Peoria Pundit

The news was announced on the Web at about the same time I left to cover the Peoria City Council, so I couldn’t get to a computer to blog about it: Gatehouse Media has bought the Peoria Journal Star.

As I’ve said before, I do not have good thoughts about this organization, as they have as reputation for cutting costs by eliminating positions. Gatehouse paid $380 million for the nine daily and weekly newspapers. I’m assuming that when they bought the Journal Star, they assumed the debt on that spiffy new press the PJS installed several years back.

And because of the scope of the purchase, there’s a lot of room for consolidation: In addition to the PJS, the deal includes State Journal-Register in Springfield, the Lincoln Courier and the Galesburg Register-Mail. Gatehouse already owns Pekin Daily Times, Canton Daily Ledger, Kewanee Star Courier, Monmouth Review Atlas and Macomb Daily Journal. Are there any daily newspapers left in Central Illinois that are NOT going to be owned by these guys? There’s the Bloomington Pantagraph, but I can’t think of any others off the top of my head.

Good luck to any potential advertiser who doesn’t like the rates offered by their community’s daily newspaper. Gook luck to anyone who thinks he was treated unfair by their daily newspaper. To what competitor can they turn? They are all the same organization now.

I’m familiar with these cost-cutting media clusters from back when I worked for the Canton Daily Ledger, then owned by Conrad Black’s American Publishing Company. They operate by continually looking for ways to cut costs, usually by increasing the workload on the staffers they don’t fire and by reducing their financial obligations to them. My understanding is that the pensions offered by Copley Press were not guaranteed, which means that Gatehouse isn’t under a legal obligation to honor them, even though it supposedly gets control over the money (My understanding is that the pensions offered by Copley Press were not guaranteed, which means that Gatehouse isn’t under a legal obligation to honor them, even though it supposedly gets control over the money).

When I was at Canton, they fired the guy who ran the big camera that shot the negatives that they used to make the plates for the printing press? Who was to assume those duties? Our news photographer. When he quit in disgust, the reporters took up the slack. When our beloved editor died, his duties were assumed by the editorial assistant, who had never covered a story in her life. But, she did know Quark XPress.

It’s a lock that Gatehouse will close the JS bureau in Pekin. And you know that building in downtown Pekin from which the Pekin Daily Times operates? Forget about it. There’s a possibility that Gatehouse will close the thing completely and move all editorial, advertising and printing work to 1 News Plaza. Newspapers do it all the time. It’s what TimesNewspapers does with its newspapers in Washington, East Peoria, Chillicothe and Morton. All editorial and ads are done in their office in Pioneer Parkway in Peoria, right along with the Times Observer. News staffs will have to operate under earlier news deadlines, meaning the news Gatehouse wants us to read over breakfast may be a half-day old.

No. I am not very optimistic at all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Local. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.