BH media layoffs

But you're blaming the consumer when that's the system we set up. For it to be free online. Newspapers just never got in front of this. That's not the public's fault that they got used to it being for free. I have no doubt people will mourn the loss of the product. Hopefully something gets figured out.

 

Sadly, there's a belief among a lot of the public that TV is the pinnacle of journalism because someone sitting on a pretty set reads it to them every night, without realizing that much TV journalism has the depth of your average kiddie pool. That's said with all respect to our TV brethren, but it's the way the medium is set up. TV is also going through some difficult times and cutbacks.

Read a TV station website and the writing is usually very poor. I rarely watch television news, but top-rated TV station spent the first five minutes covering a breaking local story. Very little time was spent actually reporting the story, but in that time, we heard "as those of you following our app saw on our push alert," "as we reported on Twitter three hours ago (that station didn't break the story)," "go to our website for coverage." It was all about the station's self-promotion and not about reporting the story. Yet, much of the public will consider this a bigger deal than anything reported in their local newspaper. We all know you get what you pay for, but thanks to TV and radio, news has been given away (in bite-size pieces) for free for decades, and people have begun to expect it to be free. They don't realize they're paying for it through their cable bill. If we could make everyone who subscribes to ESPN pay $1/month to our local papers like TV stations do, we'd be in much better shape.

 

I hear Greensboro got hit pretty hard - 23 altogether.

 

A little nugget buried in a story from Omaha. Gannett lost nearly $14 million in the fourth quarter. Anyone want to start the clock?

Grace: The World-Herald has taken some hits, but we're still fighting

 

I respect the shit out of the World-Herald for being transparent and writing more than one story about their layoffs.

I can't help but contrast that story, with compelling reasons to subscribe, with the Twitter wailings from people at my local Gannett rag. Much of that included snarky lines about how "I need to feed my family," which does nothing for me. Don't treat it like a charity, tell me that I will be missing something I desperately need if I don't subscribe.

 

Hopefully the situation improves enough in Omaha. I know, I can dream. But Omaha has always been a paper that gets it right. They've had to trim some pages, which is a shame, but they fill the remaining pages with great content. And I always love the College World Series special sections.

 

I get what you’re saying, but these folks are journalists and not sales people. They don’t exactly have a polished pitch. They just want to pay the mortgage and the tuition and for a few more months, until the next round of layoffs. They’re begging because they’re lacking answers, like most of us.

 

That nugget is misleading. According to the press release Gannett had to take a paper loss because of the revaluation of deferred tax assets due to the new tax law. This is a one-time, non cash transaction and if you back that out they turned a 30 million dollar profit.

But retail advertising is cratering. Both Gannett and McClatchy reported 18 percent advertising drops.

And one statistic I found staggering came from the McClatchy conference call transcript. McClatchy used to spend 20% of revenue on newsprint. Now McClatchy spends four percent. That tells you how much the size of the paper has shrunk.

The CEO of Gannett also said he is committed to printing seven days a week. So I expect reductions in print frequency at Gannett very soon.

 

The price of newsprint also spiked about 10 years ago, accounting for some of that difference.

 

Martinsville Marketing Services - BH Media Group

Looks like it.

 

And even if the other paper companies aren't losing $14M, they'll parrot what Gannett does in terms of slashing and burning.