GateHouse to buy Schurz publishing division

This is very much true. Essentially, if you can really cover a team well, preps sell. If you can't, they don't because the audience is very, very narrow (basically, people read about their school and their favorite college team's high-profile recruits).

And in Bloomington, yes, the H-T had staffers assigned to all 3 high schools in the county (the two in Bloomington and the suburban school in neighboring Ellettsville) and covered them like a blanket. Their HS coverage was second to none. Add in the coverage from the neighboring communities in other Schurz papers, and they *owned* HS coverage in an area where it is a REALLY big deal.

 

Props to the Springfield (Ill.) news editor for walking away with class ... and for the rest of the newsroom's show of support:

Former Press Herald editor resigns top job in Illinois to spare layoffs

 

Thanks for posting, Coco.

In what I think is good news, Quincy (Illinois) Media, Inc. (QMI … owner of the Herald-Whig) is purchasing the Hannibal Courier-Post from GateHouse. Deal should be completed sometime this summer.

 

A very nice gesture. Good luck to Ms. Muhs. This article is behind a paywall but when I googled another article I learned that Springfield is down to five reporters.

And I will post on this separately but in the first quarter revenues at Gatehouse publishing were down eight per cent. They had been declining four-five percent. The company's cash flow did not cover the dividend as the company had a pretax operating loss of 11 million dollars.

Profits were down even though the paper in the past fifteen months through March 31 also bought Akron, Eugene, Pueblo, Palm Springs, Austin, Oklahoma City and probably some other properties I don't remember. They issued over 110 million dollars of equity and borrowed another 70 million but profits still declined.

The company can cut the dividend, which is $1.52 a share, to conserve cash but that will tank the stock price. Things are not going well, except for the Fortress Investment Group, which continues to pull eight figures a year out for management services.

 

Thanks for the info, Lancey.

 

Gatehouse recently purchased a newspaper for which I once was the managing editor.

Daily circulation was about 17,000. My FTE count was 26. We hired reporters away from bigger papers and matched their salaries. I asked for $5,000 more than what I knew the last guy got. They gave me $8,000.

My guess, they’ll have a staff of eight a year from now.

 

Heartbreaking isn’t it? Those papers are the glue of America. When we lose those, we’re all a little more beholden to the national media. Never good.

 

Where do Quincy and Hannibal print? I am sure that one of the motivations is to combine printing in one plant which will probably be bad news for the production workers.

On a totally irrelevant note what a great historic name the Quincy Herald-Whig is. According to Wikipedia the Quincy Whig started in 1838. That paper would have been in the middle of the political battles of the 1850. The Quincy Herald was founded in 1835 so I would guess they were the Democratic/Jacksonian paper in town.

 

Herald-Whig prints itself and, to your good point above, I'm sure Hannibal will go there. My understanding is GateHouse shutdown its Hannibal printing operation a while back and the Courier-Post is printed in Columbia, as well as several other GateHouse papers.

 

Gatehouse is running out of cash. When they went on their buying binge they seemed to buy everything everywhere and worried little about regional clusters. I wonder if selling Hannibal is part of a strategy to consolidate into clusters and raise some additional capital by selling outliers.

 

Gatehouse bought the New Jersey Herald last Friday.

New Jersey Herald sold to GateHouse Media

Today it's laying off dozens - if not hundreds - of employees around the country.

Local newspaper giant GateHouse Media is laying off journalists across the US in cuts their CEO is calling 'immaterial'

 

But look on the bright side -- when they send someone to deal with your paper's IT situation and they mess with your computer and then end up leaving without finishing yours, and several others, corporate IT will take at least three hours (and counting) to get with you so you can actually use your computer to do your job.