Nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen at the Burlington Free Press under the newly merged and gigantic Gannett media company.
But GateHouse has a well-known appetite for streamlining media properties, or “brands,” and many pundits are predicting the future includes cutbacks for the Free Press and other papers included in the deal.
“A new slimmer structure — much more GateHouse-thin than Gannett-like — is on the way,” said Ken Doctor, a columnist for NeimanLab. “Streamlining is the name of the game. Heads will roll, though a few of the highly placed Gannett ones will be attached smartly to golden parachutes.”
The Free Press recently changed hands as part of a $1.2 billion merger between Gannett, the parent company of the Free Press, and New Media Holdings, the parent company of the GateHouse newspaper chain. The newly enlarged company is called Gannett.
The two companies touted the merger — which created the nation’s largest newspaper company — as a way to find efficiencies and save money in providing the news.
But news business experts are predicting doom — for readers, for writers and for all of the back-office functions that support media companies.
“More than 10 percent of the chains’ combined workforce — about 25,000 in the United States — will likely get the dreaded call from HR that their services will no longer be needed,” Doctor said in an Oct. 9 column, before the merger.
Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University who has written about the Vermont media, said he has been covering Gatehouse for years.
“Their MO is to cut to the bone and beyond,” Kennedy said.
Free Press Executive Editor Emilie Stigliani declined to say whether she knew of any upcoming changes at the paper, which is based in Vermont’s largest city. The company in October hired two new reporters, and right now it’s struggling with circulation that has dropped precipitously, from 15,138 in June 2017 to 9,558 two years later, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.
“It’s one of those things where we are operating business as usual until further notice,” said Stigliani, who became editor in January.
GateHouse and Gannett together now manage about 265 daily publications in the U.S. In a statement issued before the sale, the companies said the merger — under which GateHouse’s parent company purchased Gannett — would create an opportunity to save up to $300 million in costs each year, “while continuing to invest in newsrooms.”
But media experts expect the deal could easily lead to more cuts in the newsroom or other parts of the businesses, particularly because the new company must pay off nearly $2 billion in debt to finance the deal.
GateHouse is a media company that makes revenue through a variety of platforms, not just traditional newspapers. The New York-based company also provides digital marketing, IT, human resources, and financial services to small and medium-size businesses.
New Media Investment Group VP Mike Reed told Doctor in June 2018 that GateHouse is going after the 29 million small- to medium-size U.S. businesses with fewer than 20 employees.
“I think everybody is trying to sell services to those 600,000 that have more than 20 employees. But nobody is really going after the 29 million with less than 20 employees,” Reed said in Doctor’s column.
“Those are the customers that we have to win over,” Reed said. “They’re not historically newspaper advertisers.”
Kennedy cited the example of a small region in Massachusetts that had more than 100 papers, including several small weekly papers. Within six months, Kennedy said, many of the print papers were merged “so suddenly you would have a paper with some unwieldy name reflecting its progeny as the successor to three to four other papers, and you would get your community’s news in this amalgamated paper.”
GateHouse told readers that coverage would not be reduced, said Kennedy.
“It was simply a way of saving on printing and distribution costs. And that each of these communities still retained their “wicked local” website,” Kennedy said. “But a lot of the cutting takes place under the radar.”
The Free Press newsroom has four editors and 10 reporters, though some of the editors do reporting as well, Stigliani said.
“When GateHouse comes into a place like the Burlington Free Press, which is already running so lean that they can barely cover anything, GateHouse isn’t necessarily going to come in and say, ‘We can move another three people out of the newsroom,” Kennedy said. “They might be inclined to wait a bit and evaluate the property and decide whether they can implement some cuts or not.”
As for the circulation drop, Stigliani said she didn’t know if Gannett will eliminate the newsprint version of the Free Press as a cost-saving measure.
“I can’t speak to that; it’s above my purview,” said Stigliani. “I think you see the industry transitioning and changing, and seeing local news be successful on a digital platform.”