Yes, CNHI actually does sell newspapers

 I guess that the Retirement System of Alabama has enough asset diversity, and has seen its other assets grow enough, that it can sell individual newspapers at something at least approaching today's market values and let the rest of the chain mark to market on its asset value.

Anyway, last year, per a Google for other reasons, the main reason being to wonder if CNHI was still doing its mandatory quarterly furloughs, last year it sold 10 newspapers to Carpenter Media. These were in its heartland — Alabama, Georgia and one Mississippi.

Carpenter itself is "interesting," per Poynter, which notes its apparent "Chainsaw Al" type operations, which make it currently the sixth-largest US newspaper chain by number of papers. In addition, its acquisition of Black Press, besides US papers, gave it a massive Canadian presence in Alberta and British Columbia. More on that acquisition from the Seattle Times.

Per its own website, their papers include a pair of semiweeklies that I had applied to, as ME, a year ago. They made their acquisition just months after I made the first round of cuts but didn't get the job. Per this longform piece, and per the Times, it's probably good I didn't. 

What is UP with newspapers wanting a job application?

 As in job application in addition to a resume for something like an ME position?

Look, if you're hiring a receptionist, or a newspaper delivery carrier, I get it.

But, for something like an ME spot, especially at what appears to be two different semi-weeklies combined, where the ME is managing reporters? Come on.

Yes, I've only run across it twice in two years, but it's stll irksome.

Both were in Aridzona.

The first literally wanted a paper application, like going to work for Walgreens, as I've noted before. And, they only wanted it after initial interview. I refused, because I could already tell they were doing a mix of lowballing without specific numbers and slow-walking giving me numbers, on financials.

The second, recently? It was online, so there is that. But, it wanted references and all that jazz before an initial interview, or before even indicating you might make the cut for an initial interview. I didn't even get to the part about where they might ask me about my academic background, including dates of attendance, which is why you don't fill out such things.

Hard pass and I stopped completing it on page 2. 

I don't know how good or bad they are overall, but actually, I kind of do.

I applied long long ago at their flagship, then a seven-day daily in print. Copy editor position. I know that means nights. I also know that means one or both weekend nights. 

I still thought that I might have a five-day straight workweek and a "weekend" of some sort, as I had already applied a year or two prior for a copy desk slot at a similar-size paper here in Tex-ass.

Nope!

Five days scattered throughout the week.

Worse?

Could change from week to week.

Fuck that shit, and I'll name a name — Prescott. (I won't say which one I applied to this time.) Pay was also a wash after I allowed for cost of living differences.

I see the parent company, which I didn't know back then, has partner ownership with Wick on a couple of papers. Wick about whom I've written more than once before.

That's the third strike and you're out and I'm out of there before going there, I'm sure. It's been a full week since I emailed my resume and no response. That said, given that there's a reporter opening in Prescott, almost brand new?

3,000 circ semiweekly closes office

No, the newspaper itself is not closing, but?

The Copperas Cove Leader-Press, a semiweekly with more than 3,000 circulation per the Texas Press Association's 2025 annual, in a city of more than 35,000, is closing its office and having its staff work remotely. Yes, I know you share Coryell County with Gatesville, and a bit of Killeen intrudes from Bell County, and it covers the Hood, now Fort Cavazos, theoretically more than you do, but still. (Killeen and Temple are still run "shipshape" by the Mayborn family, and interestingly, Temple actually has a higher circulation. That said, a fair chunk of Killeen's population is transients, solders on duty at the Hood and their families.)

More serious sidebar while I'm here? It's Fort Cavazos and Fuck Trump. (And, per Wiki, don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining by claiming it wasn't a naming reversion but that it was renamed after Col. Robert Hood.)

Sadly, and back to journalism, Belton's down to weekly. 

I could see moving to a smaller office rather than their current/previous one, where they had been for 15 years, per the October edition of TPA's Messenger, but shutting entirely?

It's cheap and it smacks to me of "we don't care."

(That said? It looks like one full-time news writer besides the editor, a freelancer who does some news and a little sports, and the publisher doing other sports that's not canned copy. And, that's with the publisher also listed as ad director. Sounds awfully thin on staff, even these days, for a paper that size. And, looking at the website, it looks like they kind of have written off sports coverage.) 

And, if I'm a staffer? Am I being compensated with this savings of, let's say, $1,500 a month with a salary adjustment, for higher-speed internet at home if needed, or for a younger staffer, any internet at home versus having just doomscrolled a smartphone? Additional electricity for summer daytime AC? Hah. Tis to laugh. I'm probably being told that I am saving gas mileage money and I should be grateful my salary isn't being cut.

What if you're the ME and don't even live in the Cove? Maybe you're in Killeen. Or Gatesville. Or Lampasas.

Southern Newspapers sells Lawton Constitution

 It's probably at least 5 years too late, if not 6 or 7, per what I wrote in 2019 about Southern's takeover, but at least it's out of Southern's least-common-denominator, story-number-counting, vulturous clutches.

 Best of luck to the new owners, who, kind of like Ballantine Communications in the Colorado portion of the Four Corners, and now in New Mexico as well, began as a telecommunications company, then acquired the Durango and Cortez papers, then went into New Mexico for Farmington, are now entering the media biz themselves. 

Hilliary had formed a media group within the company several years ago, and had already started a business-based paper in Lawton.

Southern? Per this Facebook post, even if you take it not just with one, but several, grains of salt, the Constitution had gone way downhill. I wonder if Hilliary was paying for much more than remaining subscriber and advertiser lists.

I don't know how new Wiki's circ numbers are, but what it lists is less than half of the 2018 numbers. Even with current newspaper decline rates, that's a bigger slump than normal. Perhaps it was "aided" by Hilliary's Southwest Ledger.

Once again, not getting the Gainesville Register

 Gainesville, Texas, approximately 17,000, is the county seat of Cooke County, approximately 45,000.

The paper is CHNI. Nuff ced?

Current editorial staff is an in-house staff writer, and a regional editor, with originally a sports background, running three CNHI papers. Weatherford is about 75 miles away, generally southwest. Cleburne is about 45 miles southeast of it. Weatherford has gotten so bad that a weekly halfway between it and Fort Worth started an online-only competitor. Nuff ced?

The only in-depth sports coverage the paper had in the entire 24-25 school year was of the football state championship game for Muenster, at the western edge of the county. Muenster has its own newspaper, let us note!

So far, this year the same, until the last two weeks, when some freelancer has reported on one game each week from two non-Muenster smaller schools.

But, Gainesville is nearly 40 percent of the county's population and you can't get anybody to cover Gainesville high school sports?

OK.

That may also say something about Gainesville sports fandom, I'll admit.