The Cincinnati Post winds down

It was a 30-year JOA that expires this year. How is Gannett not following through on the terms?

 

I know that, in the past, Scripps has helped people from their defunct papers land at other Scripps properties. Is that the case in Cincy?

 

how was gannett not following its terms -- like when people called to subscribe to the post, telling them it wasn't available at their address, even though their neighbors got the paper. or not filling boxes that they were legally obligated to fill. or not putting in the inserts that they were supposed to put in. or not selling ads or jacking up the price for the post. you want me to go on? oh, yeah, the last three weeks, i'm sure, is hunky dory. fuck gannett and fuck scripps for letting them get away with it. hope that answers the questions from alexandria

 

There aren't many left, are there? The Rocky and Memphis would be about it in big markets. Scripps is far more interested (and invested) in the TV business these days, with all its various cable properties. Safe to say not many of its rank-and-file newspaper employees have much use for the Fine Living network, though.

 

Didn't realize Gannett had told the Post and Scipps to turn around and bend over like that .

 

they didn't tell 'em shit, because if they did, it would be easy to prove that they violated the joa -- instead, they just did it and scripps pussied up and didn't say shit about it and let it happen

 

Your anger is certainly justified, but this is not unusual in a JOA. The wildest example was in Anchorage in the 1970s, where the Daily News was being screwed so royally exactly this way in the JOA by the Anchorage Times that it was having trouble meeting the payroll for its newsroom of 12. Kay Fanning, the owner of the News, sued the Times to dissolve the JOA and eventually reached an out-of-court settlement that dissolved the JOA, with the Times having to continue printing the News until it got new presses. As it turned out, she wound up selling to McClatchy, which invested heavily in the News and put the Times out of business. Now I couldn't find circulation figures, but my recollection is that by the time they settled, the Times had a circ of 50,000 and the News about 10,000. Most companies would not try to overcome a gap that big and they choose to fold instead. But it's common for the weaker party in the JOA to get screwed. It isn't just Gannett and it isn't just corporations -- in Alaska, both papers were independently owned.

 

Seems to me a paper that has lost 84 percent of its circulation over 30 years in a metro area that has gotten bigger over the same span ought not to remain open. If the people there are good, they'll get good jobs elsewhere. But why would they want to stay at a place with that kind of circle-the-drain track record?

 

Hoops' valid point is that it wasn't a case of the market rejecting the Post, it was the JOA not making even a minimal effort to service Post customers.

 

It's always my experience that customers will stay loyal to a good product -- newspaper or otherwise.

 

And that certainly isn't the first case where Scripps has done something similar, either..... see Post-Herald, Birmingham....

 

Reread Hoops' post -- customers couldn't get delivery, coin boxes weren't being filled. This isn't unique to Cincinnati, but it's hard to stay loyal when you can't buy the paper.