I’m hearing that GateHouse Media has imposed an 8 percent pay cut for managers and will be talking with the unions next. The only union shops among GateHouse’s 100-plus papers in Eastern Massachusetts are the Patriot Ledger of Quincy and the Enterprise of Brockton*, so I don’t know what this means for the vast majority of employees who work for non-union papers.
The Ledger is also cutting back on its coverage area from 26 cities and towns to 12, according to one of my reliable informants. Among the towns being cast out of Ledgerland is the fast-growing community of Plymouth. Supposedly the Ledger will continue to run press releases but will no longer have town reporters in the communities from which it’s pulling back.
*Correction: The Herald News of Fall River is also unionized. See follow-up item.
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If there were ever a town ripe to have some online-only local site crop up, it’s Plymouth. I wonder what the Cape Cod Times will think of this community sitting out there all alone…
A bit ironic given that the whole Wicked Local concept started in Plymouth.
Plymouth should have had its own daily paper several decades ago, IMHO.
As far as I know, GateHouse still publishes a weekly for Plymouth, the Old Colony Memorial.
Ron: Yes. I think that speaks to Rick Daniels’ statement that he’ll continue to look at GateHouse papers that serve the same community. Perhaps he believed the Ledger was hurting the Memorial.
Was this the same Gatehouse New England that had three newspapers covering the same city of Taunton for two years?