Mike Reed Sets Goals for New Gannett

SMH! Good ol' Butch.

 

Gannett tiptoes into generative AI, giving humans the last word

Gannett using artificial intelligence. The jokes literally write themselves.

 

"I'm just glad they're using any intelligence at all now!"

 

Artificial Life, Artificial News!

 

Rebuilding America after AI: Smoking Ruins, Self-Aware Mike Reed

 

Are you saying that he’s currently not self-aware?

 

I’d love to know more details of their training and tuning process. Two weeks is not enough time to train an LLM. Not with current technology and language models. It’s simply not.

 

The world’s most inept newspaper chain strikes again as the outgoing Louisville Courier-Journal interim sports editor torches down the building.

“Turnover at the CJ, in sports and beyond, has been devastating and largely seems to stem from a suffocating culture.”

 

This is making the rounds on a Gannett alumni forum. I hesitate at first to post it here, but it's so damn good and deserves a wider audience. I've omitted the writer's name to respect their privacy in that regard, but since it was shared on social media, I hope I'm not out of bounds in reposting it here.

Gannett's stock is down about 90 percent since I left America's largest print news organization a decade ago and I couldn't be happier. The sooner this false-flag operation ends, the better for America.

Why?

Because Gannett is not a news organization and hasn't been for some time.

I believe it's really a corporate vehicle for private equity firms to gag our free press at the local and regional level.

The amounts needed to fire and neuter most of the U.S. investigative reporters who once plagued big Wall Street predators like Apollo Global is pocket lint for them. Apollo, which was founded by Michael Milken’s old junk bond team, has $598 billion worth of assets under management.

Gatehouse was owned by The Fortress Investment Group -another private equity firm - when it bought Gannett in 2019 for $1.2 billion. Apollo loaned it the money.

Private equity firms form the vanguard of Wall Street’s undeclared war on workers. They control many of the companies that destroy good jobs and lock working class Americans into debt, and make huge political donations to both crooked political machines.

Full disclosure, I beat wholesale Apollo ass for Gannett back in 2013-14, while dragging around its useless second-string editors. So I’m not just talking at random.

Supposedly, we're still a capitalist society with free market competition. I was taught to cover that society by "following the money." If you apply that standard to Gannett it should have shut down or broken up long ago.

Case in point, The Des Moines Register. One of America's most storied newspapers.

Gannett purchased my old newspaper for a whopping $351 million in 1985, which is equal to $1.01 billion today after being adjusted for inflation.

There was good reason to overpay for the Register. It had 400,000 readers back then and incredible market penetration, reaching about half of all Iowa households. Almost none of them were interested in receiving their news online.

So, how has The Register fared under Gannett's stewardship?

It has about 27,000 daily subscribers now and is probably worth less than $10 million - 1 percent of what Gannett paid for it.

One.

I can't emphasize this number enough.

One.

How many businesses could lose 99 percent of their value without shutting down or being sold off, in a true capitalist society?

None.

How many business leaders could oversee such an epic collapse without getting canned?

None.

So, whats really going on at Gannett?

I dunno, but it's not in the news business. Instead, it actually seems to be devoted to quietly strangling America's free press.

The chain owns 27 of the top 100 newspapers in the U.S. and hundreds of other dailies and weeklies. It's running them all into the ground. Has been for years and years.

Some folks point to social media's rising share of the advertising pie and say Gannett isn't being intentionally suffocated. I disagree. I think the decline is intentional. It has to be.

Why?

Because there is a boatload of advertising money in local markets looking for a better way to connect with local customers.

The news market is so underserved in Des Moines that HyVee, the fast-growing supermarket chain, has begun its own publication.

HyVee wants nothing more than to put a multi-page spread of print ads in front of readers every day, which is something you can't do with social media.

Clearly, they have a lot of money to spend and are dissatisfied with The Register.

The same story is playing out in every Gannett market.

Why?

Crappy product, higher prices.

Gannett knows most readers won't pay more for a lesser product, but they've been raising prices and cutting top-notch reporters and editors for decades now. It's almost as if they want their newspapers to fail.

So, why doesn't a local business group with a commitment to Iowa just buy The Register and breathe new life into it?

For years, Gannett has refused to sell individual newspapers. If you want to buy its failing assets you have to buy them as a group, which pretty much ensures a sale won't occur.

So, why doesn't a local group just start a new newspaper?

Because it's a bad idea. For the same reason professional sports teams relocate to unserved markets instead of those with a competitor.

The Seattle Supersonics is a perfect example. This NBA team changed its name to the Thunder in 2008 and moved to Oklahoma City. Not New York, Chicago or LA.

Same thing happened with the NFL's Oakland Raiders, who relocated to the empty Las Vegas market in 2020.

As long as Gannett has a comatose Register it can quickly ramp up the value of its local news product to squash any newcomer. There are times when it almost feels like Gannett is waiting for someone to try just so it can ruin them.

The Register is a terrible newspaper with an incompetent staff, but it's still got an over-abundance of underpaid reporters and clueless editors.

By rights, it should have a newsroom staff of 10 as a 27,000 reader daily newspaper. Instead, it lists an incredible 35 reporters and 11 editors on its website.

What the fugg right?

And they're terrible.

None of it makes any sense. Unless Gannett's real corporate mission is to let America's free press wither on the vine.

No one is this incompetent by happenstance.

Cue Woody Harrelson and the basketball hustler he played in The film “White Men Can’t Jump.” Before he could plant the hook he had to pretend he couldn’t play to bring in the sucker money.

“You see the backwards baseball cap, the gray socks and the funky outfit and you say ‘this guy is a chump,” Harrelson’s character tells the suckers before taking their money. “What you don’t realize is that it is hard goddamn work making something this pretty look like a chump.”

For the hustlers at Apollo that means putting marginal journalists with second-rate talent in leadership positions. Which is why they rely so heavily on newsroom managers who never distinguished themselves as reporters.

Like say, Register Executive Editor Carol Hunter.

Cue Woody again at the very end saying “don’t worry, I’ve hustled way better ball players than you.”

Might as well be Apollo talking to the entire Fourth Estate.

Gannett is not a failed news organization. It’s a successful effort to suffocate America’s free press.

And it’s not the only one.

What’s it all mean?

Private equity doesnt buy newspapers to make money. It buys them to silence criticism and avoid scrutiny.

 

What I want to know is in a department like the CJ, how many people are in sports to where a guy who has been there 11 months had only one guy in front of him in service time?

 

I've believed this for a long time, and not just at Gannett.

The Messenger, which has gotten off to a comically inept start, "has raised $50 million from investors including Josh Harris, co-founder of the private equity giant Apollo."

Other investors include former Hearst CEO Victor Ganzi, who "since then (has) been a prolific Republican donor;" Loews Corp. CEO James Tisch, "a major Republican donor ... (who) sits on the National Council of the conservative American Enterprise Institute;" Thomas Peterffy, "a true GOP megadonor, giving $7.7 million to Republican campaigns and conservative political action committees in 2022 alone. He also lives three doors down from Mar-a-Lago;" and Mark Penn, a former Democratic pollster who "in recent years (has) moved right and become a Trump enthusiast."

 

They used to set "new" goals every year at one of the Lee papers I worked at (the first lee paper I worked for was in the day when they were still comewhat comitted to a good product, after breaking the printers/pressmen union, of course).

No. 1 was always "increase revenue," a polite way of saying make more fucking money.