Slacker
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A lot of us have lived this story. This excerpt is what it was like for me, though I was lucky to avoid GateHouse.
Zenger’s newspaper, with a circulation of under 10,000, has been pillaged in classic private equity fashion. Its pre-GateHouse staff has been cut by 70 percent, and those who remain have not had a raise in almost ten years. The paper had its own in-house production and printing operation, and had won design awards, but GateHouse shut down and sold the press and fired the entire production staff. The paper is now laid out hundreds of miles away in Austin, Texas, along with most of GateHouse’s 770 papers. The printing is done in another city, at a GateHouse-owned shop, by harried press workers who are under constant pressure to cut costs by reducing quality.
Editors must send all the content, page by page, to the GateHouse design center via a cumbersome, laughably outmoded software interface and then wait, often for hours, to see what the pages look like on their computer screens. They are not allowed to speak to the designers, who can be contacted only by email. The designers follow strict rules that make creative layout solutions virtually impossible. GateHouse wages are so low and working conditions so high-pressured and unpleasant that turnover among layout staff is constant—so mistakes are rampant.
Although GateHouse management claims to be aggressively pursuing a “hyperlocal” digital ad strategy, its newspapers’ websites—all with close to identical design—are stunningly ugly, hard to use, and filled with dated, soft feature stories of zero local interest. Its subscriber services—all outsourced—are even worse. At Zenger’s office, the editors get calls from readers who are having trouble with their subscriptions and can’t reach anyone for help. “Sorry,” the editors have to say. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Cost-cutting measures at GateHouse are absurdly draconian, ranging from the fact that editorial staffers don’t even get complimentary subscriptions to having to buy their own coffee for the office machine. “Next it will be the toilet paper,” says one staff member, only half-joking.
The newspaper where Zenger works, sold to GateHouse a decade ago, has lost 40 percent of its circulation over that time, and nearly half its advertisers. At the Columbia Daily Tribune in Missouri, massive layoffs began one month after GateHouse took over. “You are expected to do the work that three people used to do, and you are not rewarded for it,” says one former employee. Across the company, employees complain of few resources and little tech support. A senior sales rep at a GateHouse paper in Massachusetts had his computer hard drive crash and couldn’t get a new one from the company for nine days. When he finally did get one, it wouldn’t accept his password.
The ruthless miserliness of GateHouse management has two effects: It destroys the newspaper’s capacity to do its fundamental job of covering the news, and it makes for miserable employees. “Everybody I know in the leadership of the corporation were financial people or ad directors,” says the editor of a GateHouse-owned paper. “They were never journalists—never covered a story in their life. This corporate stuff is killing local newspapers. I’m sweating bullets hoping some bean counter doesn’t say we’ve got to get another 17 percent profit out of this. How much more can these people cut? It becomes harder to do the right thing—to cover the city council meetings and find out what really did happen—when you had five people in the newsroom and now you’re down to two.”
Saving the Free Press From Private Equity
Zenger’s newspaper, with a circulation of under 10,000, has been pillaged in classic private equity fashion. Its pre-GateHouse staff has been cut by 70 percent, and those who remain have not had a raise in almost ten years. The paper had its own in-house production and printing operation, and had won design awards, but GateHouse shut down and sold the press and fired the entire production staff. The paper is now laid out hundreds of miles away in Austin, Texas, along with most of GateHouse’s 770 papers. The printing is done in another city, at a GateHouse-owned shop, by harried press workers who are under constant pressure to cut costs by reducing quality.
Editors must send all the content, page by page, to the GateHouse design center via a cumbersome, laughably outmoded software interface and then wait, often for hours, to see what the pages look like on their computer screens. They are not allowed to speak to the designers, who can be contacted only by email. The designers follow strict rules that make creative layout solutions virtually impossible. GateHouse wages are so low and working conditions so high-pressured and unpleasant that turnover among layout staff is constant—so mistakes are rampant.
Although GateHouse management claims to be aggressively pursuing a “hyperlocal” digital ad strategy, its newspapers’ websites—all with close to identical design—are stunningly ugly, hard to use, and filled with dated, soft feature stories of zero local interest. Its subscriber services—all outsourced—are even worse. At Zenger’s office, the editors get calls from readers who are having trouble with their subscriptions and can’t reach anyone for help. “Sorry,” the editors have to say. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Cost-cutting measures at GateHouse are absurdly draconian, ranging from the fact that editorial staffers don’t even get complimentary subscriptions to having to buy their own coffee for the office machine. “Next it will be the toilet paper,” says one staff member, only half-joking.
The newspaper where Zenger works, sold to GateHouse a decade ago, has lost 40 percent of its circulation over that time, and nearly half its advertisers. At the Columbia Daily Tribune in Missouri, massive layoffs began one month after GateHouse took over. “You are expected to do the work that three people used to do, and you are not rewarded for it,” says one former employee. Across the company, employees complain of few resources and little tech support. A senior sales rep at a GateHouse paper in Massachusetts had his computer hard drive crash and couldn’t get a new one from the company for nine days. When he finally did get one, it wouldn’t accept his password.
The ruthless miserliness of GateHouse management has two effects: It destroys the newspaper’s capacity to do its fundamental job of covering the news, and it makes for miserable employees. “Everybody I know in the leadership of the corporation were financial people or ad directors,” says the editor of a GateHouse-owned paper. “They were never journalists—never covered a story in their life. This corporate stuff is killing local newspapers. I’m sweating bullets hoping some bean counter doesn’t say we’ve got to get another 17 percent profit out of this. How much more can these people cut? It becomes harder to do the right thing—to cover the city council meetings and find out what really did happen—when you had five people in the newsroom and now you’re down to two.”
Saving the Free Press From Private Equity
