Gatehouse spends some more money

Buying Harris Enterprises, publishers of some pretty good papers in Kansas, including The Hutchinson News.

GateHouse Media to acquire Hutchinson News, other Harris newspapers

 

Is Gatehouse any good or another horrible company? Just asking.

 

Its reputation isn't good.

 

It's not good. I don't really know how to elaborate other than it's a stereotypical newspaper chain. I don't know anything about Harris, so I can't compare the two.

 

I've known people who worked in the Harris chain. Based on what they've said, it was pretty much the exact opposite of Gatehouse. There are a lot of good people in for a lot of changes that will make them quite unhappy.

 

Is Gatehouse storming toward internet only like a lot of the newspaper companies or "chains?" Or is Gatehouse more of a print company? Some of these smaller chains have awful Websites.

 

This is not a sarcastic reply. Gatehouse is controlled by some Wall Street hedge fund types. These guys have no interest in journalism, either print or digital. Think of them as liquidators, just like the guys who run the closeout sales at stores that are about to close.

Their strategy is buy papers at 4-5 times cash flow. So if a paper cash flows 10 million dollars they pay forty-five million. Then they they cut the hell out of costs by firing and slashing and centralizing production at a design hub in order to to pull as much cash out as quickly as possible to recover their investment..

 

My sister used to work for a Gatehouse paper until they kept piling more and more bullshit duties on her and she finally quit. Started out having her shoot games she was covering. Then shooting stuff for advertising. Then she was told she had to sell game photos to parents. Then sell subscriptions. Then ads.

The Harris papers used to be excellent. I haven't seen them much in the past decade or so, but The Salina Journal and Hutch News were great mid-sized papers with huge coverage areas.

 

They acquired a couple of papers near here. One of them is actually a little better since the acquisition, although it really could not have grown much worse.

Someone at another company dealt with their ad dept. and was not too happy. Overbilling was the topic of the complaint, and I am not sure how that was resolved.

 

Do you remember the Yugo, the cheap car that sold in the U.S. in the late '80s and constantly fell apart? Well, GateHouse has been referred to as the Yugo of the newspaper business. It's an appropriate comparison.

There are some solid, talented people who are employed by for GateHouse papers or the copy-editing center either because their companies were bought out or they really needed a job -- I've worked with a few of them over the years -- but they are badly overworked and underpaid.

 

I was hired by a Halifax paper, which became a Gatehouse paper just three months into it. Stayed for another year and four months. When I was there, the big thing was being in the "Inner Circle," which means meeting standards set for publications with a certain newsroom size. Number of videos, number of tweets, number of in-depth reporting stories, expanding social media to Pinterest and Instagram, doing a set number of photo galleries each week, month, quarter, etc. Quotas to meet to get in the "Inner Circle." We met them and still lost people in the newsroom. We were, according to our managing editor, one of the best-performing papers in the region and still lost some staff in one quarter hit. A few months after I left, I learned that the focus had shifted from "Inner Circle" quotas to website blocks or some shit where you incorporate as many multimedia and interactive blocks (quizzes, videos, photo galleries, tout links to related articles) as you can. Basically, what end of the snake are we chasing today. But this is par the course for any national newspaper chain. Gatehouse isn't an anomaly.

 

Unlike most other chains, GateHouse actually has filed for bankruptcy. Not sure of the current financials, but wouldn't be surprised if it did again in the next three years.