Mike Reed Sets Goals for New Gannett

I was with the Evil Empire back when they had furlough days every quarter there for a while. I was stunned when that ended, and it wasn't a constant moving forward.

 

Definitely it means a lot. Always did to me.

 

I went thru the Gannett investor website. That is rather boring. But not as boring as the alternative of watching Colt McCoy try to play quarterback.

Gannett, in a press release, said they had 90 million dollars of real estate and other asset sales in the pipeline. The company has been selling off their real estate for several years. How much is left to sell? Apparently not much.

According to the footnotes of the report the company sold 3.6 million dollars of real estate through September 30. If there is no real estate left to sell then I would guess the only other assets to sell are the newspapers so Gannett appears to be interested in selling a bunch.

The problem is that Gannett has over 1.5 billion dollars of debt. I do not think all the papers, if sold, would bring that much. IMO, the company is underwater.

 

For about a year, and especially the last 6 months, local editors have been told, don't touch the print product. In fact, they've been expressly told not to directly message the page designers.
At the same time we were told, "do not make copies of stories. This is expressly forbidden." If we wanted, for example, a feature from Detroit on a local athlete, we were supposed to message our planner, who would budget the story for print and add our local channel so the story would get to our website. The designer would then grab the story.
On Monday, we were told designers will no longer look for out-of-market stories. This is because of their staffing situation following VSO's and layoffs.
(It, literally, is copying and pasting a story ID into a search bar.)
Instead, the local editor is to message the planner who has to make a copy of the story for the local site's CUE.
What about on weekends, when the planners are off? Oh, then the local editor has to make the copy.
Except, 1, the local editors don't have access to the CUE to make a copy, and 2, you forbade local editors from having anything to do with the print product.
Oh, and starting next week, the news hole for local copy is 2 pages for news and 2 pages for sports, regardless of total news hole. The rest has to be wire.
And, there will be approximately 200 newsroom layoffs announced December 1-2 and all exempt employees have 5 days of furlough.
So, yeah, things are going well.

 

Proof, once again, that no matter how bad things are, they somehow find a way to make it worse.

 

I remember back in the day the rumors that all sites would be moving to a print product of the USAT (or equivalent, if not branded as such), with a 4-page wrap of local content surrounding it.

I never thought that was feasible or going to happen, but sounds like things could be moving in that direction?

 

My new job requires me to write press releases. I sent one to the general news email of the paper I left in the spring only for it to bounce back with an 'address not found or no longer accepting email,' notice. Depressing.

 

New Gannett will not succeed until it becomes all digital. The spike in single copy prices at newsstands and growing mail delivery to subscribers shows that NG is trying to shed its print media.

 

Industry outlook grows bleaker. Media layoffs spike amid recession fears

 

Next: Snow is expected in the Northern United States this winter.

 

I do not work in the industry so I don't understand the editorial process well. But my guess is that Gannett will start reducing the number of print editions. I think most of the chain's larger papers are at six times a week. After the Christmas adds run and advertising starts a seasonal slowdown (from an already low base) further reductions in the number of editions a week will be made to allow remaining staff to finish the work.

 

This story that ran in a Gannett/Gatehouse paper in 2021 is the crux of the issue.

https://www.patriotledger.com/in-de...ions-disseminate-news-information/4512797001/

John knows what he's doing. You know why these towns are spending so much keeping him in business? It's because papers like the Patriot Ledger have cut staffing way beyond the bone and at this point have almost no one who can go out and cover something.

So the towns pay JGPR to write releases that then get submitted to the paper.

And this disingenuous piece of gotcha journalism fails to acknowledge that the paper's owners are the reason why this is happening.