Gannett, Gatehouse talking merger

I think the headline should read "Gannett, Gatehouse take aim at local journalism" Staffs are already emaciated. The companies will do things like put out one paper for the state of Rhode Island and then sell it under all the mastheads they own in that state. The same thing will happen in the Rochester area where t companies own a bunch of titles and in places around the country.

 

I wouldn't be surprised to see that done in Western Kansas. For all practical purposes, Garden City's Sunday paper is just four pages wrapped around the Sunday Hutchinson News (I presume the same is done in Dodge City). Just change the mast up top and make Hutchinson, Garden City and Dodge City the exact same paper.

Do the same in the northern half of the State with Topeka, Salina and Hays.

 

This will happen all over the country because there will simply not be enough staff to produce a separate paper.

On a Monday in late May, 2017 I drove through Greensboro and bought the paper. I counted three local bylines. I posted this on another thread and someone said that I caught Greensboro on a bad day because with the layoffs weekend staffing is low. I had presumed that. But Greensboro has since had more editorial cuts.

BH Media owns both Greensboro and Winston-Salem. I did not stop for the Winston-Salem paper but I would think their staff is no larger than Greensboro so they probably had three local stories also.

At some point soon there will not be enough reporters at a local paper to put out a true stand alone product.

 

BH Media Group owns the Greensboro and Winston-Salem papers.

 

Where I am, Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook print the same paper under different mastheads.

 

My bad. I forgot Berkshire Hathaway changed the name when he bought the group.

 

Yeah, I thought they each had excellent, yet unique coverage of the recent monorail disaster.

 

I think the pretense of having a “local daily” by changing the masthead and some front page stories is coming to an end. Why bother when the inside pages are the same in a group’s dailies. The coming of Kansas Today or whatever they want to call the statewide daily is on the horizon and will become commonplace across all 50 states. Ads will be in all group dailies or in none, it’s all about scale.

 

There is not much advertising left. And much of what remains is obituaries,legals, classified and local merchants. I think the papers will have to print some form of a local edition.

 

When Gannet/GH owns Pensacola, Tallahassee, Jacksonville, St. Augustine, Daytona, Gainesville, Ocala, Florida Today, Lakeland, Winter Haven, Fort Myers, Sarasota and Palm Beach there will be little to distinguish those papers other than A1, B1 and the sports front.

 

Bedridden today and because I was stuck for something to do I listened to the New Media Investments earnings call. While short, only about 20 minutes, it got hugely entertaining.

Leon Cooperman cam on the call to ask management questions. Cooperman is the Wall Street billionaire who likes to make issue warnings about the potential of left wing politicians to damage our country. Normally the questioners on this calls are lowly analysts, not billionaires.

Cooperman told the CEO of Newe Media the problem with the merger is that "no body believes the numbers". Cooperman pointed out that "Gannett total revenues have declining by over nine per cent over the past few quarters " and New Media "around seven per cent a year" But the proxy projection is that revenues in 2020 will drop by 3.5%, in 2021 by 1.5% and in 2022 by .4 per cent. He asked the CEO, Michael Reed, how he was going to accomplish this. Reed responded that while the company had projected that "print advertising would drop from over 30% to less than 15% ".

The next questioner pointed outed that digital revenues had flat lined so how was that going to get fixed. The CEO said that growth would pick back up. And I will note that circulation revenue was down 5.8% this quarter at New Media. So I am not optimistic that the hole cause by the drop in printed will get filled.

But my favorite part was that Cooperman said on the call that Fortress took New Media public at 16 and are selling at eight and a half. He said "but Fortress will walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars". He said this is "morally wrong" and Fortress"should not even take the money given what they have done here".

 

And the newspaper editions in the Treasue Coast.