Digital First pursuing Gannett

I think Gannett laid off Matt Davies, who won a Pulitzer for the Journal-News in Westchester County, so there is a precedent within the company.

DFI laid off Mike Keefe from the Denver Post shortly after he won the Pulitzer. The LA Times laid off Michael Ramirez, though he won his Pulitzer while working for a paper in Memphis. So it is becoming a relatively common occurrence.

 

I read that Gannet is preparing to print Nashville in Knoxville. According to Google maps the distances between the offices of the two papers is 178 miles. What will the Nashville deadlines be?

 

It's not so much that Gannett is sacking a Pulitzer winner. Dumping editorial cartoonists has become common throughout the industry, and that's a shame. Even if it does save a reporting position.

 

Irrelevant. Gannett’s deadlines are already dreadfully early, so this won’t change much, if anything, about that.

 

I don't want to out myself, so I will try to keep this fairly generic. The last daily I worked at was in a city of more than 100,000, and was in a county where the population is booming and is above 500,000. This is the only daily newspaper in that entire county. And our actual paid daily circulation was about 12,000 (and about 18-20K on Sundays).

 

Which means household penetration is south of eight percent daily. The reason I ask these questions is that the dogma I had always read was that smaller papers were weathering the storm better than the larger metros because small market readers and advertisers were more likely to stick with traditional print. I don't think that is the case anymore and I think closures may become much more frequent.

I may have posted this somewhere else but what shocked me was a comment I read in a New Media Investment Group, a.k.a. Gatehouse earnings call. An analyst asked a question about how Gatehouse now buying papers in larger markets like OKC, Palm Beach and Austin. Management responded by saying that there was no long enough revenue left in many small papers to make them worth buying.

That is ominous. The bloodsuckers at Gatehouse think many papers are out of blood to suck.

 

As much as I love editorial cartoons, I would think those artists can probably do okay working with or through multiple papers. They can follow local news online for local cartoons and then do national ones with wider distribution. It isn't like a local paper covers more than one "big issue" a week these days. Of course, if papers don't even do editorials or have an editorial page...

 

I think it's very optimistic to think editorial cartoonists will be OK working as freelancers or contractors. Maybe a few. I wonder how many editorial cartoonists are making a living these days doing that work for newspapers. A dozen?

 

In Central Wisconsin there are now no full-time sports reporters for four coverage areas....

 

They had an event planner. How about a caterer?