As Gannett guts the Austin Stateless ...

 That's of course, in my media world of alt-naming, the Austin American-Statesman.

The Monthly notes how many other outlets are rushing in to fill the vacuum being left by the ongoing gutting. (That said, with the Trib headquarted in Austin, some have a leg up.)

I find it "funny," as in a mix of sad and disgusting, that the vacuum-fillers include Hearst, which cuts away at its own newspapers and hides how much it continues to make by being privately owned and not having to report to Wall Street.

The Monthly does note, contra newspaper union-hater Jim Schuetze, that the one thing that has stopped Craphouse (the tail wagging the dog of the "new Gannett") from even deeper cuts is that Stateless editorial staff is unionized. (Sidebar: Has there been a bigger wasted media space in some ways in the past five years than Schutze?)

That said, even as the union and Craphouse battle over a contract? That contract will almost certainly only cover full-time employees. Like I am sure will happen in Cowtown at the StartleGram, now that their union got a new contract a year ago, any fulltime employees who leave in the future will be replaced by freelancers.

Austin Statesman journos on strike

 Gannett New Craphouse (actually it was OLD Craphouse) journos at the Austin Stateless are on strike.  Good luck; in all likelihood you won't get a real win, and certainly not one that's long-term. Take the wage floor. Yes, the folks at the StartleGram got one from McLatchKey, as did Snooze staff from Belo. Know what? That was for full-time new hires only. That means one way around that one, of course. Nor, as far as I know, do such floors have a COLA for inflation. So, 10 years from now? Let alone 20?

Craphouse (new Gannett) really does suck

 I think most of us knew that already, but at Nieman Lab, Joshua Benton whlps out the numbers on circulation decline for 2018-22.

First, yes, COVID has accelerated problems at struggling big chains. But? Not like this, as Josh compares Craphouse to non-Craphouse medium and large regional dailies.

The real issue is that, even by modern media merger standards, the two companies took on a lot of debt, and bad debt.

That said, per one of the links in Joshua's story, did Gannett and Craphouse really have to merge after Alden's failed takeover? Probably each one could have acquired some smaller company instead. But, both — even though Gatehouse has vulture capital behind it, even if not quite as rapacious as Alden — were likely still worried about being acquired themselves.

Back in 2017, Ken Doctor talked about the "Gatehouse method" and added that he thought there wouldn't be much news left in 2022.

That said, the detritus is even worse.

Trying to find dimes under the couch cushions to service that debt, Craphouse/Gannett is now selling more and more of those merged papers. Here in Tex-ass, the most willing buyer is CherryRoad, which makes Craphouse look almost like a newspaper saint, as I told Josh. 

I wouldn't be surprised if they chase the craptacular southern New Mexico newspapers next. (Nothing I see about CherryRoad says they would also take El Paso.)

In other places, like Lafayette, Louisiana, as Josh notes, other companies are expanding to replace dying husks. In yet others, like Springfield, Missouri, digital-first or digital-only startups are launching.

Salinas should be next, if it isn't already. The Craphouse/new Gannett paper there has ZERO paid editorial staff, per this LA Times piece.

Didn't realize new Gannett / old Craphouse sucked THIS bad in NM

Per the Reporter, Santa Fe's alt-weekly, it has ZERO in-person reporters at its Ruidoso and Alamogordo, New Mexico papers. Alamogordo was a print daily pre-COVID. And, it, at least (dunno about Ruidoso) was Gannett's before the merger. So, can't even blame Craphouse.

Thankfully for Land of Disenchantment journalism, it sold off the Deming Headlight and the Silver City Sun-News to the owner of the Silver City Daily Press. It closed its old rival, but it has local reporters, which neither of those Gannett papers did. And, it's hired back a long-time Deming writer.

Oh, both those papers were also pre-merger Gannett; can't blame Craphouse there, either.

And Cruces itself sucks, as noted. The El Paso Times is also Gannett, so its lack of non-local environmental and border reporting is coming from there. Problem? Yes. They're in two different states, which affects reporting on Rio Grande and Pecos water rights, for starters.

And, barf me on El Paso staff titles.  There is is an "executive editor," still but NO "managing editor." There IS a "content strategist" and a "content coach." There's also NO "city editor." There's ONE government reporter. Two staff photogs, which means reporters are likely expected/required to shoot pix off smartphones.

Note this quote from Jay Rosen about Gannett et al:

“It’s more of a financial firm. It’s more in the category of a private equity company or a hedge fund than a newspaper company,” Rosen tells SFR.

About right.

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.

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.

Unions at Texas papers: an update

Newsrooms at the Dallas Snooze, Fort Worth Startlegram and Austin Stateless all opted sometime back to join the News Guild and fight for unionization. Surprisingly to a degree on first read, by its past history, but really, not, negotiations are going best at the one-pony Snooze, versus Craphouse/New Gannett in Austin and McClatchy/hedge fund in Cowtown, reports Gus Bova.

The Snooze may figure, with the former Belo owning only it and its limping offspring like Al Dia, that it's got nothing to win by pissing off remaining staff as it continues to work to become 21st century digital first after multiple past failures on that front.

McClatchy, for all its good stuff on not following other major chains on all foreign policy reporting, appears to have been a bit red-ass on labor stuff even before the hedge takeover. Craphouse (Gatehouse), the real driver of "New Gannett," is notorious as a crappy workplace, so no surprise there.

What's to stop newspaper owners from pocketing money from the Local Journalism Sustainability Act?

 The Local Journalism Sustainability Act has been reintroduced to Congress. Full bill here.

And, given that it would use taxpayer money to help people buy subscriptions, and its pricing level is clearly targeted to help six-day community dailies of 3,000 circulation or above, up to small seven-day dailies, rather than focusing on smaller daily and non-daily papers, then sliding out to partial support of larger community dailies, my question is not facetious.

On the second credit, for hiring journalists? A 100-hour per quarter standard for an employee's work is WAY too low. Remember, there's 13 weeks in a quarter. A newspaper owner would get a tax credit for hiring any new employee that works more than 8 hours a week.

The advertising tax credit? There's a loophole there. I presume lawyers could use this money to run the "notice to creditors," "letters testamentary," etc. that they have to already.

I don't know what, if anything, could be done to fix the first credit.

Second credit, I do. 250 hours a quarter would be about 20 hours a week for an employee. I mean, 8 hours a week? That's an invitation to reverse-loophole your "independent contractor" delivery drivers for a print newspaper. And, yes, people who run hedge funds and also own newspapers would work on a way to do that.

Address the loophole on the third credit.

(I Tweeted America's Newspapers CEO Dean Ridings at his personal and the America's Newspapers Twitter accounts raising in brief the issues on No. 1 and 2. And, have heard bupkis back.

Update, Aug. 27: I have just tweeted this to the National Newspaper Association. We'll see if I get any more response.)

Also, "local newspaper" needs to be made smaller than "750 employees" on max size. That current definition would allow just about any paper up to Dallas Morning News size (and maybe including the Snooze by now) to qualify. Most Alden-owned papers, including Dead Fucking Media/Media Snooze papers would qualify. Most of New Gannett/Craphouse would qualify. McClatchy papers, now also also hedge-fund owned, would qualify. Yes, "regional or local" is in there, but, you know what? Per media analysts, anything smaller than the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today by default and just maybe the L.A. Times is considered by them to be "regional" and not "national." And, unless that number is moved down to, say, no more than 500, the Aldens of the world would use it as an excuse for further job-slashing to qualify for the payola.

I mean, in the ad credit section, it restricts THAT to small businesses of less than 50, the standard federal definition.

And, speaking of? I see nothing in the language of the bill that says something like: "This offer shall not include any newspapers owned by hedge funds." (Since this is not criminal law, it's not a bill of attainder and carve-outs are totally allowable.)

So, in the end?

Hard pass, as both an informed taxpayer in general AND an informed taxpayer who's also a newspaper editor. Because, the answer to my rhetorical question above is "nothing."

Besides, there's a much, MUCH better way to do this, and to actually target real community newspapers. (It's by no means original with me.)

And, that's to increase funding to the Ad Council and to require it to buy spots in community newspapers. This was first mentioned at the height of COVID. Could be done right now with things like reminders not to leave kids and pets in hot summer cars. Or don't drink and drive paid PSAs.

Sidebar: It IS interesting to see that the bill's cosponsors are almost totally Dems.

Top 10 of 2020

 So, what did readers like on my blog during the past year? Let's take a look. (Top 10 is as of Jan. 4, 2021.)

Note: These were not all written in 2020 (and I don't know if Blogger can be set to do that), just the 10 most read in the last year.

No 1, in fact comes from six years ago. Long before Craphouse bought the Austin Stateless, I blogged about newspapers dying in Austin, at least by adhole.

No. 2 was Warren Buffett's decision a year ago to bail on newspaper ownership. I guess the man who took a chainsaw to the Buffalo News long, long ago realized that he couldn't pull that at smaller papers without an even cruder chainsaw.

No. 3 was about Southern Newspapers appearing to make some false claims about printing presses it allegedly owned.

No. 4 was about the Rio Rancho Observer, ethically challenged a decade ago, semi-biting the dust. (I wrote a few weeks earlier, and it's linked within, about the differently ethically challenged Los Alamos Monitor fully biting the dust.)

No. 5 was my hot take on ABC suspending David Wright for telling the truth about corporate media.

No. 6 was from 2018, telling potential applicants to take a pass on working at Wick Communications. Maybe it went even further downhill after that?

No. 7, interestingly, was from that same month. Sadly, newspaper publishers and owners who need to read this truth probably won't — newspaper magazines are NOT "the answer" to what ails you.

No. 8 was rhetorical. I asked readers if they would pay more for NYT subscriptions after the Old Gray Lady announced last February that it would start increasing their cost.

No. 9? In September, I blogged about the Times again, wondering if its change in CEOs meant "sponsored verticals" were around the corner.

No. 10? I told fellow small-town Texas editors to get a fucking life and stop thinking they had to be the omnipotent god of small town high school football statistics.

Surprisingly, none of these were about CNHI or any of its individual newspapers.

The "new Craphouse" whacks away

Yeah, yeah, the company is still called Gannett, but everybody knows the tail of Gatehouse, I mean Craphouse, is wagging the dog.

Well, the tail has started canning employees. And, please, media analysis websites like Poynter, these are firings, not layoffs.

Trump once claimed he could murder someone in Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue, and get away with it.

Well, he could now murder staff at Mar-a-Lago and it would go unreported.

New Craphouse whacked 10 editorial spots at the Palm Beach Post.

Meanwhile, Michael Reed, head of both old and new Craphouse, calling it the "integration plan," praised the number of jobs being whacked and other things.

At Nieman, Joshua Benton looks at the parts that Reed played down. Store sales dropped 10 percent over the year last year and the decline accelerated ... after the merger was announced. (That had jumped out at me in the info at the link immediately above, even before hitting Nieman.) And, digital and print advertising BOTH declined. Benton also noted that Reed turd-polished its digital marketing and events division, noting that other paper companies have also done this well in excess of reality. Having long lived near the Metromess, I can attest to this in spades with the Dallas Snooze.

The real ugly one on the job whack is the Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader shit-canning its entire printing press. Beyond its own work, you can't tell me they didn't print small dailies or nondailies from places like Bolivar, Branson and Lebanon. And they're now going to print in Columbia, 160 miles away? Which surely has other papers it prints besides itself? 

So, Springfield readers? You'll have a paper that goes to bed before city council meetings are done, before high school or college sports games are done. In short, your print news will be day-old stale.

Given that Snooze-Leader PR staff have said the print paper will be delivered at "the usual time," stale news has to be the result. That paper has to go to bed by, what, 9 p.m.? Earlier yet?

And the corporate PR weighs in:

“As our industry continues to evolve and transform, we are forced to make changes that allow us to be competitive in the future marketplace. This is without a doubt one of the most difficult decisions we’ve had to make to date,” said Allen Jones, upper Midwest regional president. “We must strategically invest in quality, local journalism and the digital experience we provide our readers and business partners.”

Bullshit. It's not "most difficult decisions" for you. You're a regional president who maybe visits the Springfield paper once a year? Especially if you get performance bonuses as part of your pay, it's probably a delight for you.

I suspect this shit-canning is related to unionizing efforts by editorial staff. I don't know if the editorial staff recruited the pressroom or not (it seems like it did, per the announcement letter), but the news staff couldn't fire anybody anymore. A paper for a city of 160K, metro 300K or so and 17 staff?

So, how many $$$ will Gannett/Craphouse lose in Springfield from:
A. Further print subscription cancellations?
B. Advertisers dropping out of a crappier product that has fewer people reading?
C. No more job printing of other area papers, mags, etc?

Nathan Bomey, you're the brilliant biz reporter at the old/new Gannett/Craphouse USA Today. Instead of this:

"Print subscribers are highly profitable and would have to decline a lot" for the company to end print operations, Gannett CEO Mike Reed tells investors on an earnings call. "We don’t have any plans in the near future to do anything like that."

— Nathan Bomey (@NathanBomey) February 27, 2020

Wanna run some actual numbers for us?

And, you wanna ask Mike Reed why, if print subscribers are so highly profitable, he's so willing to screw Springfield ones in the ass?

Top blogging of 2019

Whether it's boredom, shock at the continuing decline of newspapers or other things, 2019 was my heaviest year blogging here. As a result, most of this year's Top 10 blog posts were from 2019.

No. 1? Skepticism about the SLC Tribune becoming a nonprofit, and discussing that skepticism in detail.

No. 2? Wondering if the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, aka the StarleGram, could survive much longer without entering a JOA with the Snooze. (This was one of several advertising-related, or rather, lack of advertising-related, hot takes about the StartleGram last year.)

No. 3? Looking at the Gannett-Gatehouse, rather the Mehness (can't even think of a good bad pun) - Craphouse merger.

No. 4? Calling out wingnut lawyer Ty Clevenger, as well as several small newspapers in central Texas.

No. 5? From 2018, advising fellow print journos not to work for Wick Communications. First time I've done a by-name callout. It started with critically examining their idiocy and "work harder AND better" vulture capitalism idea of cutting the AP wire at daily pages but not cutting the page count.

No. 6? Turning a skeptical eye to  the huzzahs and handstands on the Texas Tribune's 10th anniversary.

No. 7? In the era of conspiracy theories, "deep state" buzz, etc., calling out alleged Gnu Media for some of their pretentions.

No. 8? Saluting one vulture capitalism in the journalism biz for honesty in its rapaciousness.

No. 9? Based on some longform writing, looking at just how much the lies of Facebook, Google, et al about targeted digital advertising really were lies and how many people should have known better.

No. 10? Related to No. 3, wondering if the new Craphouse was going to inflict some godawful ginormous programmatic ad nightmare on us.

Nobody wants CNHI

After Gray Media bought Raycom in 2018, the Retirement System of Alabama remained stuck with CNHI, formerly known by its original full name of Community Newspaper Holdings Inc.

CNHI has long been known as the bottom rung of larger sized newspaper ownership companies. Even as Gatehouse, I mean Craphouse, approaches official merger time with Gannett, even as Alden continues to slash and burn Dead Fucking Media, they still don't fully approach the craptaculartude of CNHI.

CNHI already had a bad reputation before 2009. I saw that 20 years ago in the greater Metroplex area when it ran two daily newspapers, Mineral Wells and Weatherford, with one publisher. No, no. Both papers would need to cooperate on press runs for special sections, etc. But, Mineral Wells needed a separate publisher, not a general manager.

But in 2009, the ground really shifted. In response to the Great Recession, CNHI started requiring one week of furlough every quarter from almost every employee.

And, it saved so much money, even as it drove quality further downhill, that it still continues to do that a full decade later.

The real deal is that, instead of furloughs, CNHI probably needed to file bankruptcy during the Great Recession, like so many other chains. But, given its state pension system ownership, it probably couldn't, for various legal reasons.

Other stupid things continue as well, as I can see from CNHI papers that are near me today.

First? Those Alabama golf course ads that insiders know are really CNHI house ads, as the courses are RSA owned, and make ZERO sense outside of Alabama. (Another sign of the stupidity of CNHI; I'm sure these are required ads, and probably a tax write-off for CNHI's parent as part of it.)

That said, the golf courses make almost zero money for the RSA. That's as golf continues to decline in interest among the under 40 crowd. Second, yes, a resort like WinStar may advertise gaming and concerts in some of your north Texas and southern Oklahoma papers, but their golf course doesn't. Is the Alabama golf ad part of why? Maybe.

Second, doing things like printing TV guide sections. Nobody who subscribes to daily papers, at least, reads those. Cut them and cut your print bills.

Of course, you're stuck with these problems. After Gray Television bought Raycom, RSA said it wanted to sell CNHI's papers, piecemeal if need be. RSA is obviously overvaluing them, cuz I ain't heard of any of them, at least not any great number of them, being sold to anybody.

Part of the overvaluing is probably that many CHNI small dailies need to be cut to triweeklies or something. Not facing that reality is part of why CNHI has them overpriced.

A programmatic advertising potential nightmare

I'm "awaiting" with something less than baited bated (shame on me for misspelling that like an AP reporter or something) breath the day when CrapHouse launches its own programmatic ad network while simultaneously shit-canning half of their on-the-ground salespeople at various newspapers. (That's assuming I haven't missed something and it already has one.)

Given the latest word on the CrapHouse-Gannett merger, this may not be quite such an unrealistic (as in, won't happen) nightmare.

Slouching toward Gomorrah rival CNHI, since it has no production hub, would be unable to do this. Besides, programmatic advertising is computer based, and you can't furlough a computer for a week every quarter, so CNHI would be confused about what to do with this. CNHI is too stupid and disorganized to pull something like that off anyway.

Sherman-Denison ain't doing so well either

A week or two ago, I blogged about a Thursday issue of the Fort Worth StartleGram that had ZERO on ROP, yes, NO display ads (outside of a house ad).

Well, recently, I saw the front section, at least, of a Tuesday Sherman-Denison Herald-Democrat. I assume that the B had classys as well as sports.

Well, dunno what display ads, besides display classifieds, might have been in that B section. But, there were none in that A section. Oof. And, no AP or other wire; inside was a bunch of "staff report" stuff that wasn't local, and mainly wasn't from any of its Texoma-area feeders, but wasn't Texas Tribune, either. I suspect it was from other dailies owned by GateHouse plus content mill stuff produced at CrapHouse HQ.

Gatehouse-Gannett merging — maybe

Just wow. Here's the company announcement, here's Ken Doctor's initial take at Nieman, and here's his follow-up analysis, complete with the "maybe" becoming more serious now that Alden Global Capital, owner of Digital First Media, aka Dead Fucking Media, apparently missed over Gannett's earlier rebuff of its takeover attempt, is spitting in the soup by allegedly taking a 9.4 percent stake in the new merger.

In his initial piece, Ken notes the two companies had become more comfortable with one another, and in the follow-up, that some sort of merger kind of fit both. Fortress Capital, still the de facto owner of Craphouse, was seeing its investment strategy run out of steam. A big acquisition helped. Gannett, kind of puttering around even before Alden's attempted takeover, probably could use a gray, if not totally white knight, and one further down the digital "transformation" road than it.

Later on, in talking to USA Today, Doctor says he thinks Alden might be looking at dumping its papers. Color me skeptical, with it's milking the Denver Post not for money for other papers, but for flailing and failing non-newspaper enterprises it owns. (Unless it thinks the last easy dollar has been milked out of that turnip.) Another angle, which I think more likely, is that Alden will do its best to cock-block this unless the combined company takes its papers off its hands.

And, where will they get that kind of money from, other than a potentially extortionate loan from Alden? So, Dead Fucking Media and Craphouse could have a dual between their hedge-fund owners, which would include Gannett being the piñata in a three-way bashing.

Now, the fallout?

First, Ken notes, the merged company (assuming federal approval) has to raise money to pay off loans.

Some of that comes through making two HQs into one. Some comes through whacking middle managers, especially, it seems, at Gannett.

Update, Oct. 9: Doctor has details on the chainsaw side. Expect a 10 percent jobs cut; he notes 3K lost jobs would equal McClatchy's entire workforce.

Advertising, production, finance and circulation will take most of the cuts.

No surprise, in various ways.

• Advertising? I'd joked about CrapHouse having the idea of centralized programmatic ad sales. Might not be a joke now.
• Production? Most of Gannett's copy editors and graphic artists will be told to apply for jobs at CrapHouse design hubs.
• Finance? Centralized billing, which will surely get fucked up. CrapHouse may, at this size, make its collections all in-house. (And then peddle that as a service to other papers.)
• Circulation? Dunno how much actual savings is there, but stand by.

Back to the initial story.

And some will come from selling semi-orphan papers and concentrating on areas where one or both chains are already somewhat clustered.

Ken lists Florida, Wisconsin and Ohio. I see that.

But, why he missed Texas, I don't know. Gannett already had a number of properties here after its Journal-Sentinel takeover. Gatehouse, ditto, even before the Statesman buy in Austin. Combined, they'll own every 7-day west of I-35 except Plainview, Midland and Odessa. They'll have several five-day and six-days in North Central and West Central Texas.

Hearst owns Midland and Plainview. Dunno if it will sell or not. AIM Texas Media owns Odessa; all of its other papers are in the Valley. Would they swap Odessa, and maybe a little cash, for Alice? Would they sell out entirely, to the new chain owning Alice and Corpus now? Would Hearst swap Midland, or Midland and Plainview for Corpus, which would let it cluster more than now in Gulf Coast (plus San Antonio) Texas?

Finally, which of the two corporate cultures (assuming Alden remains spurned) wins out? Read Ken for that. But let me offer some thoughts, too.

First, the Gatehouse takeover of the Statesman was such a shocker because their MO had been community dailies and non-dailies before that. (IMO, this also shows that, for whatever reasons, Cox had become desperate to unload the Stateless.)

Gannett, on the other hand, is still a "big dailies" type of company. Those seven-day dailies in Texas? All but Austin are Gatehouse properties, though it does own a few five and six-day dailies of decent size (Sherman-Denison the biggest).

Those different focuses will be difficult to merge, themselves. And if Alden wedges its way in, more difficult yet.

As for the cost-cutting? It will be middle managers more than top brass, even with the two HQs merging. They'll get their own on golden parachutes. And, although things have changed somewhat since 2007, big newspaper chains still get their own off the top.

As for whether this will "work"? From Deano Singleton's stupidity on the "TV Model" to AP being run earlier this decade by a bunch of CEO failures doing more stupidity, and the AP further prostituting itself more recently, it's hard to say.

More thoughts of mine on pagination hubs here.

For you the employee?

Given that Craphouse has had its design shop for years, and from what I know, it sucking about as bad as Granite Newspapers' small one sucked (and yes, I believe it was done to spin off Gatehouse), if you're a graphic artist, you'll lose your job. You may be given "first-in-line" status to apply for the new (and lower paying) ones that Craphouse will create in Austin, but that's it.

Given that Craphouse was aggressive enough on expanding its pagination shop to take on the Snooze on contract even before buying the Stateless, the same's going to happen to you as a copy editor. On, and their layout is get-it-out-the-door crappy.

I assume Craphouse may create one or two other hubs in Ohio and Florida.

Oh, and insider pro tip? If you're a minority, and maybe also if you're a woman? At least as of a few years ago, you don't want to work for Craphouse's design hub.

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Sept. 28: The two companies say they have US regulatory approval; Craphouse adds that it's already been cutting jobs in anticipation.