NPR - Gannett publishes newspapers like USA Today, as well as many local weekly papers. Despite managing many local outlets, it has been cutting down for years. At the end of 2019, Gannett merged with GateHouse Media and between them the two companies had roughly 25,000 employees. Less than four years later, the current workforce is around 11,000.... According to reporting from Nieman Lab, Gannett owned 261 daily and 302 weekly newspapers in 2019. By the end of 2022, those numbers had dropped to 217 dailies and 175 weekly newspapers, a reduction of 171 in total.
Gannett has once again forecast in the last few weeks that it plans to sell off more of its daily newspapers. While part of its business model is to focus on larger metropolitan areas, smaller communities with few news sources could be left as "news deserts," says Joshua Benton, who has covered this phenomenon for the Nieman Journalism lab at Harvard University. Benton describes this trend as another aspect of the now decades-long struggle for print media to keep up financially with digital options.
April 11, 2023
How America's largest newspaper company is leaving behind news deserts
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2 comments:
The Providence Journal, my local paper, is now owned by this conglomerate, and every day it gets smaller, has less news, and circulation shrinks. Investing in news brings in readers but Gannett forgets what business it is in.
In the long ago I worked for a large city daily, publishing both morning and evening editions and sister papers in other cities controlled print news media. Suddenly in the mid 1960's 100 year old manufacturing technology was supplanted by the beginnings of the computer control and the media revolution. Thousands of jobs were lost and that loss continues as newspapers continue to lose ground to the impact of newer types of news delivery. Sadly the greatest loser is the reader.
Semper Paratus
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