so much for small weeklies being like cockroaches ...

Hey folks... just found this site through googling CNHI furloughs. I work for CNHI, too.

This thread is about the Newton, Mississippi, paper. What the article didn't say was that CNHI has a daily in Meridian, bout 15 miles away. Something along the lines of being glad for Newton customers to get the Meridian paper and find some Newton news in the Sunday edition.

I personally know a gentleman who owns two other weeklies who offered to buy the name "The Newton Record" from CNHI. He was going to start a paper... simply wanted the name. CNHI refused... after all, why sell the paper to someone who will take money away from Meridian? The man has started the paper with another name, and it's doing well.

Newton is on I-20 in central Mississippi... it's a city of 3,600 people, but there are 22,000 in the county. Seems plenty big enough for a weekly.

 

Yup. We're paginated at another paper in our company and printed two counties away, and we just closed our business office here.

 

is our small daily in trouble?
we had two full-time employees laid off about a month ago.
we have ended our subscription to Getty Photos.
we were told last week that AP service may be next to go. If not, it's a body.
tell me if I'm wrong, but we won't have AP for long. that threat of "a body has to go" tells me they've already decided.
granted, we go almost 100 percent local in our small, six-days-a-week daily and--pardon the back slapping--but do a pretty damn good job of it in all areas.
still, the AP is nice as a backup for numerous reasons.
and my question and the one I would love to ask the bossman is this:
what in the f.....do we do if, let's say, we have another major hurricane hit the Louisiana coast or a major national news story unfold, a major sports story (a la the steroids' issue or whatever), etc.?
it sure as hell would be nice if management asked us "peons" about such scenarios?
amazing.

 

if it's a question of a short-term fix, i'd bet on "a body has to go" since canceling ap is a two-year process.

 

txsportsscribe...i didn't realize that AP was a two-year process. I have no idea of our setup with the contract or anything.
interesting. just wondering about this. and it could be a short-term fix.
but i am cynical enough and have seen enough in this business to think that the "short-term fix" works so well that it becomes the "long-term fix."
i can hear the boss and owners talking right now:
"Well, we've laid off everybody but the janitor and we need him to clean up the shit that has happened.
"Guess from here on in, we'll use mirrors to put out this paper six days a week."