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* There’s very bad news for some newspaper chains with Illinois properties…
Stock in one-time Wall Street darling GateHouse Media Inc. fell to an all-time low following a 14.1% price tumble Monday.
There were no announcements, regulatory filings, or analyst notes that might explain the drop of 35 cents to GateHouse’s (NYSE: GHS) close of $2.12. Coming into Monday’s session, the once high-flying stock had a 52-week trading range of $2.32 to $19.10. […]
Lee Enterprises Inc. (NYSE: LEE) closed at $3.15, off 11 cents, or 3.37. Its previous trading range had been $3.19 to $21.48.
* Gatehouse owns the State Journal-Register, the Rockford Register Star, the Peoria Journal Star and a whole bunch of other Illinois papers. Lee owns the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Bloomington Pantagraph, the Southern Illinoisan and the Decatur Herald & Review, among others.
Advertising is tanking, partly due to the economy and the changing tastes of consumers as everything moves online and the slow-to-respond newspaper industry attempts to stay relevant. The skyrocketing cost of newsprint also has to be having an impact…
The price of paper stock, a daily publisher’s second-biggest expense after labor, has climbed 26 percent to a 12-year high of $700 a metric ton since October, pushed upwards by supplier consolidation rather than demand.
* After a meteoric rise and almost unprecedented expansion Gatehouse is slashing and burning almost everywhere, it seems. For instance, the mega chain has cut back some of its papers from six days a week to five and it’s done employee buyouts at the SJ-R and other papers. The company has a crushing longterm debt of more than $1.2 billion, yet it continues to pay out a generous dividend to stockholders - which may be the only attractive aspect of the stock…
GateHouse Media, Inc. (NYSE: GHS) announced [June 18, 2007] that its Board of Directors has declared a quarterly cash dividend on its common stock of $0.40 per share for the quarter ended June 30, 2007. The dividend is payable on July 16, 2007 to holders of record of GateHouse’s common stock on June 29, 2007. The newly announced dividend reflects an increase of 25% over the dividend at the time of the Company’s IPO and an increase of 8% over the prior quarter’s dividend.
* More…
In its most recent quarter, GateHouse lost $27 million, double its loss of the same quarter a year earlier. GateHouse, which mainly has papers in small (often monopoly) markets, was not expected to be hit as hard as companies owning big metro dailies. But it piled up too much debt making too many acquisitions.
In a similar fix is Iowa-based Lee Enterprises, which was supposed to feast on its collection of smaller papers with little competition. (One exception is San Diego’s North County Times, a Lee paper with lots of competition.) But Lee piled up a lot of debt to buy a big paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, along with too many smaller ones. In its most recent quarter, Lee lost $713 million. In the quarter a year earlier, it had made $11.2 million. A year ago, the stock was above $20; now it’s around $4. The dividend yield is above 17 percent. Obviously, that won’t remain. “Lee Enterprises’ financial health is poor,” says analyst Tom Corbett of Morningstar, a stock-rating firm. “Lee has assumed a substantial debt load from its earlier acquisitions, and the company is closing in on the upper limits of its debt covenants.” (That is a polite way of saying that it could default on its debt.)
I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s not what they’re doing now.
[H/T: Billy Dennis]
posted by Rich Miller
Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 9:12 am
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Note the phrase “supplier consolidation”
It has worked out so well for the consumer in the oil and gasoline world…..
Loss of newspapers leads to a loss of local coverage which provides cover for numerous scoundrels of all types.
Comment by Plutocrat03 Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 9:18 am
Info on the Lee newspapers can be found at http://www.lee.net/publishing. The link in the item is the same one for the Gatehouse publications.
I find less and less local news in the Pantagraph now that Lee owns the paper. The spelling and grammar are pathetic. Proofreaders must have been the first people laid off.
Comment by Nearly Normal Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 9:25 am
Wow. Lee’s market cap is $151 Million….less than a tenth of what they spent to buy SLPD only two years ago. Now cash is so bad they have to cut dividends to service the debt.
I guess that business plan isn’t looking so good now.
Comment by Vote Quimby! Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 9:29 am
I think this internet thing has a chance to stick around…..
Comment by Vote Quimby! Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 9:30 am
This makes it all the more curious to me that Ryan Keith would leave AP for the apparently fast sinking ship of a Gatehouse newspaper… and why didn’t the SJ-R mention who he’s replacing (Doug Finke, I take it?)
I suspected all along that Gatehouse would crash and burn just as quickly as it took off.
Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 9:30 am
In the immortal words of the great philosopher, Dr. Egon Spengler: Print is dead. (Ghostbusters, 1984)
Just sayin’s all.
Comment by This Guy Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 9:31 am
Thanks for posting this and getting the discussion going. It’s a very worthwhile topic to consider. Scarcely in our history have we had greater need for a robust fourth estate to ask tough questions and do the hard work of investigatory journalism. At that very moment, newspapers are in utter collapse, a downward spiral feeding on itself.
Perhaps ventures like the Washington Independent offer some kind of model for keeping decent journalism alive: washingtonindependent.com/about/about-us
That cannot be the whole solution, though. I think that the Europeans are still reading newspapers. Maybe we can learn something from their approach - and not just the British tabloids?
Let’s hope we are at the dawn of a new era in journalism, rather than witnessing an extinction event. For now, a lot of turmoil and flux that won’t seem so bad in retrospect, but that is terrible to behold at the moment.
Comment by Willie Stark Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 9:34 am
===and why didn’t the SJ-R mention who he’s replacing (Doug Finke, I take it?)===
He’s replacing Dana Heupel, the new executive editor at Illinois Issues. Try not to spread false info here. Thanks.
Also, the move to the SJ-R would be a big step up for Ryan. He’ll get management experience, which will help his career in whatever direction he takes. Keith is still a fairly young guy, so this is a very good move for him, even with all the problems at the parent company.
Comment by Rich Miller Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 9:38 am
===Lee’s market cap is $151 Million….less than a tenth of what they spent to buy SLPD only two years ago. ===
I checked the Sun-Times News Group stock a few weeks ago and discovered that you could buy all public shares for about $36 million - and it was still a horrendous deal. The company turned down a $450 million offer four or five years ago.
Times have changed.
Comment by Rich Miller Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 9:40 am
Kind of sad to watch the death throes of an industry I love, but fascinating as well since it seems to be accelerating on itself…kind of a ‘black hole’ phenomenon.
Comment by Vote Quimby! (Former Lee staffer) Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 9:53 am
From lee.net on January 7, 2008: “The true value of Lee stock is currently greatly undervalued on Wall Street,” Lee CEO Mary Junck said.
Value on 1/7/08: $12 per share
Value on 7/7/08: $3.15 per share
I know hindsight is 20/20, but sheesh!
Comment by Vote Quimby! Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 10:01 am
Sorry, my mistake. I forgot about Dana Heupel. Feel free to delete my previous post if it would clarify things.
Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 10:04 am
It might help if the Gatehouse papers had some actual news in them. At the rate the SJ-R is going all that will be left in the paper will be lost dog ads and Little League scores. The number of pages and actual news stories seems to shrink daily.
Comment by Crafty Girl Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 10:18 am
To Anonymous: No need to delete, we generally ignore your posts anyway
Comment by Vote Quimby! Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 10:22 am
Print might be dying, but content is king. Whether these companies can survive or not is probably irrelevant. Something, probably a lot of things, will take their place. Capturing the money formerly paid for advertising and subscriptions is the trick, as Pioneer Rich can tell you.
Comment by wordslinger Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 10:25 am
Future of newspapers: Replacing printed paper with Adobe PDF files.
Comment by Crimefighter Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 10:34 am
No only is newspapers on their death bed, so is reading. We have a new generation growing up that will not read anything longer than a few paragraphs. They do not understand the importance of primary sources and do not understand how to gather or generate knowledge out of data.
Even if newspapers were profitable, they are facing a generation unwilling to read them.
Comment by VanillaMan Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 10:55 am
===No only is newspapers on their death bed, so is reading.===
And so, apparently, is grammar.
Just kidding.
Comment by Rich Miller Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 10:59 am
I naively thought dividends were a how corporation shared its profits. Apparently, there is no connection between profit and dividends.
Comment by Pot calling kettle Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 11:29 am
If the big boys can’t keep a daily newspaper worth more than birdcage lining going, how do the independents (like the Illinois Times) keep going?
Comment by What planet is he from again? Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 11:43 am
== Loss of newspapers leads to a loss of local coverage which provides cover for numerous scoundrels of all types. ==
This is the best point of all. It scares me to think that The Southern Illinoisan would go out of business, (a Lee Paper) or have to be cut back even more than it already is.
The media coverage in Southern Illinois is already thin soup with the Southern Illinoisan in operation. Without the S.I. it would be even easier than it already is for the job patronage and other various hijinks to go on.
I would also add, that as a “radio guy” I know the credibility that comes with newsprint, if its “in the paper” people tend to give it more credence. In short, the down sizing or complete loss of newspapers wont be good for anyone.
Comment by Speaking At Will Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 11:54 am
I asked the SJ-R if I could just get the Fri,sat and Sun subscritption to the paper. Or even just a Sun subscription. The answer was no, so I dropped my subscription.
They need to be dump the old model of trying to force folks to buy the whole week in order to get whatever few days they may actually want. They are not just inflexible online, they have an inflexibility that I think causes them to lose hard copy subscribers. Sell days cafeteria style and they may find they have more people paying for hardcopies
Comment by Ghost Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 12:06 pm
GateHouse is one of the bigger, unfortunately not funnier jokes, of the newspaper business. They buy all these papers up and then can’t afford to pay for them. On top of that they slash their properties to the bone and expect people to be happy with less news, when they tout themselves as hyperlocal. It is hard enough for good papers to survive in these times, let alone average or below papers.
Comment by Gus Bode Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 12:08 pm
Some posters rightly criticize content and circulation practices. Those are big problems. But ultimately, one has to understand circulation and “eyeballs” have nothing to do with the current problems. When online hits are factored, readership at almost every paper is at an all time high. The problem is advertising — sites like craigslist, ebay, amazon, vehix.com, cars.com and the real estate sites. These advertisers, from classifieds to housing, were the backbone of newspapers. They are gone now, scuttled into niche sites that offer better advertising opportunities. They are never coming back. The only way newspapers could have avoided this would be to have beaten these sites to the punch and their were some successes with that, like carrierbuilder.com at the Tribune. It is too late now. The game is over and we are all running on fumes. It is not the blogs fault or that readers are going elsewhere for their news because they don’t trust the main stream media — no matter how much you bloggers would like to think so. It is money — advertising — plain and simple. It is gone and so is journalism as we know it — free, trustworthy and dedicated.
Comment by JR Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 12:38 pm
To Planet: independent papers survive by keeping costs low (outsourcing printing, thin management, etc.) than larger papers. In journalism, once people ‘pay their dues’ on the beat they felt entitled to a management job. I have never seen anything more territorial than a newsroom, with a lot of people working a long time to get that job. It’s a very inefficient model (think post office) and the reality is coming out now. Small, smart papers can survive; indeed they may only be the ones.
Comment by Vote Quimby! Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 12:42 pm
VQ, your basically explaining why Rich prospsers and papers do not
Comment by Ghost Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 12:47 pm
There’s still an audience for interesting. And people recognize quality. Draw a parallel to any other product. If car sales are declining, is the appropriate response to start cutting corners? That works, but only in the short term, to make quarterly numbers. The appropriate response to declining circulation and advertising at newspapers is to invest more in the product, not less. But less is more has been the mantra at newspaper companies for a long time now. Just consider GateHouse’s emphasis on hyper-local coverage. They think they’re giving people what they want, but their idea of what’s news is based on some kind of template cooked up somewhere else. That’s why all the chain papers end up looking and reading the same. The thing that people want from a newspaper — or any news organization — is to be surprised. Excited. Delighted. Entertained. Mortified. Here, the coverage is conventional, predictable, staid, comforting. In other words, boring.
Comment by Anon Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 1:26 pm
The thing these newspaper companies have never focused on is improving coverage. Slowing ad revenue, the Internet and other issues may be helping their demise, but a lack of good, solid local and community coverage will kill these medium sized dailies. The idea of a newspaper is simple: tell the people what’s going on in their neighborhood. Running AP wire stories and fluffy, vapid features about puppies isn’t getting the job done.
Comment by Tony @ -30- Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 1:29 pm
Remember how last summer, a series of articles about sex offender registration started appearing in various Central Illinois papers? The articles made it seem as if there were a serious problem with persons who had been convicted of statutory rape (usually with a slightly underage girlfriend) being treated the same as serial rapists or child molesters.
Trouble was, most of the cases referred to in the article were from other states and did not reflect Illinois law.
Well, that was courtesy of Gatehouse, which took a series produced by its papers in Massachusetts and foisted it on all its member papers. So much for “hyperlocal” coverage.
Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 1:50 pm
It may not seem like much but our local retail distributor for Trib, WSJ, NYT, and other national rags simply went out of business due to rising fuel costs. You cannot find these papers in any retail outlet in our area. Leaves the SJR and our ‘fabulous’ 16 page local paper. Hate to see this happen but it is the same issue in many other businesses. Who has the adjustable business model and financial savings to make it through a difficult time?
Comment by zatoichi Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 1:51 pm
To answer an earlier post, how does Illinois Times survive?
We run Rich Miller’s column.
Comment by Roland Klose Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 1:57 pm
LOL.
I’m sure, Roland. I’m sure.
Comment by Rich Miller Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 1:58 pm
I started in reporting with Lee in the mid-80s at the QC Times. Lee was right next door to the paper, so they were omniprecient and we were kind of part of the corporate culture.
They were, in a word, rich. Profitable papers all over the Midwest, TV and radio in Iowa and the West. At one point, I think they had virtually all the TV and radio in Montana and Wyoming.
That may not sound like much on the surface, but they sure had the attention of the six senators from Iowa, Wyoming and Montana. Influence in Wisconsin and Illinois, too. The Lee chairman had pull in D.C., believe me.
I believe when they started divesting broadcast to buy up print, it was with Internet in mind. The idea was that they could transition the content on the fly and the advertisers would follow. No one’s figured out the formula yet.
I know people who have worked at Lee for decades, have their whole retirement tied up in the ESOPs. Yikes.
Comment by wordslinger Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 2:09 pm
Word, sounds like a good theme for a cautionary ESOPs fable.
Comment by Ghost Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 2:15 pm
People who trumpet that the internet is killing newspapers conveniently forget to mention that a large percentage of the stuff blogged about comes FROM newspaper and magazine articles. The content doesn’t arise out of a vacuum. It comes from WRITERS that go out and FIND the story. Then all the bloggers jump on to talk about it and spin it one way or another.
For every original story Rich does here on this blog, how many more are “leveraged” or referenced from other reporter’s stories?
So generating good content is vital.
The advertisers count on that content to be compelling enough that people want to buy a paper. So when a paper makes cuts in reportage, in beats, in story-generating resources, it is cutting it’s own throat.
The economies have to come from somewhere else. They have to come from reducing overhead and streamlining processes, not cutting reporters and amount and quantity of news. They are trying anything and everything: last week I heard a story on NPR about some weeklies that had outsourced their copy editing and layout to India, via internet. On a trial basis, to be sure, but they did it. Bet THAT goes over big at Columbia and Medill.
Some genius needs to figure out cheaper paper and ink, cheaper printing. With gas so high now, it may make more sense to print copies on-demand at the point of sale, than to print them at one or two huge plants and truck them all over the place, whether they sell or not. You could print them one at a time out of a kiosk based on photocopier technology. The more ads you agree to be printed along with your stories, the less your copy costs, or you can get a thin, ad-free concentrated 3-4 pages of news, for a premium price. You could use such tech to customize your individual copy of the paper so it’s only the sports and stocks, or just the state/city and comics, or just Ann Coulter and a Sudoku puzzle, or whatever.
The savings to the newspaper comes from never printing more copies than actually bought, and from piggybacking blank paper and ink on the delivery trucks already going to the local gas stations and quickie marts carrying other products, etc.
Comment by Lou Grant Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 2:45 pm
perhaps the small independents have a chance-they’re interested in the community’s concerns and know they must provide for those concerns–a chains appear to sell the same stories to the entire chain-an economically produced piece of newsprint,but not inviting to the reader
Comment by gray wolf Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 2:46 pm
A little free weekly like Illinois Times can make it because their costs are slashed to the bone and the reporters are not paid the highest rates around, yet they do in-depth local reporting that gets noticed. They can take a week to really develop a story, where a daily has hours to get it and print it. Plus their advertising is more hyper-local from small business and has less of the brokered, national-level advertising that daily papers like to run. Weeklies also get some of their stories from pool sources or independent syndicates, then try to add a local angle to that. Which I guess Gatehouse has tried to copy. Still, good as they may be, you’re only really getting three or so stories in a weekly like IT, plus some columns. The rest is all ads and event calendars.
Comment by Mrs. Pynchon Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 3:10 pm
Let’s get Speaker Denny and Froggy to expand the capital plan to $40 billion so we have $6 billion to buy the newspapers and give them to Capt Fax to run. We pay the extra $5 billion by raising the Chicago casino fee to %900 million —through in the Sun Times so the Mayor has a paper too.
Comment by DumberThanYou Think Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 3:17 pm
==sounds like a good theme for a cautionary ESOPs fable==
I remember an old saying about keeping all your eggs in one basket…..
Comment by Vote Quimby! Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 4:45 pm
Capitol Fax will be expanding, picking up seasoned reporters dropped by the chains…..be careful, Rich!
Comment by Vote Quimby! Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 4:49 pm
I’ve been a working journalist for 32 years, and I’m saddened by the state of the newspaper industry today. I don’t think newspapers did anything wrong — it’s just a matter of a new technology coming along doing the right thing at the right time. We are a bit like the dinosaurs looking up into the sky to see the asteroid falling or the buggy whip industry taking on Henry Ford.
I think we will see more papers cutting one or two editions a week. Perhaps a weekly print edition would nicely supplement a strong online presence. Maybe newspapers could post their pages in PDF for for printing out at home by those who wish to read ink on paper. The problem I see with newspaper Web sites is that they don’t generate enough revenue to pay the bills. Papers make a big deas out of 500,000 page views a week on their Web sites. But if your print edition averages 24 pages six days a week and your circulation is 20,000, that’s 2.8 million page views! Online will never replace print as far as revenue goes in our local markets.
The loss of local reporters churning out copy is going to hurt Web news sources and bloggers, make no mistake. Rich has great stuff on the right side of this page, but take away newspapers, and where does that content come from?
I think local papers’ Web sites have to evolve. Add to their present local coverage community message boards, create local news feeds to subscribers’ e-mail, let viewers post their photos, etc.
Hyperlocal? You can’t get any more hyperlocal than the paper where I work. You can see your kid’s school lunch menu, read your school honor roll, see Little League scores, read property transfers, find out who’s celebrating their birthday, get every score from every high school game in seven counties, etc., etc., still, ad revenue and readership (of the print edition) decline.
Lee made a huge mistake in buying the Post-Dispatch. I wonder what the Pulitzer heirs are up to these days? When the stock price drops below $1 and Lee and Gatehouse are delisted from the stock exchanges like the Sun-Times, (never own much stock in the company you work for; it’s a form of investment risk) and when the loans can no longer be paid for by revenue, and bankruptcy protection is sought, what happens? Maybe employees will get a chance to buy their newspapers out for pennies on the dollar. It might be a good thing.
Comment by up2now Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 5:34 pm
VQ, I wish. 60 newsroom people have just been let go from the Tribune, by the way.
I believe Illinois Times survives because while it may indeed have only two or three “real” stories a week, those stories are almost always interesting, they look at local events from perspectives not often considered in mainstream media, and it’s widely available just about everywhere in Springfield for free. It’s about the only paper I read in its dead tree form anymore, even when I don’t agree with many of the opinion columns (other than Capitol Fax) or letter writers in it. They must be doing something right!
Comment by Bookworm Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 6:39 pm
JR: You obviously belied yourself as a newspaper man by your comment that “we are all running on fumes.”
And you would know more than me about advertising being the limiting factor in that “the game is over.”
But there’s plenty of advertising in papers such as the Sun-Times, which has become the Tradin’ Times for autos with some ancillary news content.(Measured by pages and column space alone…)
However, I do not notice as many four-color circulars falling out of either when I bring them home lately.
People are fans of printing press superstars such as Kass, Zorn, Novak, Ebert, Steinberg, Mariotti, et al. These writers are selling the papers, not abridged AP stories.
The record-setting number of hits you speak of may be a function of the specific content provided by these columnists whose followers want to see what they have to say, based on their insight and reporting.
Comment by Stop the Presses Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 6:46 pm
AA will admit from the outset that he doesn’t know squat about the newspaper business. I do know a bit about numbers and finance. Both of these companies may well be toast, not so much because of falling circulation, high paper costs, fewer ad sales, but because they are loaded down with debt and because of their ownership. GateHouse is majority owned by some New York gunslingers called Fortress Investments, which manages billions in private equity and hedge funds. One classic tactic these guys use to siphon cash out of a dying company is to keep declaring special dividends; they control the Board of Directors and can pretty much dividend a company right up to the edge of insolvency. Special dividends, obviously, aren’t related to profitability. Further, by definition, GateHouse isn’t a long-term investment for Fortress. At some point, Fortress has to sell its investment in GateHouse in order to return capital to its investors. Any actions they have taken or will take on either the revenue or expense side will tend to be focused on short-term benefit as opposed to long-term success of the company and the newspapers.
The Lee situation is different and I know very little about what happened up there. I do know that at one time, that was a profitable, well-run, and respected regional firm. word, did they get some bad advice about dumping the TV stations? In any case, it appears that they have taken on more debt than their current cash flow can service, which is frequently a terminal illness in today’s credit environment.
Comment by Arthur Andersen Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 7:24 pm
Perhaps I’m too much of an idealist, but I think the major problem with print right now is that the people who own and run the businesses have become way too jaded.
Whatever charters and objectives they have always seem to focus on numbers for the sake of numbers. “Within x number of years, we want to be in x number of suburbs, making x number of dollars by selling or giving away x number of papers or getting x number of hits.”
That’s not to say they shouldn’t want to expand and make money, but where’s the reference to the product and the quality of the product that they’re pumping into everyone’s homes (or onto everyone’s screen)? And with alot of the “hyperlocal” coverage (cutest pet contests, local school sports, recipes, events calendars, etc., etc.), are they even considering the negative impact they’re having on society and the industry overall by being so jumpy “positive”–or, in other words, terrified of addressing some real topics? (Helloooo, Narcissus and Echo!!!!)
I think the best that these guys could do for themselves and the industry overall is lock themselves up in a room and watch a few key scenes from Citizen Kane over and over again until you’re screaming “Rosebud”.
Kick yourself in the pants. Get off the safe and superficial high. Feel the passion again and dream about changing or saving the world again through the exchange of thoughts, ideas, and opinions.
Build it right and they’ll all come back. Do it well enough and you won’t even have to give it away for free, or offshore your work to India.
Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 7:29 pm
Oh, and BTW, Anonymous, Quimby was probably referencing my posts. Not yours. It’s OK. I’m used to it. Tough crowd. :}
Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 7:31 pm
I once worked for a small daily that belonged to Gatehouse and its predecessor company, Liberty Publishing.
Their business plan was doomed from the start and was designed mainly to squeeze every penny of potential profit to please the stockholders. Their corporate flacks were the ones who deemed our paper “overstaffed” with only three full-time reporters to cover all or part of three counties with a population of over 100,000.
They constantly changed the rules for how we were supposed to obtain mileage reimbursements (all of 28 cents per mile, even when gas went over $3 a gallon after Katrina) and often paid them weeks late, if at all. They messed around with the 401 K plan so much most of us didn’t bother taking advantage of it. (One of my colleagues used to joke that she was collecting our soda cans for her retirement fund.)
The last straw was when they bumped back our morning deadline from 10:30 to 8 a.m. to accommodate a planned move to a high tech printing press out of town… which they then kept putting off, and putting off, and putting off, and still had not completed by the time I left. This prevented us from having morning police and court news as we had always had before. It also made life considerably harder for the sports editor, who was forced to start coming to work at 4 a.m. after late night games!
Needless to say I was not happy to see them buy up every downstate newspaper they could get their hands on. The results are plain to see.
I no longer expect to ever make a living as a reporter again. People like me who have family and health concerns and need a steady income will probably just have to practice their craft as a hobby or as stringers or correspondents.
Comment by Bookworm Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 7:47 pm
That’s the other major point. Besides the obvious, why are these people in the print business? Media has taken on a whole new meaning.
“It’s business,” “it’s a whole new world”…on and on…is NOT an excuse.
The public’s needs haven’t changed. They still need the papers to find out about what’s going on…probably more now than ever before.
I think I remember Zell saying something once about MBAs. Well, the time has come.
Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 7:59 pm
Sorry. Second sentence should read “Mediableep” has taken on….”
Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 8:00 pm
Its not one distrubter the Tribune doesnt existdownstate anymore and they took the NYT with them. Both are only Sunday on newsstands only. No paper has been spared it seems. Their only money prob is as previously stated the classifieds arent going to the websites
I could go on about Gatehouse but I am sure Rich will have more posts about them in the future
Comment by western illinois Tuesday, Jul 8, 08 @ 11:08 pm
quit reprinting AP stories. Shrink your paper, but go hyper local. No national or international news. Keep a reporter in each town of a certain size in the paper’s area, more than one in larger towns. Local sports coverage. Local events coverage. Cover Board (municipal, county, school, park, library, all of them) meetings. Keep a reporter or two in Springfield for your newspaper group, or (for the few indy papers, work with other papers to hire a Springfield reporter).
Don’t waste money on AP stories. Yeah, its probably cheap to run AP (compared to paying your own reporters), but no one is going to buy a paper to get what they can get on the Google for free.
But, if you give strong local and state coverage, then you could have something. Pare the paper down, move the classified ads online (follow a craigslist model…make listings (except for help wanted and real estate ad listings) free). Lots of ads on the website. Keep the archives available and free.
That’s how a newspaper can make money.
Comment by jerry 101 Wednesday, Jul 9, 08 @ 11:45 am
I love Jerry 101’s pie-in-the-sky rant. Exactly where is the money coming from in that plan?
Just to make the issue clear again — everyone complains about coverage and acts like that will fix everything. Rubbish. You could have the best coverage in an area — new exciting, mortifying, etc. — but it is not going to make you money. do you all really think the 50 cents you so generously plop down for a paper covers anything? The problem is ads — they are gone, regardless of readership, etc.
Comment by jr Wednesday, Jul 9, 08 @ 12:09 pm
Why are the ads gone, jr?
Comment by Anonymous Wednesday, Jul 9, 08 @ 2:23 pm
Darn! Wanted to reference it, but now I can’t find it.
An attorney is suing a paper to which he subscribes for impacting the quality of the paper by laying off reporters.
The even better news, is that the editor (I believe) while claiming that the guy owes him money besides the measly $.39 he pays for the paper is threatening to tell him exactly how much money he owes for the great coverage he’s going to get because of the lawsuit.
Well, I guess that’s one good way to get a good story on a real issue (the layoffs) in print with alot of exposure!
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Jul 10, 08 @ 8:44 pm
That lawsuit story would be here, Anon.:
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1137259.html
Regarding ESOPs, the one at the Journal Star (1984-1996) made a lot of employees wealthy, and not just managers. The timing was good.
Comment by anotherexjser Friday, Jul 11, 08 @ 10:36 pm
Thanks, anotherexjser!!!
Comment by Anonymous Monday, Jul 14, 08 @ 11:48 pm