Media: GateHouse slashing staff again at the Journal Star (UPDATED)
Here we go again. GateHouse Media is offering a “voluntary severance package” to 220 of its 218 full-time employees at the Peoria Journal Star. The buyout is “designed to help the Journal Star offset rising expenses faced by newspapers throughout the country.”
Translation: “everyone else is doing it … ”
The problem at the PJS, as I see it, is two fold:
- The Journal Star is under the same pressures the rest of the mainstream media is under. More businesses and people are advertising online, and GateHouse and other media can’t quite pull the trigger and move its new delivery to the Internet, which is less less costly and more efficient.
- GateHouse is hampered by the fact that they are in debt, their stock is has tumbled to “junk” status, and stockholders that are are holding on do so only because of the divided they company keeps issuing. Where does the company get the cash to pay for the dividend? Cutting costs. The cost of paper and ink keeps rising along with the price of gasoline, so they have to keep cutting staff and salaries.
So how does this affect news consumers in Peoria? The PJS lost some good journalists during the last round of voluntary layoffs (just calling a spade a spade). They will no doubt lose more now. It means less bodies on the streets gathering news, which means more press releases masquerading as real news. It means more one-source stories hammered out by overworked writers. It means younger, less experienced reporters covering complicated local issues in which a knowledge of “where the bodies are buried” would be of great value.
No newspaper is really truly appreciated by its readers until it’s gone. Well, folks, the quality of the Journal Star had noticeably declined since the buyout, and is nowhere near the very high quality attained in the years immediately before the Copley buyout.
But what the Hell, as long as there’s a dividend.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, the folks who are served by the Bloomington Pantagraph seem to be enjoying the experience:
The Pantagraph is one of nine Lee Enterprises newspapers to post circulation gains both daily and Sunday in the most recent auditing period, while its online audience continues to expand.
The Pantagraph’s circulation stands at 47,764, up slightly compared with March 2007, said Circulation Director Bob Scott. Sunday’s circulation is 50,081, also up from the same period a year ago. The Pantagraph is distributed daily and Sunday to 96 Central Illinois communities.
Meanwhile, the Pantagraph’s online audience is steadily growing.
In April, The Pantagraph reported 7.4 million page views on its Web site, www.pantagraph.com. That’s up 2 million from the same month a year ago — an increase of 37 percent.
“While our online page views have grown rapidly, it has not been at the expense of the print edition of the Pantagraph,†said Publisher Richard Johnston. “I think it shows that when a newspaper remains committed to its mission of covering local news and sports in print, and combines it with aggressive coverage of breaking news on the Web, it can attract a very large audience.â€
The only commitment GateHouse has made is to cut costs to the bone.
Hat tip to Peoria Pundit contributor David P. Jordan.
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
My former co-workers deserve better. It makes me sad.
I agree with you that the ESOP period of the Journal Star was in many ways a “golden era.” There is still disagreement among those who lived through it about whether the ESOP’s eventual demise, ostensibly caused by too many early retirements, was engineered into the original plan. My opinion is that it wasn’t. I do recall saying in 1996, though, that top management’s explanation was: “We made too much money, and now we’re broke.”
Today, Henry Slane’s 1983 pronouncement (engraved on a bronze plaque inside the lobby entrance until 1996) that he didn’t intend for the paper to fall into the hands of a chain makes its full transition to irony.
Right next to me is a wooden yardstick put out by the Journal Star as an advertising gimmick many years ago. It reads: Now! Over 100 thousand net paid daily circulaltion. It’s all very sad. Kind of like watching an old friend slowly die. With 281 fulltime employes, they are offering buyouts to nearly 80 percent of the staff. If my memory serves me correctly, fulltime employment around the time of the Copley buyout was about 500.
Sigh. If you thought the government (and big business) shenanigans were bad in Peoria now, wait until the JS is further crippled by these layoffs. What disturbs me is that this is a death spiral. Poorer news content means fewer subscribers, which means less money for advertising, which means further cuts. When Gatehouse has wrung the JS dry and can’t realize a certain percentage of profits, it will sell the shell to the highest bidder.
I see the paper has deleted all the comments on the story in the “breaking news” box. I wonder why, but I don’t think I’ll ask. Yeah, that one accusing another poster of being inbred was probably over the line. Most of the comments were intelligence and thoughtful, though.
Yeah, that whole “free marketplace of ideas” and “the public’s right to know” is just pablum marketed to the rubes. It’s certainly nothing to be applied to the newspaper busines itself, for heaven’s sake. That would be contrary to maximum corporate profits.
Check this out on today’s Pantagraph:
http://www.pantagraph.com/articles/2008/05/03/money/doc481b97c01df80644394745.txt
I Summary:
(1) Rising circulation
(2) Greater number of hits on their website
Interesting Pantagraph numbers. I wonder if they can sustain that.
Publishers can play all sorts of games with circulation figures, and the Audit Bureau of Circulation is changing the rules again to include numbers that were excluded before. What matters most is whether advertisers believe the figures and get results.
I have a built-in bias, but I think the Journal Star is still a hell of a lot better paper than the Slantagraph.
I wish Gateshouse would sell PJS.
1st of all its 220 out of 280 or something. My friend that works there was telling me about it and while they didn’t get one they were just told just because someone got this paper & signs it doesn’t mean they get to leave. It will only be if they can do without the position. From what they’ve said the place is bare bones as it is. Also some departments were exempt from receiving the buyout