What has Gannett wrought?
The country’s largest newspaper chain has already accomplished the unfathomable in Memphis. It’s made us look back to when E. W. Scripps Co. owned The Commercial Appeal as the newspaper’s glory days.
It is impossible to think of another corporation that has made a similar investment in our community that has shown such a callous disregard and lack of interest in learning about its new market and what the people who live in it would like to read.
Rather, it treats all of its markets’ distinctiveness as irrelevant, manhandling them for maximum profits on minimum news.
No One’s Laughing Now
There was a time when we all laughed at Gannett’s USA Today as McNews.
No one is laughing now that we’ve seen it up close and personal. It’s about applying a rigid business philosophy to homogenize news so it can be printed in all of its newspapers while cutting local news coverage to the bone.
After all, 40% of the workforce in its chain has been eliminated in seven year, and this week alone, Gannett eliminated about 30% of The Commercial Appeal’s staff. It’s no wonder it is America’s least loved chain. It’s reputation for high margins and low quality is well-deserved.
For example, within the last 30 days, there have been articles about Memphis as a passionate, even obsessive, sports city, so of course Gannett is cutting back sports coverage. In the morning newspaper delivered to your home or office, you’re unlikely to find coverage of the previous night’s Grizzlies or Tigers games.
There have been stories in recent weeks about our unique culture and creativity, so Gannett is devastating that coverage. Anyone with just a passing understanding of Memphis knows that we are unique and that we already resent the lack of responsiveness from politicians and the dismissive attitudes that Nashvillians have for our community, so Gannett puts real decision-making about our newspaper in Nashville.
Buzzwords and Buzzsaws
It was only a short time ago that Laura Hollingsworth was writing in The Tennessean as its president and publisher. Today, she is President, USA Today Network/Tennessee. It’s hard to imagine this structure bodes well for Memphis – and conclusive proof came this week.
As far as we know, she’s not even bothered to introduce herself to the Memphis business and civic leaders. But in bundling Tennessee cities into a homologous entity that more than anything displays a complete lack of knowledge about our state and its cities.
So far, Mrs. Hollingsworth has been noteworthy in her acclimation to Gannett’s traditional culture, long been known for its culture of fear and intimidation, and she has shown a proficiency for parroting talking points about innovation, thought leadership, virtual and ambient platforms, and urging her “team members” to be “comfortable with the uncomfortable.”
“I happen to be in an industry that used to be called the newspaper industry. I’m not sure we know what it’s called today,” said Ms. Hollingsworth. She says she has to make “tough decisions” and fire employees who resist change after working in newspapers “a long, long time.”
Following the Memphis massacre, she delivered a proud message of misdirection from the Ministry of Truth: “Today we underwent and completed a reduction in personnel in our news division in several of our Tennessee markets, as part of a transformative strategy for the USA TODAY NETWORK–Tennessee.”
And undoubtedly, she will now try to convince the survivors of the purge that they are her “team members.”
The Fatality List
Gone are 19 Memphians who printed The Commercial Appeal because that will now be done in Jackson, Tennessee.
Gone are copy editors who knew the nuances of Memphis names, street names, and facts, sacrificed as part of the sweeping moves to “right size” the CA as the design department moves to Nashville’s so-called design studio.
Gone are about 20 people this week whose names were synonymous with the newspaper itself, including reporters, a photog, and others who knew this community best.
Commercial Appeal publisher George Cogswell, on whom the axe fell early, said at the time: “The anxiety locally is that other folks will be handling our work who aren’t in the market. But at the end of the day, all that content first of all is generated here.”
These were Gannett’s alternative facts. First, there are fewer reporters to generate content for a shrunken news hole and the moving away so many key functions means that the new deadline for the Memphis paper (so it can be printed in Jackson and transported back here) is likely to be before the 10 o’clock news.
Turning Down The Light
All in all, it’s a strange concept. In order to sell more newspapers, Gannett drastically reduces news coverage. In order to sell more news, rather than prove greater value through a deeper dive into Memphis to address the decline in circulation, Gannett believes we will be moved to pay for news from cities sprinkled across Tennessee as far as 440 miles away. The business plan is to reduce local news to only a few pages, pad it with news from other Tennessee cities, and bulk it up to become USA Today-lite.
There was a time when The Commercial Appeal’s tagline: “Give light and the people will find their own way” was more than a slogan. It was an operating principle. It is now a historical footnote and nothing more.
Rather than offer up alternate realities, perhaps Ms. Hollingsworth should start by telling us how her “transformative strategy” will illuminate who we are as a people and how it will give a greater understanding of our community, its victories, and its challenges, and how it will do this in a handful of news pages every day.
Just What You’ve Been Wanting: More Knoxville News
Then again, we wonder that because Gannett now controls major newspapers in our state’s major MSAs, except for Chattanooga, it labors under the misapprehension that we are dying to know more about what’s going on in Knoxville. And vice versa.
Until they had purchased Tennessee’s largest newspapers, we suspect Gannett wasn’t aware that Memphis is as close to New Orleans as it is to Knoxville, and almost as close to Dallas, Chicago, or Kansas City. Come to think of it, Knoxville is about as close to Canada as to Memphis.
And yet, we suspect that Gannett will not be deterred from its “one size fits all” business plan has disrupted cities across the U.S. and injected a brand of journalistic Darwinism like it did at the The Tennesseans, where it pitted existing reporters, including its best known, against each other in what the Newspaper Guild accurately called a shabby, mean-spirited “Hunger Games.”
More importantly, at the exact time that we all need more light to find our own way, Gannett is the light by commoditizing the news and formularizing its collection and distribution. Even a decade ago, it had trouble saying it was in the newspaper business, preferring corporate-speak and saying it had “profit centers.”
“Old Reliable” Is But A Memory
While every business has to make its profits, the term, profit centers, says volumes about Gannett’s view of journalism. As a result, rather than spending more time and money to improve its newspapers, it instead drains excessive money out of its papers, resulting in a lack of hometown allegiance and more erosion of its circulation.
The result from a Gannett purchase has left long-time subscribers mocking the thin, amateurish product. We are about to see it for ourselves.
It conjures up memories of the death of the Memphis Press-Scimitar, which was on the front end of the wave of future. When it closed in 1983 by Scripps-Howard. Its circulation had dropped to 80,000, more than The Commercial Appeal today. Death followed Scripps-Howard reducing its news hole, moving up deadlines two hours for the delivered newspaper, cutting back the number of reporters, and accepting greater mediocrity in its product.
Looking back, Memphis would have been better served by hometown owners committed to the community and willing to plow profits back into the newspaper, possibly structured as a non-profit.
We Need More, Not Less
At any rate, we are where we are, and it is a troubling place.
There will some who will celebrate the decline of this 175-year-old newspaper, but they are short-sighted. The lack of an adequately staffed newspaper in a metro area of 1.3 million people has serious consequences, most notably in the kind of investigative reporting that uncovers political scandal and conflicts of interest and civic crises that need more light shone on them.
Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland’s communications guru and former Commercial Appeal reporter, Kyle Veazey, has seen journalism on both sides of the table and he is widely respected on both. Upon learning about the firings this week, he said: “City Halls need more good local journalism. Not less. A poorly informed public hurts us all.”
That is so true, and we are about to find out how much.
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This essay is right on, and leaves many of us with a dilemma. My first job was as a paper boy, delivering the morning “Richmond Times Dispatch” beginning at 4:30. Ever since I have subscribed to the local paper and read it voraciously. I’m tempted to cancel my subscription, but Kyle Veazey is right on target: Where would this city be without a good local paper? And who will be next? Waters? Beifuss? Calkins? Biggs? Not to mention a quality investigative team. I want…I need to support them. So my question is: How long do I keep subscribing?
Gannett is the absolute worst news company, if you dare to even call it news. It’s not just an issue in Memphis, it all across the country. They dominate in America’s newspapers and tv stations and the journalism is non existent. The Commercial Appeal which was not much better under previous owners. Times have changed and home city newspapers are a thing of the past. The only paper worth reading is The NY Times.
Great post. Could not agree more. 20 years ago I told someone that what Memphis needed was 1 Mayor and 2 newspapers (vs. 2 Mayors and 1 paper). I think we also have to give some credit to the Memphis Daily News–the only locally owned business paper in Memphis. I have been working in Memphis now for 30 years and over my career here, Memphis has become a “seller town”–We have sold off our most important corporate assets. Go back 20 years and look at the list of Memphis-owned publicly traded companies, large banks, financial institutions (Morgan-Keegan for example) and look how many SOLD. Holiday Inns…bought by BASS. All of our major banks–sold. When big companies gobble up Memphis-owned organizations, WE Memphians are the losers. Those decisions and all of that money walks right out of our city. So you see, its more than just journalism. Unfortunately, Memphis lost when it sold out to Gannett.
When I saw that their subscriptions were below that of the press-Scimitar at its closing, I shuddered, but was not surprised. Seriously, it’s just David Waters, Chris Herrington and the Sports Department as reasons to stay. When you give us less for more every day in an attempt to prop up unsustainable profit margins, how can you expect people to keep their subscriptions?
The real losers in this are The Commercial Appeal’s subscribers in Arkansas and North Mississippi. Those in West Memphis would now be better off with a subscription to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (still a great paper) than with a CA subscription.
As for coverage of North Mississippi, I thinks it’s safe to assume we’ve seen the last time a CA reporter will cover an Ole Miss game in Oxford. Instead they’ll continue to rely on content from The (Jackson) Clarion-Ledger — uh, I mean — The USA TODAY Network-Mississippi.
The sale to Gannett was a business transaction done only to increase size, scale, and most importantly profits. This has been the trend with all types of industries for decades. FedEx does the same with every acquisition they make. With a newspaper the impact can be more public. This isn’t a Memphis only problem, it’s happened for years in cities across the country. Gannett’s “formula” gives only scant local news coverage and no investigative journalism. Those days are long gone. The only thing that matters is the bottom line. R.I.P Commercial Appeal.
“Seriously, it’s just David Waters, Chris Herrington and the Sports Department as reasons to stay.” So true.
I say these guys break off from the CA. I’d pay a subscription for their work.
I cancelled my subscription over a year ago, and they started sending it to me free, haven’t paid for it in over a year. It’s free and it’s STILL a rip-off. Can’t wait until they finally hit me up to re-subscribe.
It’s a joke of a media company.
There’s been no real local news in the CA for years. Now all we get are USA Today Tennessee stories. I rarely ever see the print paper and when I last did us was so thin and had nothing except ads. The Daily News, Flyer and Business Journal are pretty much the same stuff – no news and mostly just press releases. The local tv stations news are crap and show only sensational crime stories and weather reports nonstop. No local investigative reports so our politicians get away with even more shady stuff than before. And so it goes. I’ll not miss the CA.
I know too many people at the CA to hope it fails. It’s a bad position. I want to cancel subscription to protect Gannett but don’t want to give them reasons to lay off any more people. They are better at extortion than journalism.
I told the Commercial Appeal for years they need to stop with the endless racism stories, and post some real news. They kept Wendi Thomas on board with free reign for a long time, engaging readers every week. Half of the county is Conservative and lives in the suburbs, but you attack their way of life every week in columns. Now, the Commercial Appeal just attacks our President all time, which turns alot of readers off. The CA shot itself in the foot by appeasing the Liberals of Memphis for too long. The problem is, many inner city Memphians don’t read a paper. Oh well, RIP CA.
Anon at 6:03—-You took the words out if my mouth. When it became so liberal, the people who paid for it , stopped. Let the liberals cry in their bed they made.
The demise of the CA means absolutely nothing to vast majority of the people who live in the city of Memphis. I’d wager most have not, or could not, even read a newspaper. Texting, Facebook, Snap Chat, You Tube and television are their sources for news and information.
The myth that the Commercial Appeal is liberal is one of those excuses right wingers give for their own stupidity.
Next time you gripe about all the crooks in government, don’t whine because the newspaper doesn’t have the staff to investigate.
The Implosion @ 495 actually began in 1992, a few months after the newspaper’s late-editor was killed by a drunk driver on New Year’s Eve.
The editor/replacement Uncle Scripps send in was the former caretaker of one of its defunct properties up North. He brought in yet another incompetent and together they ruled by staff intimidation and through yes-men, for the lack of any other learned or applied business management skills.
As a part of Uncle Scripps’ early-1990s restructuring, an extensive reader survey was undertaken by an outside media-research entity. The results were kept esoteric, as the internal-line-editor management was rearranged.
Some higher-paid employees (editors and reporting staff) were slowly eliminated as “cost-cutting” measures, combined with the planned elimination of Guild representation for many others.
Their failed-management tactics culminated with the buzz-word laden form letter that appeared within the Network’s digital outlets this week. And today management refers to consumer exposure in terms of “readership” as opposed to “paid circulation”. So you’ll still get what you paid for, from 495 – or a little-bit less.
Lol @ Frank saying the CA leaning towards the Liberal side is a myth. Why don’t you look at the editorials the CA post on Twitter… 90+% of the opinion pieces tweeted from the CA have a Liberal viewpoint. I told them for years they need to hire a Conservative writer to offset the Liberal opinion pieces, and their excuse was that the “letter to the editor” section has some. Ha! Sure, it does, but they don’t work for the CA with a weekly editorial. Keep your head in the sand, with the CA leadership, Frank.
I think the Gannett should let go a few more “writers”??? go.
The CA isn’t a liberal paper by any stretch. Here’s why: I have had several Republican and conservative people in Shelby County tell me with a straight face that a politician like Bob Dole or Lamar Alexander was a liberal. They really believe that. So what does that make Ted Cruz? A moderate?
There is a spectrum, and you righties don’t have the first clue as to where you stand along it.
The CA sucks, if anything, because it’s too CONSERVATIVE. Go get your news from Breitbart and Infowars, you Trump sucking morons. BTW, we’re taking that Russian stooge down.
With just a skeleton staff in Memphis, editorial control in Nashville, and printing in Jackson, one could correctly say that the CA is no longer the daily newspaper of record for Memphis. We really have no newspaper or respectable journalism here locally any longer. Another huge loss for this city and area.
Anonymous 12:54: You don’t know what liberal even is if you think the Commercial Appeal is. It’s moderate on its best day. If only it were liberal.
I went to work for The Memphis Publishing Co. when I was 15 years old and retired at 62 several years ago. 99 percent of my friends and co-workers are no longer there. It actually hurts to see what 495 Union has become. It has long been recognized that Memphis and Shelby County are more “related” to Eastern Arkansas, Northern Mississippi and the Bootheel of Missouri than middle or East Tennessee. This is not a local newspaper anymore. In years past the “newspaper family” at MPC would go to extreme means to get new subscriptions and keep the old ones. The new owners couldn’t care less. For years and years and years the management and work force were primarily locals or folks who were born and raised close enough to Memphis to know the area and it’s living style, it’s desires, it’s business atmosphere and the pulse of it’s citizens. That changed…..and before Gannett. Management teams were brought in from areas of the country that had absolutely NO idea about the Mid-South and rather than keep the traditions of one of the most profitable newspapers in the Scripps chain they proceeded to make editorial and business policy changes that evidently they brought with them from California and other areas that they deemed so much more “progressive” than
Memphis and the Mid-South. I lived through these changes, saw what was happening but still can’t believe the depth to which “The Old Reliable” has fallen. Sooooo…..today , Louis Graham, You are force-feeding your subscribers totally trivial news(?) relating to areas unimportant to them and obviously making very little effort to cover the news of local importance. From an old newspaper man…..it hurts but we are watching the death of a monumental part of Mid-South history.
There is an opportunity here.
The city needs quality current local news coverage to read. The new profit format is a website not affiliated with a paper. Anybody an entrepreneur and want to provide this service?
I remember when Memphis like many cities had two daily papers, the morning CA and the afternoon Press Scimitar. The CA was never great, but had really gone downhill during the last 20 years, long before Gannett ever bought it.
People just don’t read newspapers any more especially many younger kids who can barely read anything due to terrible public education. This is really true in Memphis.
Deterritorialization (French: déterritorialisation) is a concept created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972). The term “deterritorialization” first occurs in French psychoanalytic theory to refer, broadly, to the fluid, dissipated and schizophrenic nature of human subjectivity in contemporary capitalist cultures (Deleuze & Guatarri 1972). Its most common use, however, has been in relation to the process of cultural globalization. Though there are different inflections involved, the general implication that globalization needs to be understood in cultural-spatial terms as much as in institutional or political-economic ones is common to all accounts. In this broad sense, deterritorialization has affinities with the idea of the “disembedding” of social relations in, for example, Anthony Giddens’s (1990) analysis of the globalizing properties of modernity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterritorialization#Deterritorialization_and_reterritorialization
I do not read the newspaper, but my husband reads the paper edition from cover to cover. He will not read it online, but that has to do with age. Of the last week, we have not received a paper 3 different days. When I was finally able to talk to a real person, it seems that we have a temporary person delivering our paper. So I guess this is a sign of the times with Gannett. We WILL NOT continue with our subscription if this continues. I hope they’re happy with their profits when they have no subscribers.
Deterritorialization (French: déterritorialisation)? Please explain relevance. It sounds like really interesting relevance.
Things have come to a sad pass, indeed, when waiting for the next edition of the Memphis Flyer to come out is the only way to catch the local feel of local ‘news’.
Only reason I still subscribe is the puppies prefer the CA to ‘pee pads’, for some reason.
I’ll try, Frank.
An proto-example of deterritorialization is that Japanese people don’t wear kimonos as much as they used to. The link between traditional Japanese culture and the people in Japan has been weakened. An example of proto-reterritorialization is that Japanese men now commonly wear Western suits. A Deleuzian would argue that this symbolic re-encoding affects how the Japanese think and feel about themselves–for example, feeling more distant from their ancestors and their values but maybe as a part of the West or modern global business community. Whatever distinctions traditional garb signaled would be lost.
It seems to me that the replacement of Memphis news coverage with TN coverage is a similar transformation in which we are re-coded as Tennesseans instead of Memphians. What makes this change a full deterritorialization is that it is driven by changes within modern capitalism, communications technology, and the media. Relevant consequences, off the top of my head, are:
1) If changes at the CA are part of global processes first fully conceived forty plus years ago, then we can’t blame only local non-subscribers, the CA, Gannett, or even that cauldron of shame and infamy that is Nashville.
2) Other possible culprits include the Chicago School of Economics belief that companies exist solely to maximize shareholder value with no consideration for other stakeholders, e.g. readers or broader social ecosystems, i.e. city governance.
2.1) This narrow conception of value sounds like a problem with Gannett, but maybe also in news media anti-trust law and enforcement.
2.2) Here’s a really interesting article about similar issues in St. Louis: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/how-americas-coastal-cities-left-the-heartland-behind/478296/
3) Reterritorialization points to the fact that it’s not all bad. Yes, our sense of space may change, but it’s great that we can learn from other cities’ experiences like the Atlantic article above. I get BBC radio in my car and read the Washington Post on my phone. That gives me more information even if I can act on less of it or share it with a community.
What other consequences do you see?
Attn Tom Jones.
Love Bill Day’s cartoons but noticed that you still refer to him as a Memphian. He lives in Tallahassee now and was not born in Memphis so I think it’s incorrect to label him as a Memphian.
Homerhog, very well said indeed!
I still love Memphis and believe it is a wonderful city filled with wonderful people. After losing my job eight years ago, I struggled to stay afloat. With no work, I finally had to sell my house and move. I continue to follow everything happening in Memphis and find pleasure in reading that I’m a Memphian, perhaps as much as many who reside there. I hope Smart City Memphis keeps me.