WHAT is up with Hearst's transnational outsourcing? And Gannett's?

 In a previous post, I talked about interviewing for Hearst's job as ME at its Midland, Texas paper.

Either the first or second interviewer mentioned they currently print in Mexico, and I'm tackling that in more detail.

I didn't think to ask him about printing in El Paso with the Times. Duck Duck Go's search says its been printed in Juarez for five years now.

OK, Lubbock? 

ALL of Gannett's West Texas papers — Lubbock, Amarillo, Wichita Falls, San Angelo and Abilene as well as El Paso, are now in Juarez.

Is Midland there? Well, at this point, Duck Duck Go's AI had a big old fail versus a humanoid from Hearst. It claims the MRT is still local.

Google actually did better. It said the MRT went to Lubbock in 2018. So, it's now in Juarez.

Question for Hearst: Since you now own the Snooze, which is still printed in the Metromess, have you thought of moving? (Shudder the thought, but would Hearst send the Snooze down to Houston? Doubly shudder the thought, but would Hearst send it to Juarez?)

Second question: How much are you saving? Ditto for Gannett? Since Hearst is privately traded, this is hard to know.

Third, without stereotyping, this IS Juarez. Even if you fly finished papers to your various sites, both Hearst and Gannett, it still takes trucks to get to the airport, whether that in Juarez or that in El Paso. Have you worried, or thought in any way, about hijackings? (I presume Hearst's other West Texas offings — Canyon, Plainview, Muleshoe — are also printed in Juarez.)

Fourth, in terms of staff trust, which is in the crapper for sure at Craphouse, the tail that wags the dog of Gannett, I'm sorry, "USA Today Co.," do you even care what this does to morale or perceptions of integrity? In a sense, that's even more true for Hearst, which is privately owned and not under the thumb of vulture capitalism debt. 

Sidebar: Neither Google nor DDG would tell me where the OA is printed. 

On Hearst's overall profitability? Wiki notes that it long ago got a 20 percent stake in Red Satan ESPN and still holds that, and that for the overall company, beyond newspapers and mags, this is probably a major income source. 

In addition, as I already thought in the back of my mind six years ago, when my current newspapers' owner moved from a local printing plant to one he owned, but 200 miles away — or even before that, as I pondered when I first realized that here in Texas, Jim Moser was becoming more and more the king of  long-distance printing ...

What happens when continually high gas prices kneecap you? Like COVID, on the flip side of 99 cent gasoline to 3.99 gasoline? (I'm including diesel and jet fuel.)

Who knows how long Trump will refuse to admit he fucked up (and that he lied about negotiations) on the Iran war? 

Another reason not to like the Houston Chronicle — a short-falling weather page

When I took my semi-forced move to lower East Texas in January, a friend of mine in the biz warmed be that if I thought editorials and columns at The Dallas Morning News were too conservative, I hadn’t seen nothing yet — that the Chron was often not much more than a right-wing whack job.

Well, whether it is that or not, I do, having perused an entire Chron for the first time while visiting a good friend in Houston for a convention, I see something else to bitch about.

How can it’s weather page not have Texas high and low temps from the previous day, let alone be missing national temperature extremes.

The Eagle, out of Bryan-College Station, I’ll give a pass on them for the same omission, but not the Chron.

God, is the Chron’s telemarketing persistent, or what?

Thank doorknobs for caller ID, so I can just refuse to answer the phone whenever a 713 area code shows up. Even the Dallas Symphony Orchestra wasn’t this persistently annoying.

I do NOT want you, Houston Chronicle. I get the BCS Eagle for free at work. Besides, from everything I know, you’re even more in the way of conservative whackjobs on the op-ed page than the Snooze is.