Tag: Commercial Appeal

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News News Blog

Gannett Rejects MNG Purchase Deal

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Justin Fox Burks

Gannett Co.’s board of directors unanimously rejected MNG Enterprises’ offer to buy the company, calling the proposal “not credible” and saying it undervalued Gannett.

MNG proposed buying the newspaper company, owner of The Commercial Appeal, earlier this month, in an unsolicited deal worth $12 per share. The move left many to worry that the company would lay off even more staff at Gannett papers to drive profitability.

But Gannett board chairman Jeffry Louis said the board is optimistic about the company’s future and its digital strategy.

“Our board of directors is confident that Gannett has significant value creation potential,” Louis said in a statement. “Our vision and pursuit of our digital transformation, combined with our USA Today Network strategy, enables us to serve more directly and efficiently the persistent demand of our audiences and customers to engage with their communities.

“We believe that our future — and that of the industry — turns on thoughtful investments in journalism and marketing solutions, so we can deliver engagement when, where, and how our audiences and customers demand it. Delivering on this purpose will deliver value to our shareholders and benefit the communities we serve.”

“We know there are challenges that face us and our industry. We firmly believe, however, that given our operational expertise, our focus on evolving our business model, and our unwavering commitment to remaining a trusted source of news, we are uniquely positioned to grow this company and its valuable assets.”
[pullquote-1] A news release from Gannett early Monday morning provided some interesting details of the deal proposed by MNG. The company’s actions — before and since its public proposal — “suggest that MNG’s proposal is not credible,” according to Gannett.

MNG did not talk to Gannett officials before a story of the offer appeared in The Wall Street Journal. Gannett received a letter from MNG a day after the story ran, even though “MNG and Gannett management are well known to one another and in fact are partners in significant operations.”

MNG did not give Gannett any information on how it would finance the deal and “failed to address potential regulatory risks and other fundamental issues that Gannett considered important.” Gannett leaders did meet with MNG officials but left with unanswered questions.

“Gannett posed questions to MNG that are routinely addressed by someone making a credible, public, unsolicited takeover proposal: Can MNG fund it? Can MNG close it?” according to Gannett.
[pullquote-2] Without the information, Gannett leaders said they felt uncomfortable signing a non-disclosure agreement with MNG. Gannett said they asked for written responses to questions that would not have required MNG to disclose confidential information. But MNG would not give them any more information about how it would execute the deal.

“In light of this, Gannett now questions MNG’s motives and can only conclude that the proposed nondisclosure agreement is a distraction designed to mask MNG’s inability to finance and complete the proposed transaction,” reads Gannett’s news release. “Indeed, given MNG’s refusal to provide even the most basic answers to Gannett’s questions, it appears that MNG does not have a realistic plan to acquire Gannett.”

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

MAGA Bro Pens Love Letter to MAGA CAP: Dammit Gannett

“Nonpartisan” and “fair and balanced” journalism sound like great ideas. But they probably aren’t what you think they are. They’ve been made to sound like best practices for ethical news gathering. But historically these ideas are artifacts of technology and capitalism.

I bring this stuff up because getting beyond all the usual ideological mess and straight bullshit like this tone-deaf nonsense from The Tennessean, is crucial to understanding why “writer and social media personality” Ryan Moore’s weird love letter to his Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat appeared in Gannett newspapers including The Commercial Appeal.

A screen shot/excerpt from The Commercial Appeal.

America’s partisan-funded press came skidding to a halt in the last quarter of the 19th century when new, high-speed printing made it possible for newspapers with enough up-front investment capital to distribute their products farther than ever before. Lots of attention is paid to the idea that “a biased news medium is bad for a self-governing people.” But the thing is, at scale, it was also bad for business. Politically neutral papers could reach bigger markets becoming valuable to local interests and emerging national brands wanting less partisan places to advertise.  Economic realities forged the new journalistic ideals regarding what makes appropriate news content, not idealistic struggles for better information and freer reporting. And they still do.

A similar technological disruption bent the modern media mythos away from big-market “objectivity” toward a more useful narrative for an exploded economy: “fair and balanced.” This works in a crowded field because you can’t know the truth until you’ve heard every [hardline ideological] side, right?  When cable news blew up and America went from having only three major news networks to having so many choices you could no longer get by without a remote control, the basic idea of what constitutes respectable market shares reduced considerably. Niche marketing and partisan reporting made sense again. This is where Fox News comes from and with it the logical fallacy that all tits require right-wing tats. 

So what does any of this have to do with Gannett’s MAGA-Man-crush?

Like I’ve said before, markets determine content and Tennessee remains a solid red patch on the political map. Gannett’s earnings are in the shitter and its products, deformed as they are by a loss of local autonomy and investment, waste like plague victims. So much reporting and media opinion following the infamous MAGA-Teen‘s 15-minutes in the barrel, cast MAGA caps in a bad light, and judging by the color of those electoral maps I’ve linked above, that’s the favored headgear of many if not most Tennesseans. In other words, the news smacked lots of Gannett’s subscribers and potential subscribers right across the brim. 

Market served. “Tat” accomplished.

Moore’s editorial is mostly familiar rhetoric about folks needing to be respectful of other folks and judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their stupid, racist hats. I could do a whole post on irony and the character of Moore’s content, but that’s not my purpose.

✖
This stuff’s candy — bulked up by outrage-shares and sweetened with hate-clicks.
click to tweet

If serving readers/viewers/listeners is important it’s probably not a good idea for news-oriented media to be in the business of promoting standard, white-male victimization narratives. If media serves a public good it’s also probably a bad idea to participate in softening symbols that, regardless of what secret, special things they may mean to social media personalities, are also, inarguably, touchstones for white supremacists.

But c’mon! From a commercial POV this stuff’s candy — bulked up by outrage-shares and sweetened with hate-clicks. Win-win for everybody! Unless the consumer was looking for information instead of a daily rise, in which case, not so much there.

Nevertheless, the story went big opening Moore’s complaint up to a wider dialogue.

Top comment, Newsweek

I’ll conclude my rant by answering some rage-posts I’ve seen in my social media feed from folks justifiably wondering why MAGA-bro Moore is fronting all over their social media feeds. The real question is, why are you sharing it? And are you ready for more?

It’s just business; thanks for yours.   

 

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Gannett Layoffs Hit Commercial Appeal Newsroom

In December of last year, Fly on the Wall predicted layoffs would be forthcoming at Gannett sometime after the new year. It had seemed like an inevitability since November’s dismal quarterly report and the call for early buyouts that always presages another round of cuts. 

Yesterday, it finally happened. On Wednesday, January 23rd, Gannett laid off newsroom employees at newspapers across the country.

Via Poynter:

Another brutal day for journalism.

Gannett began slashing jobs all across the country Wednesday in a cost-cutting move that was anticipated even before the recent news that a hedge-fund company was planning to buy the chain.

The cuts were not minor.

The CA, which lost many top-of-pay scale employees to the Daily Memphian startup and has been under a hiring freeze, appears to have fared better than many Gannett publications.

As of now only one newsroom layoff has been confirmed. Four open positions have been eliminated. This story will be updated as more is known.

  

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

On Gannett, The Commercial Appeal, and Digital First

“I am most afraid of our important, consequential work getting upended because our business model is further disrupted.”

– Commercial Appeal managing editor Mark Russell in an interview published by Poynter.org, 1-13-2019.

“In April, The Post published the editorial headlined ‘As vultures circle, The Denver Post must be saved,’ calling on Alden Global Capital to sell the newspaper after it cut 30 more positions in the newsroom, leaving it at a fraction of its size just a few years ago. Then in May, three top figures at the Denver Post, including its former owner, resigned amid budget and staff cuts.”

– From an AP report about Alden-backed Digital First Media’s move to acquire The Commercial Appeal‘s parent company, Gannett Co. Published 1-14-2019.

If MNG/Digital First Media successfully acquires The Commercial Appeal‘s parent company, Gannett Co., it’s time to start a dead pool. Only, instead of celebrity deaths, we’ll bet on daily newspapers. Also, I’m calling first dibs: The Commercial Appeal, 2021 — RIP. 

After news broke that Digital First media was making moves to acquire Gannett, many local media watchers wondered if there was any juice left to squeeze from Memphis’ already greatly diminished daily newspaper. It’s a fair question, but only a tiny piece of the bigger picture. Whether or not the CA can withstand another round of screw-tightening, the market’s certainly interested in finding out. Gannett stock rose 21 percent following the announcement and, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, this makes it harder for Gannett to, “justify turning its back on the offer,” or go forward with plans to expand its own digital footprint by purchasing Gizmodo Media (Previously Gawker Media).

Frankly, if not for Digital First’s reputation as “The Death Star of newspaper chains,” the company’s reasons for making an offer and encouraging Gannett to pursue other offers, might sound downright noble.
From the WSJ:

In the letter, Digital First accused [Gannett’s] management of poor stewardship and of damaging the company’s financial position by making several “aspirational digital deals” that haven’t paid off. It demanded that Gannett put all digital acquisitions on hold and hire bankers to review strategic alternatives. 

That sounds like the Gannett we all know. But to extend the Star Wars metaphor, this isn’t Han Solo swooping in with his blaster to save the day. To borrow from Will Bunch at Philly.com:

“The dirty little secret is that DFM learned — at least for now — that it can sell longtime readers an inferior (or, to use the technical term, crappier) newspaper and only 10 percent of reach each year will cancel. Do the math, though, and it’s clear that much of America outside the biggest cities will become news deserts by the early 2020s, after Smith and his fellow hedge-funders have sucked out every last drop.”

Is Bunch being alarmist? He’s certainly not the only media watcher to sense a disturbance in the force. I caught a similar chill and the market’s positive response to the Digital First news instantly called to mind a line in James T. Hamilton’s 2003 book All The News That’s Fit to Sell. When applied to the information business, economics really earns its reputation as “the dismal science.”

Hamilton’s book is aging well. It delves into how markets shape media bias with attention paid to how little the value of well-informed communities has to do with the value of commodified media product. It more or less describes and defines the kinds of changes we’ve all observed in local media markets. It’s what happens when the public’s interest shapes public interest and profit drives all.

via GIPHY

On Gannett, The Commercial Appeal, and Digital First

What happened to Alderaan can happen here.

The Digital First news took me back to that happy moment in 2018 when The Daily Memphian, a new startup, siphoned away much of the CA‘s top talent, effectively cloning the ailing Gannett property in a locally owned but digital-only environment. Most media consumers cheered, but I went full Cassandra on social media and any excitement generated by the prospect of a new information startup was dampened by the sense that we’d now crossed some kind of risk threshold. Every media  startup’s a dicey proposition; now the Gannett-damaged CA had been cut in half — its talent gutted by a digital twin with good intentions. The idea of having no daily non-broadcast news source in Memphis within the next decade had to be seriously entertained.

In spite of recent and well-justified optimism, I once again submit my modest observation: The sky is falling. Maybe not for everybody and maybe not right now. But someday and soon and as reported elsewhere, there are no good guys in this deal.  But if Digital First takes Gannett there won’t be a Commercial Appeal in 2022.

Write it down. 

Categories
News News Feature

News News

The big media suspense story of 2018 came to an end Wednesday, August 8th when the board of Tribune Media voted to terminate a controversial and law-bending $3.9 billion merger with Sinclair TV. This deal would have made WREG Channel 3, Memphis’ top-rated TV news station, a Sinclair property, and Memphis a new market for a company with unprecedented national reach and defined by a history of delocalization and forced right wing content.

Now, with Sinclair solidly in the rearview mirror, Tribune has entered into a new agreement with another giant, Nexstar. This latest development could alter the Memphis media landscape considerably.

According to a Bloomberg report, Nexstar plans to stay just below the FCC ownership cap by divesting in 13 markets. One of these markets will almost certainly be Memphis, where the company already owns WATN-24 and WLMT-30, which function as a content/staff-sharing duopoly.

The Daily Memphian

In print — if that’s the right descriptor — the year’s biggest news was the birth of a new, ambitiously scaled digital-only news source. The Daily Memphian launched online in September. Executive editor Eric Barnes said the venture became necessary when Memphis’ traditional “newspaper of record,” the Gannett-owned Commercial Appeal, lost considerable editorial autonomy. Many of the new startup’s first hires were marquee reporters and columnists siphoned away from the CA — refugees from the increasingly non-local local newspaper. This harvesting of established talent allowed the new enterprise to generate considerable local interest, but it also resulted in an exciting new thing looking a lot like the declining newspaper that made The Daily Memphian a necessity.

The second biggest news in print is The Commercial Appeal‘s comeback after being displaced by a parent company eager to sell the real estate, and relieved of its institutional memory and talent by a new startup. Losing so much top-of-payscale reporters and columnists allowed the hobbled daily paper to staff up like it hasn’t been able to in years. And, while it’s still plagued by embarrassing mistakes, the result of a careless and clueless out-of-town editing process, the CA still managed to break the most relevant and change-making investigative report in recent memory.

“For the dozens of children currently separated from their families while awaiting trial inside the Shelby County Juvenile Court and Detention Center, the cost of calling home often presents a barrier to keeping in touch with their parents,” Sarah Macaraeg wrote in a detailed report showing how Shelby County’s contract with phone service provider GTL brought in a million dollars annually. Within a week, steps were taken by County Mayor Lee Harris and Commissioner Tami Sawyer to make phone calls from juveniles to their parents or guardians cost-free.

Gannett Co’s Q3 earnings contained some good news for The Commercial Appeal‘s parent company. Digital revenue is up by $3.3 million over last year. Unfortunately, digital gains couldn’t keep pace with the $5.5 million in revenue lost from declining circulation. Publishing revenue is down $43.9 million with advertising and marketing taking a $26.5 million hit.

The disappointing economic news arrived shortly after Gannett’s latest letdown to loyal print subscribers. Deadlines weren’t extended to allow for even rudimentary coverage of the midterm elections.

Following the Q3 report, Gannett sent out a company-wide memo offering early retirement to employees 55 or older who’ve been with the company for at least 15 years. Then, USA Today Network president Maribel Wadsworth, told Gannett employees it was time, “to think about our overall cost structure in alignment with profitability.

“We will be a smaller company,” she said, promising there would be no major layoffs before the holidays. What happens in January remains to be seen.

The Daily Memphian isn’t the only ambitious launch of 2018. Storyboard Memphis is a new monthly printed paper featuring original urbanist-oriented reporting and a curated selection of news stories taken from Memphis area websites.

More good news: ProPublica, the Pulitzer-winning digital newsroom, selected Wendi Thomas and her MLK50 Justice Through Journalism project to join its Local Reporting Network. Thomas described the announcement as a “vote of confidence in the importance of this work.”

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Commercial Appeal Shares Holiday Story of Messiah-Like Christmas Stocking

When the holidays get hectic and stressful it’s good for the soul to pause and remember the true reason for the season: Selling shit. Anxious for this yearly opportunity to serve a special convergence of reader interest and advertiser need, many news organizations, including the one that publishes this blog, create special gift guides. That’s why it’s so nice that The Commercial Appeal went a completely different way and told the story of a magical Christmas stocking that suffers for your favorite cook.

Wait, never mind. It’s just another gift guide. That “suffers” bit was just a typo. Our bad. Fly on the Wall has been hoping for miracles lately, and we thought this might be one.

Dammit.

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Will The Commercial Appeal Face More Newsroom Layoffs?

Gannett: Newspapers lack resources to spellcheck their own names. Will likely cut more of these resources.

Will The Commercial Appeal face more newsroom layoffs? Probably. Can the diminished daily newspaper withstand more cuts? It’s hard to say. But before getting into any of that, I’d like to share a few of the things Maribel Wadsworth, president of USA Today Network, allegedly told Gannett employees during a company-wide conference call according to a report by The Nashville Scene. I’d then like to provide an easy to understand translation for folks who don’t work in the print media and therefore won’t be hip to the industry’s famously colorful jargon.

• “As we continue this transition … it’s important to understand … that it will require us to think about our overall cost structure in alignment with profitability.”

Translated: layoffs are coming.

• “Going forward, we will be a smaller company.”

Translated: Layoffs are coming.

• “It’s gonna feel rocky at times. It just is. We just have to be very clear-eyed about that.”

Translated: Layoffs are coming.

Tennessean staffers were also told:

• “There is no plan for a mass layoff before Christmas.”

Translation: HAPPY NEW YEAR, SUCKERS!

None of this is surprising. Gannett’s Q3 numbers weren’t good. Digital growth isn’t making up for losses in print and the company is looking to cut operating costs. In previous years, when the CA was a Scripps property, layoffs inevitably followed any efforts to recruit early retirees. It seems as though the trend will continue under Gannett. In November, a company-wide buyout offer targeted employees over 55 with more than 15-years experience. The deadline to take Gannett’s offer of 30-35-weeks pay, and a possible bonus of up to $5,520 is December 10th. 

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

No Next Day Election Results For Gannett Newspapers

If there was ever a news item worthy of the “Dammit Gannett” tab, it’s this. Via The Nashville Scene:

“Editors at the [Gannett] chain’s papers around the country were informed two weeks ago that deadlines for the print edition could not be extended in order to cover elections. As a result, Wednesday’s editions of The Tennessean, Commercial Appeal and Knoxville News-Sentinel will not have final results for some of the most closely contested statewide races in years.”

Justin Fox Burks

“We do not believe print is a vehicle for breaking news,” Tennessean vice president   and editor Michael Anastasi was quoted as saying.

Anastasi’s not wrong, of course. Broadcast and online media do have advantages when it comes to live and breaking news. How that absolves daily print editions from obligations to print subscribers and expectations of  mere currency remains a mystery.

Folks who pay for paper say it with me now: Dammit!

UPDATE: NiemanLab weighs in:

“Conceptually, the push to separate print — “not a vehicle for breaking news,” that Gannett memo notes — from digital makes a certain sense, of course. And not adding any extra pages of newsprint for election results does save money. (“As you plan for print, please remember that we have tight controls on newsprint costs,” says the memo. “Any pages added need to be ‘made up’ by the end of the year preferably in November.”)

At the same time, it is those incredibly loyal print readers — the ones who have stood by newspaper companies through cut after cut in staff and in the product — who will now see that loyalty tested, again. Gannett, like a number of other newspaper companies, has more than a third of its print subscribers ages 70 or above in many markets. Most read in print; digital is a second and lesser option. (E-edition readers, who essentially get the print paper in digital form, will also be impacted by this decision.) Those subscribers, at Gannett and elsewhere, have seen their subscription rates hiked again and again, raised to the very limits of econometric modeling.”

Ken Doctor’s column notes that, in an effort to push more readers online Gannett is dropping its paywalls for 48 hours, enabling anyone with internet access to read Gannett’s election coverage. It’s a good read that takes a hard look at recent economic and subscriber history.

“What those numbers tell us is that that road to a mostly/fully digital future gets narrower month by month. Digital subscriptions — which sell at much lower prices than print ones, though with lower marginal costs — are gaining ground much too slowly. Given the combination of higher prices, a lesser product, and even increasingly erratic home delivery, print subscribers may provide less of a lifeline to the digital future than Gannett and other publishers now assume in their whiteboard calculations.”

Read it all here.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Survey Says … We Don’t Agree. About Anything.

Some of the “news” I was exposed to before 9 a.m. today:

An “urgent alert” post on Nextdoor.com that read, “I love my penis.”

A tweet that led me to a video link showing President Trump praising Kim Jong-un as one the “great leaders” of the world, and saying that he “loves his people.” (These would be the people he imprisons and murders, keeps impoverished, and denies basic human rights to, I suppose.)

A story in the print-version of The Commercial Appeal about the “grandma” who put her kids in a dog kennel in her car.

A link on Facebook to a story about the facilities in Texas where the separated children of (brown) asylum seekers are being kept in cages until they can be sent off to foster homes. America!

A CNN video of Dennis Rodman in Singapore wearing a MAGA hat and pitching a crypto-currency called PotCoin.

A Commercial Appeal email that sent me to a video of state Representive Reginald Tate talking to a Republican on a “hot mic” and saying his fellow Democrats were “full of shit.”

An NPR story about U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ latest ruling, one that categorically denies asylum to any (brown) woman who claims to be a victim of domestic violence.

Drake Hall playing “Miss You” by the Rolling Stones.

I also made two moves in Words With Friends on my iPhone.

I don’t think I’m particularly atypical. We are bombarded with “news content” from multiple sources these days. It seems unimaginable that just a decade ago, most of us woke up, made coffee, read the paper, and went to work, assuming we were reasonably well-informed.

Information now comes at us nonstop, a pupu platter of news, opinion, tragedy, nonsense, pathos, and propaganda. None of us get the same serving. All of us filter our information stream differently, picking and choosing what catches our fancy.

Is it any wonder we can’t agree about anything?

A survey conducted last week by the the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute found, unsurprisingly, that most Americans are unsatisfied with the current state of journalism and the news. Perhaps, surprisingly, three out of four journalists who were surveyed agreed with them. News creators and news consumers both want the news to be better, but for different reasons.

Journalists are feeling beleagured and threatened by the continued down-sizing of the newspaper industry, the dumbing down and politicizing of television news, and by the constant attacks on the media from the president, who denigrates any reporting he doesn’t like as “fake news.” The survey found that most journalists believe the public’s level of trust in news media has decreased in the past year. Forty-four percent of news consumers said it had.

Interestingly, the survey found that the public wants what most journalists say they want to deliver — stories that are factual and offer context and analysis — but 42 percent of those consumers who were surveyed said journalists too often strayed into non-objective commentary.

Here’s where it gets sticky. When newspapers ruled the Earth, readers pretty much knew what was news reporting and what was opinion. Newspapers had (and still have, for the most part) a clearly delineated “op-ed” section, where pundits unleash points of view about various subjects. It was easy to differentiate news reporting from opinion.

Now, not so much. Is that clip of Dennis Rodman news? Entertainment? A reality show gone rogue? Hell if I know. When that video of Trump and Kim gets posted to Facebook with a snarky comment from a friend, the video itself is ostensibly news, but the comment is opinion. The lines are blurred and getting blurrier. Most of the news we get via social media comes with an opinion attached. Too often, we react to the opinion rather than to the news itself.

Where do we go from here? I don’t know. But it’s worrisome that in a time when accurate, serious reporting has never been more important, most Americans can’t even agree on what it is.

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Dammit Gannett: Fabulous Prizes Edition

Picking on the Commercial Appeal used to be its own reward, back in the day when they were the big corporate Goliath and we were the little dude with a slingshot. As the paper has continued to decline, it’s become a weekly, though not entirely joyless, chore. Still, it’s good to feel appreciated. So thanks, Jim Palmer, for this cartoon inspired by Fly on the Wall’s regular “Dammit Gannett” feature.

Jim’s a first generation Memphis Flyer vet who contributed illustrations for columns by Lydel Sims. He’s the creator of Memphis’ own Li’l E and your Pesky Fly’s very favorite cartoon about the journalist’s life.