Gannett sucked long before it became the new Craphouse

People in the newspaper biz will of course understand who Craphouse is, like they'd understand the reference to Alden's newspaper empire, Dead Fucking Media.

Anyway, the WaPost had a story this week about the latest round of editorial staff cuts at the new Craphouse. The writers noted how Gannett keeps cutting, cutting, cutting, and how this is nothing new, and went back to when it was just Gannett, not the new Craphouse.

But, they miss a few things.

They talk about this paper in Guernsey County, Ohio, for example, and mention that the only full-time editorial staffer at this daily paper was one of Gannett's latest cuts.

Now, for a real newspaper, how do you run it without a local-(ish, these days) editorial staffer? New Craphouse, like other groups big (Can't Nothing Help It [think about it]) and small (Cherry Road Media) just more and more resort to non-local staff mixed with regional content, or in Tex-ass, supplemented by the Texas Trib. (Not even supplemented; replaced would be a better word.)

BUT ...

That ignores something else, because I Googled Guernsey County.

If the "daily" is referring to print, why the hell does a county of less than 40,000, even allowing for the small geographic size and density of Ohio counties, still have a daily paper in the post-COVID world? The Daily Jeffersonian should be the Tri-Weekly Jeffersonian. But it has a circ of 12,000, Wiki claims. Yeah, and I've got palm trees on Lake Erie to sell you. That said, as I said on Twitter, community journalism in Ohio, both small daily and non-daily, puzzle me in many ways.

(Let's ignore the question for now of why many print non-dailies in counties that size still build a daily e-edition, or in CNHI's case, why they put a full week's worth of daily comics, puzzles, etc., into two days of paper and waste money on print costs and on syndication money, when surely COVID would have let them modify such contracts if they're still operational.)

That's the real biggie. 

At the time Dean-o Singleton had the half a light bulb come on with the idea of clustering (idea was good, could have been much better implemented and certainly not in a "Chainsaw Al" way), Gannett was one of the few other chains really positioned to do something like that, and it did bupkis.

That's of a piece, and a 15-years or more timespan with Guernsey County, Ohio, still having a daily paper.

That said, I tried to look at their adhole by e-edition. I forgot Gannett does one of those head fakes, offering to let you sign in with Google or Hucksterman, then telling you you still need a subscription. That's why I don't use my real name with Google.

Sidebar: I blogged last fall about the employee-cutting at the new Craphouse.