I was once a publisher at a small CNHI paper (4K), which is a very small fish in most ponds, but in the community, the newspaper was highly respected. Before the sale to CNHI, we paid water bills, electricity bills, the exterminator, etc. on time, every month via our corporate office. When CNHI takes over, we start getting calls about shutting the water off, disconnect notices from the electic company and threats from our newsprint supplier that they were going to hold our next newsprint shipment. That in turn caused advertisers to be much less supportive of our newspaper and in turn, revenues went south.
The worst, tho, was CNHI's brilliant cluster printing plan where they removed the presses from a lot of plants and consolidated the printing into one location. For a lot of small newspapers, the outside job shops we solicited and secured meant a nice revenue source. Without a press, this revenue source went away. When we inquired as to how they expected us to recoup the loss of a $35K annual printing contract, you can guess what the answer was -- cut jobs. So we lost status in the community because we didn't pay our bills, lost thousands in revenue and weren't able to provide readers the same quality of news coverage because we had to cut staff.
If there is justice, when it comes time to repay the loans to the Alabama Teacher Retirement System, this company won't be able to and it'll go into bankruptcy and maybe sold off to reputable buyers who can restore the newspapers to the level they need to be.
