I see a lot more corruption that doesn't get noticed. It is possible, but it's a challenge.įLORIDO: What do you see in the future of local news?īENTON: I see a lot more uncovered city council meetings. But there are communities across the country where smart digital outlets are growing to the point where in some cases, they have bigger newsrooms than the local daily newspaper does. It's often much easier to start from scratch. So do you see any solutions here for the local communities that are being left behind in these sort of information deserts?īENTON: I think it is very difficult to manage the transition from a print daily to an effective digital news outlet. Most newspapers are businesses, with a mission to inform the public, yes, but also driven by profit motive. It's really hard to run a robust newsroom when you have seven people working in your newsroom.įLORIDO: At the end of the day, Gannett is a business. And in that time, the newsroom has gone from over 40 employees to what on its current staff listing is seven. You know, one newspaper in Eugene, Ore., The Register-Guard, was locally owned by a family in Eugene until 2018 when it sold to GateHouse and - which was then merged into Gannett. And these places will become more like a news desert. ![]() So in a lot of communities, there just aren't a lot of options. There are also communities where there often isn't as much of an alternative in terms of a local television station or a local digital news outlet that's covering the area. It's very difficult to manage the cost while emphasizing digital subscriptions and getting enough of them to make things work out. Those larger weeklies and smaller dailies are in a really tough position economically. But Gannett owns a lot of very small newspapers, a lot of weekly newspapers, a lot of very small daily newspapers. Gannett CEO Mike Reed has said that he sees in the future, the company will be focusing on its larger newspapers in communities like Phoenix and Indianapolis. So what does it mean for these communities when their newspapers are sold or closed or even if they're just gutted of staff?īENTON: Yeah. Many of these are newspapers that are serving smaller cities and towns. The other problem is that there are lots of other free alternatives for a lot of local news and information, and people will be happy to consume those without bothering to subscribe to the local daily.įLORIDO: You write in the Nieman Journalism Lab that in the last few years, Gannett had 563 newspapers and today has fewer than 400. But even when that does happen, newspapers generally make significantly less money off of a digital subscriber than they do from a print subscriber. So the idea has been to shift to digital, and Gannett claims some degree of success in doing that. They're not really making new print readers anymore. Newspapers have generally given up on the idea of creating new print readers. Is it just the case that these Gannett newspapers aren't managing to get people who used to subscribe to their print paper to subscribe to their digital product instead?īENTON: Yeah. And today, most people get their news online. It's been on the decline for decades, actually. That means cutting staff and cutting the quality of their newspapers.įLORIDO: I guess it goes without saying that print circulation of newspapers has plummeted in recent years. And the way that they have been doing that is by cutting costs to the bone. The problem is, as part of the merger, Gannett took on a lot of debt, and they have to pay off that debt. The thought was you could achieve these economies of scale and make a profitable business. You have the page layout and editing done elsewhere. ![]() The idea was an individual newspaper might struggle on its own, but if you buy enough of them, you can extract as much of the cost of producing the newspaper from the local community as possible. So what's going on here?īENTON: The Gannett that we have now is the result of the merger of two very large companies. I mean, newspaper revenue has been steadily declining over that time but not by that much, not at that rate. Welcome.įLORIDO: Joshua, Gannett had 25,000 employees at the end of 2019, and less than four years later, it has just over 11,000. Joshua Benton has been writing about this for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, and he joins me now. Since its merge with newspaper company GateHouse Media in 2019, Gannett has closed or sold hundreds of papers and slashed staff by more than half, and that is projected to continue. ![]() The country's largest newspaper company, Gannett, is once again forecasting it will sell off more of its daily newspapers.
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