Mike Reed Sets Goals for New Gannett

Their pants?

 

Gannett will no longer be using AP content.

 

Given that Gannett has papers with literally zero staffers what are they going to print on the pages? Content from other papers?

 

“Lottery Numbers From All 50 States”

 

And I would bet very few ads. In their latest 10-K Gannett said circulation of USA Today dropped from 133,000 in 2022 to 113,000 in 2023. I don't see how the company can afford to continue to print and distribute the thing.

 

"This shift will give us the opportunity to redeploy more dollars... to pay our massive debt."

 

Negotiating ploy to secure a lower rate?

 

Right around the time I left the Norwich (Conn.) Bulletin, in 2013, it had moved from its home of more than 100 years to the former train station nearby. Over the next 10 years, Gatehouse/Gannett took the staff down to (I believe) 2 full-time news reporters and one full-time sports reporter (when it was a 10/5 ratio when I left). In that time, the previous home was rehabbed and turned into a co-working space. Last week, they announced they are moving back into their old home and will be occupying one of those co-working spaces. Hard for me to wrap my head around that one. To think that newspaper once took up three whole buildings on the block, and now the entire operation fits in a glorified cubicle in that same space.

 

I advocated years ago at my shop to consider dropping AP. Nothing against the quality of AP, but it was a lot more valuable pre-online when readers didn't have access to every paper in the country. What's the value these days of AP copy -- or any copy -- that most of the rest of the country also publishes? At least at our place, the traffic (mostly from search, which generates most of our traffic) for an AP story on a subject is dwarfed by the traffic if one of our staffers writes it, even if the quality isn't any better.

 

Big if true

“We create more journalism every day than the AP,” Roberts said in the Tuesday statement, adding that not paying for AP content “will give us the opportunity to redeploy more dollars toward our teams and build capacity where we might have gaps.”

 

I largely agree with this but from a sports angle the photos are invaluable

 

In theory, Gannett ought to have enough papers in its chain to where it could create an in-house equivalent of AP — a national wire service for its papers that covers most of its needs for national news for its members. Maybe they do already.
In practice, a lot of their papers are so gutted and it would probably require an investment in IT infrastructure that it might not work.