Best (meaning worst) newspaper chain stories

You run into it often here on this site - the "careful, it's "(Insert Media Company Name here)," or "(Media Company Name) sucks, stay away."

So, as a Paxton Media Group, ahem, grad, anybody have any great stories to tell about current or past media companies they've worked for? Cheap, insincere, suffering product - anything is fair game. Figured it might make for some good hate-reading to collect some of them in one place.

 

This might be better in the Journalism Topics section.

And the winner (actually loser) is JRC. So many nightmare stories are out there.

 

Is there anyone left who has never worked for a chain? Figure most independents have been sold, and those people who can remember the independents have been bought out by now.

 

I worked for Gannett, Thomson, Cox, cnhi and the NYTRNG. They all sucked.

As soon as I realized the company cares first about publisher bonuses and shareholder dividends, the madness made a lot more sense.

 

I've worked for Morris, Freedom and Scripps. I left two just before things really went to shit. Maybe they should have made more of an effort to keep me around.

 

My favorite stories, both same chain... I've told both stories before, but they're both pretty good...

Story No. 1 - Copy editor finds out he's on the list to get the boot. He falls down the stairs, hurts his leg and goes on workman's comp for a couple months. He then survives the next several rounds of layoffs and is still there several years later...

Story No. 2 - Guy get the boot from paper... A few months later he is re-hired by the same chain, but has to move his family completely across the country on his own dime. He does this and is let go less than six months later. ...

 

I've worked for five papers, and four were privately owned.

The other was one of the best companies I've ever worked for (Harris Corp.)

If possible, avoid private papers like the plague.

 

So private papers are bad.
And corporate papers are bad.

Starting to smell like papers are BAD.

:-[

 

Now you're catching on!

 

We love to rip chains, but the family-owned place I worked out was just as bad, if not worse.

 

At a chain, you're working for shareholders. At a family-owned paper, you're likely as not to be working for someone with an agenda and a mean streak. You pick what's worse.

 

CNHI was the worst I worked for. And I'm not even whining about the furlough days, which I managed to use somewhat strategically.

They wouldn't invest in equipment (our server constantly malfunctioned), didn't have a staff photographer, make us actually punch a timecard and, in general, had too many silly inflexible rules that kept you from doing your job properly.