Gannett Fires More Journalists, Closes More Newsrooms
Mass media giant Gannett, Co., Inc. announced that it laid off roughly 400 employees, or three percent of its U.S. workforce, in August, because the company slashed its marketing budget and made other non-payroll cost reductions. The company also reduced the size of its executive team from ten to seven.
Gannett is the largest newspaper publisher in the United States. The company purveys some 400 local newspapers in 48 states, meaning they are also the most widely circulated newspapers–especially in the continental United States. Gannett’s control over how many Americans get news and what news they get is unparalleled.
But why did Gannett make these cuts? Were they losing money? According to Defector, Gannett made $748.7 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2022 alone. The CEO, Mike Reed, made $7.7 million for the year himself—160 times the average salary for a journalist in Gannett’s employ (the average salary at the company is $48,419.) All of the executives made well over six figures.
The workers who lost their jobs as a result of the shutdowns include Kristi Garabrandt, the only full-time reporter for The Daily Jeffersonian in Guernsey County, Ohio. “When you’re the paper’s only reporter, you don’t consider yourself nonessential,” she said.
After these rounds of layoffs, it took Gannett close to three weeks to disclose, in full, the number of staffing reductions they made. In that time, Poynter tracked around 90 newsroom positions being eliminated, including some newsrooms’ only sports editor, photojournalist, or even administrator. Others include longtime employees, like photojournalist Don Shrubshell, who lost his job at The Columbia Daily Tribune in Missouri, where he’d been employed since 1998.
Local papers going extinct or missing major parts of their journalism team are a cause for concern. As these often provide low-cost access to information for low-income communities and small towns, cutting staffing or shuttering the newspapers altogether could create news deserts, or decrease the quality of information being passed along.
Diana Moskovitz, of Defector, delivered a scathing indictment of Gannett’s decision to lay off its employees:
“For decades, companies like Gannett have convinced people the problem is newspapers. If only the internet hadn’t happened. If only social media hadn’t happened. If only another recession hadn’t happened. Somehow, it is always someone else’s fault. Sure, the days you could be a literal idiot and still make millions because your daddy was rich enough to buy a printing press are over. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a market and value in local news. It somehow never occurs to people that Gannett is the problem; that a system that requires massive profits every quarter in an industry undergoing profound changes is the problem; that a newspaper company answering to global money managers instead of actual readers is the problem; that a lack of support for trying out real, tangible solutions to fill in the gaps in local news deserts is the problem. The problem is not newspapers are dying. The problem is corporate greed killed them.”
More than a dozen Gannett newsrooms have unionized in recent years, which is more of a reflection on Gannett’s practices than any statement they could make.
