv7uFbnzO5hS_Xi6wpai8QUSOkJ5Yc1OGXRj4b7UWqby7scq4lcWP00 to read it.

Be sure you have a vomit bucket handy.

 

 

The PD viciously pounded the final nail in the coffin.

After more than 80 years, the Northeast Ohio’s Local 1, at the Plain Dealer, is dead.

The PD Guild statement said that unit will be dissolved Sunday, May 17. A "They is done" taps as a funeral dirge in the background with a white cross planted at 1801 Superior Avenue would be appropriate.

The PD on Friday, May 15 will lay off the 4 remaining reporters, who have been offered jobs at the non-union Cleveland.com scab organization that will put out what’s left of the PD.

The Northeast Ohio Newspaper Guild claims it has “about 130” members at the BJ, the Canton Repository and the Massillon Independent but that number seems as inflated as Trump crowd math.

The PD went from 340 journalists to NONE in 20 years.

PD Guild members included retired rock and roll reporter Jane Scott, in the Cleveland Press Hall of Fame; former Cleveland mayor and Congressman Dennis Kucinich; and Hollywood screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (“Basic Instinct,” “Flashdance”), whose net worth is $18 million, not bad for a guy born in the village of Csakanydoroszlo, Hungary (total’s population: 1,757) as Jozsef Eszterhas. He is listed as the ONLY “notable people” ever born there, in 1944 in Joe’s case. It’s on the western border of Hungary

For another painful look at the PD situation by the Columbia Journalism Review, click on https://www.cjr.org/analysis/advance-local-one-cleveland-plain-dealer-layoffs.php?fbclid=IwAR2bV7z6zYwRdc0dxibrDeRTu8SFixmda21pqsxpMhvGV9sEB81mF2vdu-c

TWO newspaper chains before football season?

There may be only TWO major newspaper chains left in America before football season starts!

Six months ago, there were five: Gannett, New Media’s GateHouse, McClatchy, Tribune Publishing and Alden’s MNG Enterprises.

Today, there are four when GateHouse swallowed Gannett but kept the Gannett name.

Gannett stock has freefallen to EIGHTY EIGHT CENTS a share. That makes it a penny stock.

Tribune and MNG are expected to merge by June.

Staggering McClatchy is a prime target for Gannett or a merged Tribune/MNG.

In 1995 there were TWENTY newspaper chains. It took only 25 years to wipe out nearly all of them.

Listing them in order of their circulation totals there were Gannett, Knight-Ridder, Newhouse, Times Mirror, Dow Jones, New York Times, Thomson, Hearst, Cox, Tribune, E.W. Scripps, Hollinger, McClatchy, Freedom, MediaNews, Washington Post, Central, Morris, Capital Cities/ABC and Copley.

Vanished like the horse and buggy. But far more important to democracy.

2 creditors set floor for sale price of McClatchy

McClatchy’s largest creditors offered to buy the bankrupt media company Thursday as a strategy to set a floor for the media conglomerate's sale price.

Chatham Asset Management and Brigade Capital Management offered “well in excess” of $300 million as a “stalking horse,” meaning no one else would be allowed to offer less.

Any settlement will free McClatchy from pension obligations, dumping that cost onto the federal pension protection program.

Knight Rider was acquired by McClatchy in 2006 but sold the BJ almost immediately to Canada’s Black Press. Gatehouse Media bought the BJ frm Black Press in 2018. John Knight inherited the debt-ridden BJ in 1933 from his father, Charles Landon Knight.

McClatchy has controlled the company since the California Gold Rush.

To read the entire article, go to

https://news.yahoo.com/creditors-move-buy-mcclatchy-opening-130622641.html

PD: Union card? Leave the county! Firing squad next? 

Newhouse Advance Publications has unveiled its latest union-busting tactic. 10 of the remain 14 Guild employees will be banished to out-lying county bureaus so that only non-union Cleveland.com workers can work in Cuyahoga County or Summit County.

The next step is obvious because it’s been done by management for a century: Put everyone you don’t want into a department or category, then a few months later eliminate the department or category. It’s capitalism version of the firing squad. No bullets needed.

Once the 10 are banished from Cuyahoga County the next step is to close down the PD bureaus in Geauga, Lake, Lorain, Medina and Portage counties. It’s coming. Count on it.

Those truncated ten might as well send out their job applications elsewhere. They are living on borrowed time.

With no union protection the final step also is obvious for those at Cleveland.com: Slash their pay. They’ll be lucky if they make minimum wages.

Putin couldn’t be more merciless and effective. At least there are no bullets in the PD firing squad.

The banished union members are investigative reporters Rachel Dissell and John Caniglia, arts and culture writers John Petkovic and Laura DeMarco,  real estate reporter Michelle Jarboe, medical reporter Ginger Christ, education reporter Patrick O'Donnell, features/Friday Magazine events writer Greg Burnett and photographers Gus Chan and Lisa DeJong.

The only exceptions, for now, are superb sports columnist Terry Pluto, once at 44 E. Exchange Street who writes a book a week, or so it seems, about sports; columnist Philip Morris; art and architecture critic Steve Litt; and travel writer Susan Glaser.

To read the excruciatingly painful Cleveland Scene article, click on https://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2020/04/07/plain-dealer-put-out-to-pasture-in-final-death-blow-remaining-reporters-given-impossible-choice