CNHI

Don't believe everything you read, Hank, I don't know of any 30K paper at CNHI which is operating with one reporter.

 

I was once a publisher at a small CNHI paper (4K), which is a very small fish in most ponds, but in the community, the newspaper was highly respected. Before the sale to CNHI, we paid water bills, electricity bills, the exterminator, etc. on time, every month via our corporate office. When CNHI takes over, we start getting calls about shutting the water off, disconnect notices from the electic company and threats from our newsprint supplier that they were going to hold our next newsprint shipment. That in turn caused advertisers to be much less supportive of our newspaper and in turn, revenues went south.

The worst, tho, was CNHI's brilliant cluster printing plan where they removed the presses from a lot of plants and consolidated the printing into one location. For a lot of small newspapers, the outside job shops we solicited and secured meant a nice revenue source. Without a press, this revenue source went away. When we inquired as to how they expected us to recoup the loss of a $35K annual printing contract, you can guess what the answer was -- cut jobs. So we lost status in the community because we didn't pay our bills, lost thousands in revenue and weren't able to provide readers the same quality of news coverage because we had to cut staff.

If there is justice, when it comes time to repay the loans to the Alabama Teacher Retirement System, this company won't be able to and it'll go into bankruptcy and maybe sold off to reputable buyers who can restore the newspapers to the level they need to be.

 

Sounds good to me.

Sounds delusional to me. None of those jobs is coming back. When those presses were removed, the die was cast.

 

And while they're essentially house ads, they're still such a waste of advertising. How many people in Ohio or Massachusetts are choosing Alabama over Myrtle Beach or Florida for golf trips?

 

Actually, the courses are among the best I've ever played; and they're owned by the state pension fund not just the teachers.
But yeah, I'd be pissed if I had to run them on my section front.

 

Both are a little under 20K.

 

I think CNHI is cutting back, a buddy of mine who works for a CNHI paper told me three of their papers in southern state were sold to NHPI, National Hometown Papers, Inc. A company, which I had never heard of. I wonder if they're selling off some papers to keep the company afloat?

 

They've been selling off lots of smaller papers, mostly non-dailies and dailies they consider too small for their company.

 

Jeebus, how small is too small for CNHI?

 

since this thread is being revisited, can someone tell me more about the monstrous payment CNHI is going to have to make to the retired teachers? i've googled the issue, but can't seem to come up with anything.

and throwing the question out there again, even though they hold mostly small newspapers, any thoughts on the impact it would have if both JRC and CNHI went belly up in the same year?