Gannett Voluntary Buyouts

Well, you had to apply for them. As fucked up as Gannett/GateHouse is, I don't think they were in people's home offices forcing them at gunpoint to put in for the buyout.

 

So, the guys in the pressroom decided it would be smart for the company to take on so much debt?

 

It will be the same thing in Florida. Pensacola, Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Gainesville, Daytona, Cocoa, Sarasota and Palm Beach will eventually swallow up Panama City/Fort Walton, Fort Myers, St. Augustine, Ocala, Winter Haven. Hell, you see a new version of the Florida Today -- the panhandle edition (Pensacola, Tally, Jax), Space Coast (Daytona-Cocoa), central (Gainesville, Ocala, Lakeland, Winter Haven), combine Sarasota and Fort Myers and wait to pounce on Fort Lauderdale when it finally caves and combine it with Palm Beach.

 

The suits should get full blame for not recognizing 20 years ago that the model was going to change. The suits are the ones getting golden parachutes. The suits are the ones ruining lives because they were horseshit businessmen.
Fuck the suits.

 

I can tell you mine was voluntary
My mother died that spring
My sister and I were using vacation time to take care of things but we really needed to be there
Buyout let me do that and find a place to retire in Florida
Plus they don’t take out union dues or 401k deductions and the extra $$$ comes in handy

 

Sorry to hear about your loss, Jake.

 

Thanks
One of the things I feel best about was leaving on my own terms

 

Twenty-five years ago a consultant told me they’d manage online by making exclusive content deals with AOL or CompuServe to get their money up front.

Hmm.

 

Most businessmen are ostensibly good at (drumroll, please) . . . running their business.

Only a tiny fraction are capable of reinventing them. Buggy-whip "suits" don't magically evolve into airline "suits."

 

In fairness that makes some sense when you have about four ISPs and everyone is trying to be like Prodigy. AOL’s Digital City was one of the first places you could get professional, online-only content.

 

When industries downsize they usually do it through mergers. This is certainly true of newspapers. Many papers in the country have been around since the 19th century. But most of those survivors had merged with competitors along the way. Frank Gannet's nickname was "The Great Hyphenator" because he started the chain by buying up competing papers in a town and achieving economies of scale.

Eventually papers downsized to one in virtually each market. Now as subscribers, classifieds and revenues decline the next step is to combine markets. Technological advances have made this process a hell of a lot easier. Fifty years ago the newsroom and the printing press pretty much had to be in the same building so that the paper could be designed and type set. Now that process can be done anywhere.

So regionalization is inevitable.

 

One that did is Bell & Howell
The former camera company now has a lot of overnight ads selling all kinds of crap