BY RAUL HERNANDEZ
The Walmart of the newspaper industry recently gobbled up some more of the nation’s newspapers including the Ventura County Star. The newspaper I worked for.
Readers of the Star and other 13 newspapers including the Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel staff can expect some drastic changes in news coverage and reporting.
Gannet, which owns USA TODAY, is also known for numerous corporate edicts that include the art of writing “tighter,” which often means putting enterprise and investigative stories into cramped newspaper space.
Gannett’s modus operandi shortly after it buys a newspaper is to gut the newsroom to the bare bones, and shrink the news space. This means the community has one less avenue to hold elected officials accountable, keep an eye on where taxpayers’ money is being spent or expose public corruption.
I worked for the El Paso Times for about three years in the late 1990s. It is owned by the Gannett Corporation. So I know about formula writing first hand, and how Gannett’s corporate drones run cookie-cutter operations.
Scripps Unloads its Newspapers
First, some background on how E.W. Scripps Co. unloaded The Star and 13 other newspapers, including its most recent purchase, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Scripps had an eye on the Journal Sentinel’s profitable TV and radio stations. Last year, Scripps and the Journal Communications, which owned the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, merged and as part of the deal, they formed a new publicly traded Journal Media Group.
Journal Communications’ television and radio properties, including the WTMJ radio and TV, were part of the merger.
The financially struggling Journal Sentinel and 13 of Scripps money-losing newspapers were soon cast out of Scripps’ TV- and radio-stations empire and were put into the Journal Media Group.
The group included Scripps’ newspapers The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, The Knoxville News Sentinel, The Naples Daily News the Corpus Christi Caller-Times and the Ventura County Star.
Scripps is one of the nation’s largest independent TV station owners, with 33 television stations in 24 markets and a reach of nearly one in five U.S. households. It also owns 34 radio stations in eight markets.
After its merger, Scripps put lipstick and some heavy-duty rogue on the Journal Media Group and told the newspapers’ staff that this was simply a good business move:
In a story in The Star published July 30, 2014, Scripps CEO Richard Boehne said “the split should enable both companies to grow their respective media platforms through acquisitions and capital investments. Journal Media Group will emerge from the deal with no debt. Scripps will have less debt than its peers in the broadcasting industry. Scripps is also retaining the pension liabilities of newspaper employees as part of the transaction.”
“It’s a big opportunity for Scripps and Scripps shareholders,” Boehne said in the article. “It makes us a much larger television company, a much larger digital company and we also get back into the radio business. We’ll be financially a much bigger and stronger company.”
Bigger and stronger
But despite the “bigger and stronger” reassurances, the old Scripps stockholders, which held the majority of stock, voted to pull the plug on its 14 money-losing newspapers including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Months after the Journal Communications and Scripps merger, Scripps put a For Sale sign on the Journal Media Group.
Gannett, the Walmart of the newspaper industry, is always looking to buy financially crippled newspapers in the consolidating newspaper industry. They had the highest bid of $280 million and bought the Journal Media Group.
Gannett now operates USA TODAY and 107 dailies in 34 states and Guam, in addition to Newsquest in the U.K., with its 150 local digital and print news brands.
After the sale and with newspapers out of the way, Scripps can now buy TV stations in Florida where it once owned newspapers. Stringent federal rules about newspapers buying newspapers or TV stations were it would eliminate competition is taboo because readers and advertisers might suffer.
Gannett’s Happy Face
The New York Times reported that the annual sales of the 14 Journal Media Group newspapers would be about $500 million.
Just like Scripps, Gannett is putting a happy face for Journal Media Group’s management and staff, promising a user-friendly management style and a bright future.
But media observers and former Gannett reporters are skeptical, including columnist Bruce Murphy with UrbanMilwaukee.com.
“Which brings us to the comments now being made by Gannett, once again assuring nervous JS (Journal Sentinel) staff that everything will come up roses for them, just as the Scripps folks did,” Murphy wrote in an article published in October. “In a JS story about the sale, Gannett CEO Bob Dickey declared that his company intended to let the “local editors make local decisions on coverage, on how they use their resources,” including making decisions on the level of journalist staffing, adding that he didn’t see this “changing in the foreseeable future.”
“Lovely sentiments, but all completely contrary to how Gannett operates. Gannett is famous for cutting the budget and staff of newspapers it buys, for replacing veteran journalists with younger, lower-paid employees, for doing cookie-cutter newspapers subject to tightly centralized corporate rules,” Murphy stated in his article.
Newspaper profits were on the decline in 2008, Gannett newspapers were raking in high profits.
“Back in 2008, when the meltdown of print media was still in its early stages, writer Jim Hopkins did a story on the extraordinarily high profit margins of Gannett’s newspapers (based on 2007 numbers), with the Green Bay Press-Gazette leading the pack with a 43.5 percent profit margin. Many of the 80 Gannett papers Hopkins had numbers for were making a profit margin of 20, 32, 30 or 35 percent,” according to Murphy’s story.
“Those fat profits were achieved by constant cost-cutting and maintaining lean staffs, but in the years since then, as the full brunt of print’s economic demise was felt, the company still slashed its staff almost in half.
“From 2008 to 2012 Gannett reduced total employment by 20,000 positions out of 45,000 positions,” Jim Hopkins notes. “The vast majority were aged 45 and up because they were the highest paid.”
Adding, “Those fat profits were achieved by constant cost-cutting and maintaining lean staffs, but in the years since then, as the full brunt of print’s economic demise was felt, the company still slashed its staff almost in half. “
Here is Gannett’s formula for increasing its bottom line, according to Hopkins who worked for 20 years.
Buy newsprint and office supplies in bulk for all papers.
Have a few regional customer service centers to replace all the newspaper circulation departments.
Develop giant page production hubs which include centralized copy editing, has cookie-cutter websites for each newspaper (for ease of selling ads nationally) and install a similar editorial approach at every newspaper.
Replace newspaper publishers and editors at recently purchased newspaper.
“They like to have their own people in place, who are more familiar with corporate culture. Plus it’s a chance for people within the company to advance,” Hopkins noted in Murphy’s article.
Working for Gannett
I left the now-closed El Paso Herald-Post, which was owned by Scripps, around 1994 to work at the El Paso Times, owned by Gannett. Scripps and Gannett had a joint operating agreement or JOA, meaning the newspapers shared the same building, printing press and sales department to save money. But each had separate and independent newsrooms and editorial departments.
So, it took less than ten minutes to walk across the hall with my boxes and begin covering the courts for the El Paso Times.
Shortly after I arrived at the Times newsroom, I got a taste of life under the Gannett Corporation.
I asked reporter Emily Jauregui where I could get a reporter’s notebook, and she pointed me to a storage closet. There, I am not kidding, were a few stacks of used reporters notebooks. She said reporters donate some of their partially used notebooks so others can write on the unused pages.
It’s recycling, and I guess it saves money, she said. I grumbled, suggesting that it was more like corporate slinging henhouse BS to save nickels and dimes. I wanted a new notebook that wasn’t filled with other reporters’ notes and doodling.
She said to go to the editor’s secretary and ask for a new notebook. I did and had to sign for it. If I needed another one, come back and do the same thing. I did it once, and I was so turned off by this that I started buying my own notebooks. I wasn’t going to be part of the bargain-counter.
For the most part, the reporters and staff at the Times were great but I left after nearly three years of enduring Gannett’s corporate jingoism that included having at least one minority — black, hispanic, Korean, an Indian chief or one of the Village People, whatever — quoted in every damn Times’ story.
I quickly learned about Gannett’s diversity outreach.
This is from an article in the New York Times published in 1988: “Under the policy, reporters and photographers are instructed to include people from minority groups in all articles, not just those relating to racial issues.”
”If largely white newsrooms are left to their own devices, the sources used turn out to be largely white sources,” Charles L. Overby, Gannett’s vice president for news is quoted in the 1988 NYT report.
In the NYT 1988 article, the newspaper also noted Gannett’s hypocrisy: “In spite of a 10-year program to hire and promote journalists who are members of minority groups, the newsrooms at Gannett’s 88 daily newspapers remain 89 percent white, said Mary Kay Blake, director of news staff recruiting for Gannett. (USA Today, which is not included in the overall count, is 78 percent white.) A study released in August by the American Newspaper Publishers Association showed that racial minorities make up 16 percent of the work force of American newspapers, but only 8 percent of news and editorial staffs.”
But to its credit, Gannett had much better minority hiring numbers at that time than the rest of the industry, which isn’t saying much.
No excuses. Find a minority “voice”and get quotes for the story.
Reporters joked about begging minority sources to comment about issues they knew nothing about to fulfill Gannett’s minority-story quota.
Then, there were endless focus groups and meetings. I called them indoctrination or bitch sessions. I recall a small diversity focus group about how Hispanics would like to be identified in print. I was invited to join the discussion. The group came up with “Chicano, Latino, Hispanic, Mexican-American” and one reporter said: “American.”
“I like that,” I said sarcastically. “That’s thinking outside the box.”
It was always my habit that when I attended newsroom touchy-feely or as I called them, “Think Tank” discussions to make myself as invisible as possible. Occasionally, nodding the head thoughtfully and saying, “that’s great idea” or “I like that,” just go with the flow.
Usually, in the newsrooms, I just ran my own program that included constantly milking my sources, working hard and pumping out as many solid stories from my beat.
Most of the time that kept the editors at bay.
Don’t get me wrong, many of these meetings elicit incredible ideas or suggestions, usually from reporters, on how to improve the newspaper coverage or better run a newsroom.
With the El Paso Times, however, I sometimes felt Moses was going to show up at one of the meetings holding tablets that stated: “Thus Sayeth Gannett.”
Gannett took the newsroom “touchy feely” management style to new heights.
Murphy wrote about how Gannett will create news posts at Milwaukee, The Star and other Journal Sentinel Group newspapers they’ve purchased:
“Gannett papers have all these quaint-sounding jobs that will need to be filled like the ‘Quality of Life Content Strategist,’ ‘Audience Analyst,’ ‘Senior Content Coach,’ the “Working for equality, celebrating diversity” reporter (the Louisville paper has two such reporters!) or the all-important “Give Back and Pay it Forward” reporter. And no, I am not making these titles up.”
Still, some reporters thrived at The Times. Most stayed long enough to get some experience and find work elsewhere.
After working three years at The Times, I accepted a job offer with a raise and went back to work — with the Herald-Post.
I knew that afternoon newspapers like the Herald-Post were closing left and right. I was there a year before the Herald-Post quickly closed in 1997. There were a lot of job offers for Herald-Post reporters right after the closure from newspapers throughout the nation.
The Times management said Herald-Post reporters who wanted a job with them would have to apply for them. There was no way I would go back and work at another Gannett newspaper. I was very fortunate. I got four job offers from papers in Texas, New Mexico and California. I ended up at the Press Enterprise in Riverside County, California.
In 1998, I accepted a job offer from then Ventura County Star Editor Tim Gallagher. Tim had worked as a managing editor with the Herald-Post when I was there. He left after Scripps named him editor of the Albuquerque Journal. Later, Tim became the editor and publisher for The Star.
In the interest of full disclosure in 2013, I resigned from the Ventura County Star, and later, successfully settled a wage and hour lawsuit against the newspaper.
The Star has many talented and creative reporters who are dedicated and hardworking people. It was fun working with that crew.
With Scripps packing up and leaving many communities, newspaper stories holding public officials accountable or exposing corruption where Gannett has its corporate footprint will be few and far between.
As for the Journal Sentinel’s downtown offices, way too large for its current staff, “one of the first things Gannett will do is sell – or try to sell – the paper’s headquarters and move into cheaper offices,” predicts longtime national media writer Jim Romenesko, according to Murphy’s story.
“The one thing likely to survive is the relatively new JS (Journal Sentinel) printing press in West Milwaukee, which will likely become one of Gannett’s regional presses, printing the other Gannett papers in Wisconsin,” Murphy wrote.
“Famed publisher Harry Grant, who created the Milwaukee Journal’s unique employee-owned structure in the 1930s to protect its stature and seriousness forever, must be rolling over in his grave. The slimmed-down, corporate cookie cutter paper the Journal Sentinel is about to become would have been his worst nightmare,” Murphy stated.