Details of how the new Craphouse — Gatehouse — guts papers, with maybe a touch of naivete?

An Atlantic staff writer, Elaine Godfrey, checks in from the scene of the crime, Burlington, Iowa, where she grew up.

The Burlington paper is still a daily since the new Gannett, aka the old Craphouse, started running it. But, in things I saw when Craphouse started paginating a paper as big as the Dallas Morning Snooze, it doesn't look so good. Bigger fonts? Check. Not even flowing the jump to fill all the space on the jump page? Don't know if that's the case in Burlington, but likely.

Being owned, not just paginated, by Craphouse?

If your paper's late (it's printed in Peoria, Illinois) you're given the number for a call center. In the Philippines.

Op-ed stuff is state and national. None regional to eastern Iowa. Local columnists mainly gone. Godfrey doesn't guess at the likely cause ... regional paginating means combo editorial pages. (Burlington is paginated down in Austin, and other pre-merger Craphouse papers from Iowa also certainly are, and possibly many post-merger "old" Gannett ones, too.

And, filling the void? As at an exurban Pittsburgh paper, Facebook groups. Largely inaccurate and rumor-driven.

OTOH, per the demographics of Burlington and Des Moines County, I had originally written that if that paper is still six-day daily, it should be cut to five-day and maybe to tri-weekly, with a well-paywalled website. Did the previous owners do that? No, Craphouse did a year-plus after buying it. County's under 40K; city under 25K; both shedding population for decades. Problem is from Craphouse's POV, any national ads or inserts it runs are harder to get for a non-daily paper. But, it should still cut to a tri-weekly. Some of this makes me wonder how proactive on web issues the Harris chain, the previous owners, were. Or were not. And, Harris owned enough decent sized dailies (started in Hutchison, Kansas) it had the money to do more earlier.

Related? Godfrey talks about being trolled by friends for a "puritanical tween" revelation in the article. What if that, re things like Burlington's demographic decline and her not discussing it, is actually part of nostalgic naivete of some soft?

Plus, the current version's website is light to nonexistent on paywalling. (I clicked around the website on different stories under four different verticals, all of them local stories, at least 10 times, and hit no paywall warnings.) If the pre-Craphouse version was that way, that also explains part of the problem. I've seen this failure for years. It STILL is, at some places, despite the ongoing decline in print ads, the ongoing price decline in digital, and computer digital dimes now being gutted by mobile digital nickels.

Also, in the past half dozen years or so, smaller family-owned chains have also been consolidating printing operations.

So, it's easy to blame all of this on Craphouse. And, a large part of it is. But, not all of it. Sorry, Elaine. And, while not justifying smaller family owned chains cutting back as well, it's part of the reality.

So, if you write another story about newspapers, Elaine, either don't focus on your own (while learning more about today's industry in general) or else take off the rose-colored glasses.