Gannett announces furloughs

I always told my guys the truth and stood up for them. I'd go up the ladder to fight to get my beat guys on road trips that were necessary to covering their beats after the suits started cutting travel. I'd tell them the truth, and I'd tell my bosses the truth. In the end, it made me enemies above my paygrade and took a toll on my physical and mental health.

In my final six months at Gannett, I was pulled into a meeting by the No. 2 in our shop to discuss a range of things, including not sending reporters out to games - literally. No games at all. At one point, this person told me how they're "good at managing people out," i.e. making them so unhappy that they'd just quit. Not long after, my wife caught me throwing up before leaving for the office. It became a regular occurrence.

A few weeks later, at annual review time, I was pulled into a meeting with my boss and an HR rep and told I was on a "performance improvement plan," meaning I was getting "strong righthanded urging," as they'd say at the track, to do what No. 2 wanted me to do. I had never been rated badly in anything ever in my life or career. I saw the writing on the wall -- I was being managed out.

In the end, I jumped before I was pushed.

 

Not really.

Gatehouse used to say they would not pay more than 4.5 times EBITDA for a newspaper. EBITDA at Gannett last year was about 450 million dollars. If you give that number a multiple of 4.5 the value of the company is two billion dollars or so. Total long term debt was 2.3 billion dollars. The company was underwater the day it was born.

Gannett was Penn Central redux even before the pandemic. The pandemic will quite probably reduce the time Gannett spends in the hospice before going into Chapter 11. I do think Chapter 11 will be better for virtually all the employees than the current situation (the exception would any employees or retirees who were going to make above the limits that PBGC covers in bankruptcy. But that would be very few people).

One telltale sign. Gannett issued a press release saying it was negotiating with creditors including the feds concerning the pension liabilities. McClatchy went into bankruptcy because they could not successfully negotiate their pension liability. I don't think Gannett will have better luck.

 

Yeah, but what's approximately -$300,000,000 among us capitalists?

I'm sure the CFO will use her $4.5 million to buy a yacht or another house on a golf course.

 

I think how I ended up leaving my paper was something similar. Someone went around saying salaried people were making it look like they were working 40 hours when they weren't. And that included me, during the middle of football season, turning in another legit 50-plus-hour week.

Talked to the sports editor of the neighboring paper, which was the mother ship for our region. He said the publisher spent most of her day ranting how salaried people were lazy, coasting to 36 1/4 hours so it could be rounded up to 40. I already knew she didn't understand that most sports take place at night or on Saturdays or that there are news events on Saturday and Sunday that need coverage. (She eventually came around on sports but never understood why we couldn't take a submission for a Saturday event regardless of its importance.)

The 40-hour thing was when I finally realized that it didn't matter what I did or how hard I worked to do it, it didn't matter. There was always going to be someone out to disparage my work to try and make me look bad. The last straw was the clear indication that this included flat-out lying.

 

And lets be clear - those huge buyouts executives get when they leave a company? They aren't for performance, it's for keeping their trap shut and not spilling all the nefarious secrets that could put others in jail or prompt lawsuits that would cripple a company. You have to think the CFO did some heavy creative accounting to earn a payout worth more than 3 percent of the company's total market cap. It certainly wasn't because the stock price or earnings were going up.

 

It’s the speed that I find astonishing. Certainly this was all inevitable, but the timeline seems to have been condensed from years to months to weeks (?) in the span of days.

 

Seemed like most of the stock market was up its own ass - Nothing like a global pandemic to make people panic and go, "Holy shit, how are we going to pay off these loans?"

 

I got into it with our ASE twice.

The first was about timecards during the '93 Stanley Cup Final. I worked every day for 2 months. I didn't want to have a fight with the guy so I put down 48 hours every week. I could have been perfectly justified putting down 56 hours. He cornered me near the end and questioned the time card. He said he knew I was working hard and what I was producing was top-notch, but he questioned the hours.
"So, how many hours did your work yesterday?"
"Uh, maybe 6." (An off-day story.)
"Why did you file for 8 hours?"
"Because I worked 13 the day before and only put down for 8."
"Could you have done it in less than 13."
"Probably not, considering it included my third round-trip flight from L.A. to Toronto and back in 10 days."
Finally, I just said "I'm not talking to you about this anymore. Pay me whatever you think I deserve and if it's wrong, we'll take it up with HR."

The other time was when the SE wanted all of the writers evaluated. He sent a memo with appointment times and dates for everybody. And I was first on the list. Before I even finished reading the memo, he called me into his office. He said he didn't want me to read anything into the fact I was first. Somebody had to be first, that's all it is.
When I met with the ASE, he had printouts of the first three paragraphs of every story I wrote the past year. The stack of printouts was probably 3 inches deep. He pushed the stack to me and said to take a few minutes and look them over. I thumbed through about the first 2o. He came back and sat down. I said, "Pretty good stuff. We're done." I got up and walked away.

 

New suit in the building - Doug Horne hired as Chief Financial Officer.

His last job? WeWork

 

TEGNA (the Gannett TV spinoff) also announced furloughs today. One week for staffers.

In the business, our ratings are incredibly high right now. But... many advertisers are pulling their packages. Need that political gravy to get here pronto.

 

That sucks. We have a TEGNA station in Spokane that will be affected, no doubt.

And when I've watched local news, the amount of house ads/self-promotion spots is more than I've ever seen. Not a good sign.