Tag: gannett
New York Daily News building

Alden Global Capital Is Killing The Local Newsroom

If Hollywood wanted to make a gritty movie about the work of dig-it-out newspaper reporters who uncover big local stories of government doings and corporate misdeeds, it couldn't have chosen a more picture-perfect location than the boisterous newsroom of New York's Daily News. Once the largest-circulation paper in America, the Daily News embodied the rich history of brawny tabloid journalism, even serving as the model for DC Comics' Daily Planet, workplace of Clark Kent and Lois Lane in Superman.

But there'd be a problem with filming at the Daily News now: Its owners have eliminated the newsroom, leaving reporters, editors, photographers, et al. with no shared workplace. Yes, today, it's a newspaper without a newsroom.

This once-proud publication is now owned and run by Alden Global Capital, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund with a long record of buying papers on the cheap, selling off their assets and slashing pay and jobs. Media watchers have labeled these vulture capitalists the "ruthless corporate strip-miners" of local journalism. And sure enough, in the past couple of years Alden's profiteers have steadily plundered the paper, eliminating half of its newsroom staff. Then, last August, they told the remaining journalists they would no longer have a physical place to work.

To be clear, this closure was not a temporary measure to protect staff from COVID-19. Nor was the newsroom abandoned in favor of relocation to a less expensive office (an increasingly common cost-saving decision). Indeed, real newspaper publishers realize that the collective hive vitality of a newsroom, with its camaraderie and reportorial cross-fertilization, enriches the journalism.

But Alden is in the business of making money, not journalism. The Wall Street bosses emailed staff that they weren't selling the offices — just leasing them to other businesses, creating a new revenue stream to fatten the profits of the fund's investors.

Unfortunately, such crass corporate calculations are typical of the new model of a nationalized, "conglomeratized," and financialized "local" journalism that has already taken over thousands of papers in big cities, suburbs, and rural areas across America.

The scale and speed of that transformation have been breathtaking.

Alden's high-flying hedge funders have amalgamated the second biggest newspaper conglomerate in the country, having swallowed up more than 200 papers, including metro dailies in Baltimore; Boston; Boulder, Colorado; Chicago; Denver; Hartford, Connecticut; Norfolk, Virginia; Orange County, California; Orlando, Florida; San Jose, California, and St. Paul, Minnesota.

Last August, in one blow, the 30 papers owned by the venerable McClatchy family fell to yet another multibillion-dollar hedge fund, Chatham Asset Management (led by a former Wall Street junk-bond dealer). With this buyout, Chatham's clique of global speculators grabbed the major dailies in Charlotte, North Carolina; Fort Worth, Texas; Kansas City, Missouri; Lexington, Kentucky; Miami; Sacramento, California, and Seattle.

Then there's the colossal Gannett conglomerate, now owned by Japan's SoftBank Group. It runs USA Today, as well as more than 1,000 local papers across the U.S., including the main dailies in Austin, Texas; Burlington, Vermont; Cincinnati; Detroit; Des Moines, Iowa; Indianapolis; Louisville, Kentucky; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Nashville, Tennessee; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Phoenix; Providence, Rhode Island; Reno, Nevada; and Springfield, Missouri.

The operational mandate of newspaper hedge funds is absolute: Sacrifice local newsgathering and community interest to squeeze out every bit of profit and siphon it off to unknown investors in WhoKnowsWhereLand. The papers Alden acquired were reportedly profitable, with annual margins of around ten percent. But the hedge fund sharpies demanded that all their papers deliver 20 percent or more — a level at which the squeeze becomes deadly to quality journalism.

Community life cannot thrive without community news, which in turn depends on reporters and editors who are of the community and have the know-how, time, and resources to investigate, educate, expose, inform, entertain, and generally enlighten the citizenry. But what does some obscure, aloof money manipulator know or care about your community or its democratic vitality? Zilch, that's what.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Journalists’ Union Drive Involves Much More Than Jobs

Journalists’ Union Drive Involves Much More Than Jobs

Reprinted with permission from Portside

As destiny would have it, just days after Amazon used illegal tactics to derail a drive by warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama to unionize, journalists in northern New Jersey who work for Gannett are voting on whether or not to form a union. They are affiliated with NorthJersey.com, the Bergen Record, the Daily Record and the NJ Herald.

In both cases the workers putting so much at risk to form a union are like David facing off with Goliath. Armed only with their courage to stand up for their own collective sense of right and wrong, they face multi-billion-dollar corporate behemoths that are the very engine of the wealth concentration and radical income disparity that have come to define the global economy.

As multiple economic studies have documented, since the 1970's workers saw their wages flatline or decline, even as technology saw their productivity, the wealth their labor generated, grow exponentially.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the newspaper business which I entered through the loading dock door decades ago at the Ridgewood Newspapers in Bergen County, when I started in the typesetting and composition department.

As a reporter, I watched as technology reduced the number of people it took to produce the newspaper, but those labor savings never found their way into the paychecks of those of us who continued to produce the newspaper.

Rather it went to the capital interests that swallowed up local newspapers which permitted those Wall Street types to corner the entire industry.

We were told we were lucky to have a job, which is a mantra that has only gotten louder as the corporate titans like Gannett, which now owns one in five of America's newspapers, has gutted the staffs of the local newspapers it has devoured in an unrelenting squeeze play that put profits over people.

"Since 2016, we have seen more than half of our colleagues lose their jobs, with cuts of over 250 people at The Record, the Daily Record and the NJ Herald," wrote the Gannett employees seeking union representation in their mission statement. "Staffers who were unceremoniously laid off include a reporter nearly nine months pregnant and a 30-year-veteran reporter who was forced to take a buyout after missing a single email to opt out of the process."

Their statement continued. "By forming a union, we are taking a stand for respect and dignity, and greater protections against unjust terminations and reductions in force. We are uniting with NewsGuild members around the country in a movement to save local news and ensure a seat at the table when decisions are made that affect our paper and the news coverage we provide. There is no journalism without journalists."

But Gannett is hardly alone.

According to the Pew Research Center's analysis U.S. newspapers "have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008."

"From 2008 to 2019, overall newsroom employment in the U.S. dropped by 23 percent, according to the new analysis," Pew reported. "In 2008, there were about 114,000 newsroom employees – reporters, editors, photographers and videographers – in five industries that produce news: newspaper, radio, broadcast television, cable and 'other information services' (the best match for digital-native news publishers). By 2019, that number had declined to about 88,000, a loss of about 27,000 jobs."

With the contraction of authentically reported local news what filled the void was social media click bate and propaganda as the nation lost the vital sense of situational awareness that comes from a vibrant local press. It's not hard to track the devolution of our national circumstance to the Jan. 6 insurrection where thousands were ready to overthrow our democracy in their own cyber bubble where they were convinced the 2020 election was stolen.

After all, they heard it on the "news."

What's happened to the news gathering workforce played out across every other industry and has only accelerated since the early 1980s when President Reagan fired more than 11,000 air traffic controllers who were on strike. He also banned them for life from federal employment. His scorched earth approach got traction with private employers who adopted similar tactics.

Before Reagan's mass firing, close to one in four Americans were represented by a union. Today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics just 10.8 percent are, a .5 percent increase from the year before.

In transportation, where crews on trains and ships have been slashed, the results have been calamitous for people and the planet. Consider the runway oil train that was unattended when in 2014 it leveled a Quebec community's downtown killing 47 residents. Maritime fatigue, the result of short staffing, has produced oil spills visible from space.

In the healthcare sector we see it in the business model of nursing homes where profiteers pay as little as they can to as few people as possible to care for our most vulnerable. More than a year into the COVID pandemic, we have seen the consequences of that business model carried on the backs of low wage caregivers who often had to work in more than one facility to make ends meet and spread the deadly virus in the process.

With the historical decline of unions, there's been an explosion in so-called gig workers, who as "independent contractors" are part of a precarious workforce that lacks the basic safety net of healthcare or access to workers compensation in the event they are injured or disabled while working.

No doubt, they too, are told they are lucky to have a job, even if they can't really call it that.

At both the state and federal level, our democracy has become captive to these capital interests that have successfully pressed for deregulation in a world where corporations can plot global domination for maximum profits subsidized by our tax policy. Meanwhile, workers are blocked at every turn from organizing collectively in their own and in their community's self-interest.

And just what has this brave new world dominated by Goliaths like Amazon and Gannett given us?

According to Forbes, in October the Federal Reserve found that the top one percent of Americans had a combined net worth of $34.2 trillion in wealth, or 30.4 percent of all U.S. household wealth, while the bottom 50 percent of the population held just $2.1 trillion, or 1.9 percent of all wealth.

Is it merely coincidental that the breathtaking concentration of corporate media power that Gannett represents comes as the well-documented concentration of wealth continues to grow and even accelerate in this country during the pandemic?

Let's hope our colleagues at The Record, the Daily Record and the NJ Herald can carry the day and form a union.

Gannett To Split TV And Newspaper Units Into Separate Companies

Gannett To Split TV And Newspaper Units Into Separate Companies

By Joe Flint, Los Angeles Times

Gannett Co. is spinning off its publishing assets into a separate publicly traded company.

The McLean, Va.-based broadcaster and publisher whose holdings include more than 40 television stations, USA Today, and 81 local newspapers, is the latest media company to separate its newspaper and television units.

Last year, Rupert Murdoch split his entertainment and publishing assets into separate companies — 21st Century Fox and News Corp., respectively. Earlier this year, Time Warner spun off its publishing company Time Inc. and this week Tribune Media completed a spinoff of its publishing assets including the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times off into a new company called Tribune Publishing.

“These transformative transactions will give both the publishing company and the broadcasting and digital company enhanced strategic, operating, financial, and regulatory flexibility to pursue growth and consolidation opportunities in their respective markets, while delivering strong cash flow to build further upon Gannett’s long-standing traditions of award-winning journalism and service to our local communities,” said Gracia Martore, president and chief executive officer of Gannett.

Traditional publishing is seen as a more challenging business with limited growth compared to television and digital media. Investors and Wall Street analysts have been encouraging these spin-offs.

The new publishing company will be virtually debt-free, Gannett said. Existing debt will remain with the broadcasting and digital company. Both Time Inc. and Tribune Publishing were saddled with heavy debt loads after they were spun off.

Martore will be chief executive of the television and digital company. Robert Dickey, president of Gannett’s U.S. community publishing division, will be chief executive for the publishing company. Gannett said it expects the spinoff to be completed by mid-2015.

Gannett is also buying the 73 percent stake of Cars.com it didn’t own for $1.8 billion from A. H. Belo, the McClatchy Company, Tribune Media Company, and Graham Holdings Company. Cars.com is a popular site for people buying and selling cars.

In a related move, Tribune Publishing entered into a five-year affiliation agreement with Cars.com.

“Upon closing, this agreement will represent significant recurring revenue for our digital classified business,” said Jack Griffin, chief executive officer of Tribune Publishing. “We’ve had a long and mutually beneficial relationship with Cars.com and this agreement ensures auto dealers in key markets will continue to benefit from the scale and reach of our prominent print and digital properties.”

Photo via WikiCommons

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