Gannett buying The Dallas Morning News?

Who is the most valuable Gannett writer these days? Doyel? Are they still putting out Sports Weekly? I can't name their national columnist. Seems like it would be a no brainer they would have a name columnist they could "give" to the various locals.
I don't think the G has enough "exclusive" content. I don't know what happened to their "sports vertical" - I think everyone left. Their political coverage isn't great either. I don't know anything they do where you can't find better elsewhere. That's a problem.

 

I rarely buy it these days because it's usually passed along for free, but it has been strange lately. They used to have an organized set of baseball stats for each team. (But no RAW.) Then they cut way back on that. This season, they started running slews of old box scores. It's almost like they want to screw up to one extreme or another.

 

I think it's USA TODAY's new earlier deadlines that prompted Gannett to put box scores in Sports Weekly. People realize there's still a market for them, however limited it might be.

 

I think Gannett has thought about that. In fact, that is why Gannett chased Tribune as hard as they did. The idea was to combine the national staffs of USA Today and Tribune. While USA Today does some good things it certainly does not cover national news as well as the Washington Post or New York Times. If Gannett could turn USA Today in something comparable to the Washington Post at the national level then they could start offering digital subscriptions through their local for something like $9.99 a month, which is half the price of the New York Times and you would also have access to all their papers.

 

I should clarify. I am sometimes interested in the older box scores. But now it seems like they cut some of the other content in order to print a week's worth of box scores.

 

Delusional. Definitely delusional.

 

Another annoying thing about the layoffs is that they're usually followed by a triumphant announcement that Gannett is gobbling up another paper somewhere.
Maybe they're getting them at prices too cheap to pass up, and maybe it's keeping them from going out of business entirely so it's actually a good thing, but I can't help but think they might make more money if they didn't spend millions of dollars buying up every damn paper that comes on the market.

 

If you do an online subscription to a Gannett newspaper you can set up your feed to read up to five other papers for no extra cost - and you can change around which papers those are during the life of the subscription. I caught a sale and got 12 months for $19.99 total. And even then I still forget and miss a couple or three days worth of stuff before going back and catching up.

 

If you're in SoCal.

 

You can read any Gannett paper you want with a subscription for just one... there's a workaround for it

Just gotta change the URL

Say you see a story you want to read out of Phoenix, but only have a subscription to the Indy Star...

You just change the URL from
www.azcentral.com/storyiwanttoread
To
www.indystar.com/storyiwanttoread

 

If Gannett invested in their staff, good journalism and keeping talented reporters rather than worrying about getting bigger and gobbling up papers then maybe things would be different, but we know that's not going to happen.

 

Newspapers, and now local TV chains HAVE to "buy" new outlets in order to keep the cash flowing to meet their debt obligations. Of course at some point the music stops and some creditor is left without a chair, there are no more properties to buy and no amount of accounting tricks can hide the fact that your company owes more than it is worth. Right now the G's market cap is $878 m and the long-term debt is $385 m.
Staggering number is revenue per employee - $185k NYTCo is at $438k