Poynter reports the parent company of the Pensacola News Journal lost $54 million in its second quarter and is struggling to pay down more than $1 billion in debt from its 2019 merger with Gatehouse. The publishing company that owns more than 200 newspapers has reported it has paid down $55 million of the debt since June 30 and is selling $65 million in real estate and other assets.
Gannett’s stock price has fallen over 78% this past year, closing at $1.37 per share yesterday. The company has frozen overall hiring and is requiring employees to take one week of unpaid leave in December. It’s also seeking volunteers for buyouts, according to an email obtained by Poynter.
This summer, Gannett laid off 400 employees and eliminated 400 open positions. PNJ cartoonist Andy Marlette’s resignation last month may not have been completely of his own volition. He was the last editorial cartoonist on staff at any Gannett newspaper.
Thanks for saying this. People like Marlette are boring because they are predictable. Anything a Republican does is bad. Anything a Democratic does is good.
There is real local news out there, but you have to do more than regurgitate press releases. For example, what are Pensacola’s biggest attributes? Pensacola Beach and the Bays. What are its most threatened attributes? Pensacola Beach and the Bays. Southwest Florida has finally realized they have let their water be horribly polluted. We need to be proactive in preventing the same fate here.
I’m glad that Marlette is no longer writing nonsense about local issues he never took the time to understand. His fact-challenged columns reminded me of the crazy stuff that Shannon Nickinson used to pontificate about in the PNJ. She once described how she put together her columns saying that she just wrote whatever came into her head when she got up on the day her column was due. Carl Wernicke always had thoughtful columns carefully laying out his facts in support of his view. Even if I didn’t entirely agree, I understood how he had reached his position. What I don’t understand why Marlette as recently as this past Sunday is still listed as a member of the skeletal two-person editorial board? Does he still work for the PNJ in some secret way? In 2008, PNJ columnist Mark Obrien told me that what this city “needed” was a good daily newspaper that reported the news. He must have seen this coming. The Internet doesn’t have to be a death sentence for newspapers as described in a book I recently read by Stephen Shepard titled Deadlines And Disruptions: My Turbulent Path from Print to Digital. People tell me that the main reason they no longer subscribe to the PNJ is because it no longer has much local news and what it reports is too often wrong. Each October, the PNJ publishes a U.S. Postal Service notice about its circulation. In 2011, the average number of copies published for the past year had been 45,141. The announcement in the 10/6/22 issue has that number down to 10,955. Total paid distribution is down from 41,651 (2011) to 9,043 (2022).