Gannett Voluntary Buyouts

Wow! Everybody Down East knew and loved Sammy. I sat next to him many times at N.C. State athletic events. Plus, the list he rattled off is a who's who of guys I interacted with during my Tele-Lie years. Thomas Pope, Chip, Friedlander ... man, I hate to think of the institutional knowledge gone. I think Wilson's Tom Ham may be the only guy still doing this thing after all these years.

 

How many of these buyouts really are “voluntary” and not done under duress?

 

And the Hammer is still going strong.

 

Death (of newspapers), taxes, Tom Ham ... I like only one of them.

 

The suits need to dump salary so their bosses can make payments on their vacation homes and a long distinguidhed career means nothing to the suits. The print product still is keeping newspapers alive and they keep dumping the favorite writers of those who still read print. It's all a disgrace. Keep charging 1,000 dollars a year to the old folks, suits, that's the way to run a business. And keep dropping all the reporters who made a name for themselves and a following. Hire some kid who can (not) get some page views.

 

Ohio's one step forward to becoming a statewide news desert.

 

the reality is New Gannett is deeply in debt and the interest payments on that debt is what is driving the sale of land/buildings and the reduction in employees. The "suits" you rail against are not responsible for the debt. If payments on that debt are not met, it will mean default, another bankruptcy and possibly liquidation of the company. Are the "suits" responsible for the millions of dollars lost this Black Friday because buying shifted online and print circulars were sharply down?

 

something something institutional memory something

Eliot Kleinberg remembers what the newsroom felt like as a 10-year-old.

At The Miami News, the afternoon paper where his dad worked, he heard clanging typewriters and people shouting for a copy boy. A cloud of cigarette smoke hung over everything.

He grew up with stories about the day President John Kennedy was shot, and his father, Howard Kleinberg, got to stop the presses.

Kleinberg remembers his father’s unplanned retirement, too, when The Miami News abruptly closed in the late ’80s.

“He had to literally shut the lights down and turn the key in the lock.”

This week, Kleinberg did his own version of that, turning in his laptop to The Palm Beach Post on Tuesday morning, marking his official retirement from a 33-year career there. ​

For more than 70 years, a father, then a son, covered South Florida. That ended this week. - Poynter

 

I believe Gannett's true end game is making Cincinnati, Columbus and Akron as big and profitable as possible, and laying waste to all of the small(er) outlets to pay for it.

 

can we wipe out newspaper industry debt with the student loan debt will that save our jobs

 

Sports editor Jim Russ and designer Julie Altsleben among six to take buyout at Detroit News

 

Buyouts at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: photographers Rick Wood and Mike Sears, features writer Kathy Flanigan and education/GA reporter Annysa Johnson. Wood and Sears each had been with the JS or their pre-merger predecessors for 40 years.