Adams' property Janesville (Wis.) Gazette going to five days

This is a very good publication, always punching above its weight class. Hard-working staff. Adams bought it a couple years back. Now they are dropping Saturday and Sunday editions and laid off three in the newsroom.

The Gazette to cease Saturday, Sunday print editions

 

Adams has been systematically buying and destroying publications long before now.

Hourly employees were cut to 30. Employees on salary slashed 25 percent in the wallet. That is, those who survived layoffs.

 

Where did this occur? In Janesville?

 

I'm sure the print devotees will be happy to see they will be getting less product for the same money.

 

If they cut hours to 30, the employees there should not do the wink-wink work 60 get paid 40 any more. If you want to insult an hourly working cutting hours to 30, then that's that. It should be overtime, baby, and lots of it! Disgusting to save money that way.

 

If you are doing a "wink-wink work 60 get paid 40" it is not possible to insult you. You've fully taken care of that on your own.

 

This. The act has gotten so very, very tiresome.

 

All Adams properties:

APG papers cut hours, pay to deal with revenue loss

And, as usual, do not fall for the bluster that passes for quotes from executives. They had a round of layoffs in January, so any talk of sparing employees for any reason is BS.

 

The Adamses are a billionaire family who got into community newspapers aggressively over the last six years. I talked about four months ago with the retired editor of the Eau Claire, Wis., paper, which Adams bought (IIRC) in 2017. The editor, who had been at the paper for decades, was pretty contented at the time with the way Adams had been running the place.

Since then, Adams has bought up nearly all of the remaining family-owned papers in Wisconsin, including six dailies and a handful of satellite weeklies in 2019 alone. As an interested spectator, I observed some staff shakeups at those acquisitions but no overwhelming changes. They laid out a shitload of money to acquire businesses that were circling the drain.

Now, of course, the bottom has dropped out of the advertising market. I'm holding a copy of one of the smaller dailies Adams acquired about the same they bought the Gazette. In its 12 pages it has less than half a page of display advertising in it. I've read issues in the last few weeks that had literally no display advertising.

Adams wants to make money, but they aren't even breaking even in this environment. They aren't even losing just a little money. The bottom has dropped out of their year-old investment. I can understand why they see a need to retrench.

I joined the staff of the Gazette as regional editor in 1989, shortly after they began publishing on Sundays. I had a lot of fun and worked my ass off. I used to joke with the former editor that he turned my hair gray. In the years since I left, the town lost its biggest employer, a large General Motors plant. A city of 50,000 doesn't just bounce back from that.

Suggesting that Adams is unconcerned about laying off employees is unfair, IMO. Suggesting that they've followed a chainsaw management strategy for years is inaccurate. Again, the family didn't get into the newspaper business until 2014. Here's an article Poynter's Rick Edmonds wrote when the family stepped up their rate of acquisitions in 2017: Who are the Adams family, and why are they buying newspapers by the dozen? - Poynter

I don't agree with everything Adams has done in the region. I do believe they invested here in good faith and got blindsided by an economic crisis with no clear end to it.

 

Agree to disagree. Not at all impressed with Adams, they've done zero to justify defending their buy-and-slash BS and they're no better than Gannett/Gatehouse or Lee. They were burning their properties to the ground long before the pandemic.

 

I admit still sometimes laugh when reading it. Pretty much always laugh when he
refers to himself in 3rd person.

 

I see Adams as more like Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway than Gannett/Gatehouse. Buffett thought he could stir in his secret sauce and keep newspapers financially sustainable. Eventually he concluded that he had made a mistake and sold to Lee.

I suspect Adams will smell the coffee at some point and bail out too. Again, the Wisconsin papers they bought in 2019 were mostly in dire financial shape when the families finally sold, which was a move they resisted for years. Frankly, there isn't a lot left to burn down in the Janesville and other southern Wisconsin properties.

In the meantime, three journalists in eastern Idaho just had their jobs saved when Adams bought their failing paper from Horizon Publications:

Adams Publishing Group announced Monday (5/4) that its Bingham County Chronicle newspaper is merging with the Blackfoot Morning News. Illinois-based Horizon Publications was the former owner of the Morning News.

Adams Publishing Group retained three of the five Morning News staff members laid off by Horizon...