Gannett, Gatehouse talking merger

I don't know who has the resources buy Gannett. DFM did not have the cash. McClatchy and Lee have a lot of debt and low market capitalizations. Gatehoues's stock price is int he toilet. Maybe Tribune but that company has a lot of trouble making decisions.

 

Gannett in Advanced Talks to Combine with GateHouse Media

 

New York Post also with a shorter story on this ...

https://nypost.com/2019/07/18/gatehouse-media-poised-to-buy-gannett/

 

If Gatehouse, arguably even a cheaper more disgraceful company than Gannett (staff size, pay for employees), buys Gannett does that mean Gatehouse will improve the papers? Or hack them down to Gatehouse crap standards? Would Gatehouse kill USA Today??

 

Gatehouse will kill anything it touches.

I was talking to a non-journalist friend earlier today about the state of the industry and how Gatehouse owns 95 percent of the newspapers (including weeklies) within a 50-mile radius. It’s insane. She couldn’t believe it.

 

I think Gannett is clueless. I think Gatehouse has smarter management and the strategy is to milk the papers until they die. So Gatehouse would hack them down.

But Gatehouse stock has tumbled in price and I don't see how they can finance the purchase of Gannett. '

 

They’ll just borrow some of Mnuchin’s pallets of cash to leverage it. We all know how that debt is going to be retired.

 

Is there a need for USA Today any more? Business travelers don't need USA Today to get a paragraph of news from back home. On a plane or in the hotel breakfast room, travelers are looking at their phones, not reading newspapers. National advertising has plummeted, as a look at any USA Today will confirm. If you buy Gannett, why wouldn't you keep open a small Washington bureau to service the chain and kill the rest of USA Today?

 

The NYT, WSJ and WP are nowadays the de facto national newspapers. I think USA Today will be broken up into zoned editions as a last resort before they totally nuke it.

 

Newspapers should implode before allowing these assholes to take credit for killing it off.

 

Not that I expected it to go out in a blaze of glory, but I would have hoped that all those "3s" I got for phone, and other BS Gannett put their employees through would have been for some higher purpose then just conceding to Gatehouse. But the company has never been known for its imagination.

 

God, one would hope that this would fly against monopoly rules or the FCCs media ownership rules. But those both feel more and more relaxed as the years go by.