Month: June 2023

Gannett is (wait for it) bulking up on local even as union staffers stage a one-day strike

Michael Anastasi. Photo via LinkedIn.

As you may have heard, union journalists at many Gannett newspapers staged a one-day strike Monday to protest chair Michael Reed’s brutal leadership style, which has resulted in devastating cuts and a sliding stock price even as he’s pulled down more than $11 million in compensation over the past two years.

I’ll get back to that. But first I want to discuss a less publicized development. Over the past several weeks, Gannett has made a couple of personnel moves aimed at — wait for it — reinvigorating local coverage at the country’s largest newspaper chain.

On May 19 came word that Michael Anastasi, vice president of The Tennessean of Nashville and editor of USA Today’s South Region, was being promoted to the newly created position of vice president of local, part of what the company is calling “a new nationwide Gannett effort to transform the growth trajectory for hundreds of local newspapers.”

In an article announcing the move, Anastasi was quoted as saying, “I can’t wait to help accelerate our transformation as I work with the thousands of local Gannett journalists across the country.” He’ll report to Kristin Roberts, Gannett’s chief content officer, who stated, “We are going to save local journalism, and we’re going to do it by working together with absolutely clear eyes about the challenge and tremendous speed toward the solution.”

Anastasi’s promotion is part of what Gannett is calling Project Breakthrough, which “focuses on key growth areas to increase nationwide audience, including opinion columns, newsletters, service journalism, breaking news and audience engagement.”

Imtiaz Patel. Photo via LinkedIn.

Less than two weeks later came word that Imtiaz Patel, chief executive officer of The Baltimore Banner, will leave July 7 in order to become a top executive at Gannett. According to the Banner’s story on that departure, Gannett has not yet announced what Patel’s new position will be. But it’s remarkable that the head of one of the most respected nonprofit digital news organizations in the country would jump onto what is widely regarded as a sinking ship.

Now, there were family considerations involved in Patel’s move. He told the staff that a change in his wife’s job made it impossible for her to move from New York City to Baltimore, as she had planned. Still, Patel has won nothing but plaudits for his management of the Banner, and presumably he could have written his own ticket. (Interesting wrinkle: former Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory, now chair of Boston University’s journalism department, will help lead the transition as the outlet searches for a new CEO.)

“I’m tremendously proud of what we have achieved to bring locally owned, not-for-profit news to Baltimore,” said Patel, who’ll remain on the Banner’s board of directors. Under his leadership, the news organization signed up about 70,000 paid subscribers.

For all of Gannett’s cuts, which have had a devastating effect on newsrooms as well as the communities they serve, the company has always had a story to tell about how brighter days are just around the corner. Back before the merger with GateHouse Media, GateHouse folks used to talk about developing revenues from ancillary businesses such as services and events in order to support their journalism. Not much ever came of that. More recently, Gannett has embraced sports betting and even NFTs — again, without an discernable positive impact on the bottom line. (Are NFTs even still a thing?)

All of this came to a head Monday, when hundreds of journalists went on strike at Gannett’s dailies, which employ about 1,000 union members in 50 newsrooms. The job action coincided with Gannett’s annual shareholder meeting, Angela Fu reports for Poynter Online.

Most of the strikes are one-day work stoppages and involve journalists at some of Gannett’s largest newsrooms: the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Austin American-Statesman and The Palm Beach Post. Workers at The Arizona Republic and The Desert Sun will stage multi-day strikes, and journalists at The Indianapolis Star are withholding their bylines in lieu of a work stoppage.

The NewsGuild-CWA had hoped to persuade shareholders to vote against Reed’s continued tenure as chair. Not surprisingly, according to Katie Robertson of The New York Times, that effort fell short.

So now we’ll get to see how the latest story Gannett is telling itself plays out. Anastasi and Patel are serious news leaders, and it seems unlikely they would have agreed to accept their new roles without promises of money, resources and time. And yet — really? Gannett is not going to bring back all the weekly newspapers that it closed in Massachusetts, or restore the local journalism it eliminated in favor of regional coverage. It’s almost certainly not going to repopulate daily papers like The Californian of Salinas, now operating with zero staff reporters.

It would be easier to read the tea leaves if Reed and his associates simply continued pillaging the company. The Anastasi and Patel moves suggest that they’ve got something else in mind. It will bear watching to find out exactly what that looks like.

Correction: Updated to fix Kristin Roberts’ name. That’s two this week. I’ll try to slow down and read more carefully.

Chris Licht understood what was wrong with CNN but had no idea of how to fix it

Photo (cc) 2010 by CNN Center

I started out writing a much longer post about Tim Alberta’s astonishing 15,000-word takedown of CNN’s now officially embattled CEO, Chris Licht. But I decided there’s really no need. You can read Alberta’s story for yourself along with Jon Allsop’s analysis for the Columbia Journalism Review of what it all means, Brian Stelter’s article at New York magazine on the chaotic aftermath inside CNN, and Benjamin Mullin’s story in The New York Times on Jeff Zucker, Licht’s bitter and scheming predecessor.

Rather than add to that, I want to focus instead on one small point that shows Licht sort of/kind of had the right idea. While speaking to a student group, Alberta writes, “Licht sought to differentiate CNN from both networks — slamming Fox News for being a duplicitous propaganda outfit, and rebuking MSNBC for trafficking in hysteria.”

Licht has been talking this way from the moment he ascended to the top of CNN, and it’s why I was willing to cut him some slack despite misguided decisions such as firing Stelter, the network’s excellent media reporter. The problem, it seems, is that he understood CNN’s problems correctly but superficially and thus wasn’t really able to execute.

CNN didn’t need to move from the left back toward the center or to be more polite to authoritarian right-wingers, as Licht seems to think. Rather, it needed to readjust the balance between opinion and reporting.

Of course, it’s fair to ask who is really calling the shots at CNN — Licht or his overlords, David Zaslav, the head of Warner Bros Discovery, and right-wing billionaire John Malone, who owns a significant chunk of the company. It all fell apart when CNN’s town hall event with Donald Trump turned into a disaster in exactly the ways in which everyone had predicted — with Trump simply yelling lies in the face of his well-prepared but overwhelmed host, Kaitlan Collins, while the Trumper crowd hooted and hollered off stage.

You may have heard that another media executive, David Leavy, has been brought in as CNN’s chief operating officer, a significant wing-clipping for Licht, who has presided over a steep decline in ratings, revenue and morale. It seems hard to believe that Licht can survive the humiliation, much of it self-inflicted, that he endured in Alberta’s piece.

It’s equally hard to know where CNN should go from here. A return to Zucker’s clown show (Chris and Andrew Cuomo, anyone?) would hardly restore the reputation of a still-great news organization whose on-air product often fails to match the excellence of its journalists.

CNN is just as much in need of a reset today as it was when Licht took over.

Earlier:

Brant Houston talks about his new book, which chronicles two decades of disruption

Brant Houston

On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Brant Houston, who is hard to describe in one sentence: he’s an author, an educator, an investigative journalist, an expert in data-based reporting, and a co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network and the Institute for Nonprofit News.

His new book, “Changing Models for Journalism,” chronicles the history of change, disruption and reinvention in our industry over the past two decades. These are themes we explore on this podcast, and in our own forthcoming book, “What Works in Community News.” Brant takes us back to the early days of digital and recounts the early optimism, and the early misconceptions, about the promise and the peril of the internet.

I’ve got a Quick Take on Pink Slime Journalism 3.0. We’ve seen an explosion of websites that might be called Pink Slime 2.0 as political operatives have sought to take advantage of the decline in real local news. That followed Pink Slime 1.0 — an outbreak about a decade ago of local news being produced by low-paid workers in distant locales, including the Philippines. Now, NewsGuard reports that dubious online content powered by artificial intelligence is spreading.

Ellen looks at the numbers in the 2023 impact report on local news by the INN. And there’s some good news: As the nonprofit journalism field expands, the resources to sustain these newsrooms are expanding, too.

You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Something for the kitchen table: Why print makes sense for some local news startups

Local news board members Greg Bestick of the Harpswell Anchor, Fred Perry of Brookline.News and Virginia McIntyre of The Concord Bridge. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.

Residents looking to start news organizations in their communities usually look to digital first. Even at the local level, advertising revenues are not what they used to be, and the cost of offering a print newspaper — both in terms of money and complexity — often isn’t worth it.

Yet the traditional notion of publishing a weekly newspaper remains attractive on several levels. Readers like it. Advertisers prefer it. And in many states, public notices placed by governmental agencies, a lucrative source of revenue, are restricted to print papers.

So I was interested to learn that print is part of the discussion at three nonprofit local news startups that were featured at a panel discussion, “The Re-Emergence of the Community Newspaper,” held during the recent conference of the NorthEast Association of Communications Executives, held in Meredith, New Hampshire.

The Harpswell Anchor in Maine and The Concord Bridge in Massachusetts have offered print right from the beginning. Brookline.News in Massachusetts is digital-only but may offer a print edition in the future. (Disclosure: Ellen Clegg, my research, podcast and writing partner, is also a founder and co-chair of Brookline.News.)

Greg Bestick, president of the nonprofit board that publishes the Anchor, said print was not something he and his fellow founders especially wanted to offer. What changed their mind, he explained, was that a survey of the community revealed that 95% wanted something they could hold in their hands.

“We weren’t thrilled about that,” Bestick said, “but we did say we’d be much more robust online than the previous owner.”

Unlike The Concord Bridge and Brookline.News, which were both launched in response to massive budget cuts by the newspaper chain Gannett, The Harpswell Anchor had been a locally owned for-profit newspaper until several years ago. The paper ceased publication during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bestick said. The new iteration of the Anchor has had an operating surplus from the start, he added, and won 11 awards from the Maine Press Association during its first year.

Virginia McIntyre, a member of The Concord Bridge’s board, said the founders of that site were enthusiastic about print right from the start. “We wanted something people could have on the kitchen table,” she said, adding: “It’s nice to have something that the family can see as a whole. Our advertisers also like having an ad that hits every household.” The print edition of the Bridge, she explained, is mailed for free to each of Concord’s 8,700 households.

Discussions about starting a community news outlet began after Gannett decided in early 2022 to eliminate nearly all local journalism from its Massachusetts weeklies. The Concord Journal is still published, but it’s filled with regional stories from throughout Gannett’s network. Because of that, McIntyre said, many residents had no idea about important developments such as the hiring of a town manager and a $110 million middle school project. Although the Bridge includes feature stories and coverage of school sports, she said that the goal is to inform the public about day-to-day goings-on.

“It’s not entertainment,” she said. “I always thought Concord was a boring place, and now I know it is.”

In contrast to Concord, Gannett shut down the Brookline Tab altogether, leaving a community of nearly 60,000 people just minutes from Boston without any local source of news. “The Tab was not good. But it was something,” said Fred Perry, a member of the Brookline.News board.

Brookline.News’ website didn’t go live until last week; a newsletter began covering the town just before the annual town meeting in April. Perry said he’s hoping that the project can start offering a print edition sometime this fall, praising “the wonderful examples on both sides of me,” a reference to Bestick and McIntyre. Several other board members, he added, are skeptical of print because of the cost, but he said he’s optimistic that print “can generate a significant surplus.”

The panel discussion was moderated by John Harrison, an executive with Wallit, a company that helps publishers manage digital subscriptions.

In many cases, digital-only makes sense. LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers, an organization for digital news entrepreneurs, has more than 300 members. Many of the projects that Ellen and I are profiling in our forthcoming book, “What Works in Community News,” are digital-only, and they have no plans to add a print edition.

Yet print has persisted long past its anticipated expiration date. Perhaps the best way to think about it is that print is still worth doing — but only if it makes sense in terms of revenue, reader preferences and advertiser reach.

Correction: Updated with the proper spelling of Greg Bestick’s name.