COMMENTARY: Despite years of cutting into democracy’s bones by decreasing news coverage in communities across the United States, a giant corporation that owns several newspapers in New Mexico still has room to cut staff, its leader suggests.
To be perfectly clear about my position: Gannett leader Michael E. Reed is wrong. He must know it. And his company’s history of chopping down local newspapers for profit is a real threat to the First Amendment and the society it is intended to protect.
But Reed and other top executives are paid millions to make cuts and spin those cuts to the public as positive. So he spews… what he spews. He told The New York Times that Gannett cares about “quality local journalism.” Gannett chief executive Paul Bascobert was quoted by The Times as saying the company’s mission “is to connect, protect and celebrate local communities.”
The comments come in the context of Gannett being folded into GateHouse Media to form the largest newspaper company in the nation, still called Gannett, in an effort to save $300 million — most of it, officials claim, not coming from laying off journalists.
Gannett is being managed, The Times reported, by Fortress Investment Group, a Manhattan-based private equity firm. And Fortress, The Times reported, is owned by the Tokyo conglomerate SoftBank. Gannett’s true mission is extracting money from communities for its shareholders. Selling us less news and information packaged as “quality local journalism” is a means to that end.
My experience working for a Gannett-owned newspaper, the Las Cruces Sun-News, is what motivated me to set out on my own and start NMPolitics.net in 2006.
I did some of my best work at the Sun-News. We responded to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by producing weeks of special editions full of local stories that aimed to help our community sort through how the world was changing.
I was given months to investigate corruption at the Las Cruces Public Schools. My reporting helped spark a recall of two school board members and the misdemeanor convictions in 2003 of five on violations of the state’s Open Meetings Act.
I spent months investigating problems in Doña Ana County government. My reporting led to a state audit that essentially confirmed our articles and led to improvements.
I had time, months, to research and write a series on child abuse in Doña Ana County after seven children died. That series helped this community make positive changes.
But by the time I departed in 2006, the newspaper had already made substantial cuts. We could no longer find the time for such projects. Things have continued declining since I left. Every time I thought the corporate overlords had cut the Sun-News’ staff to the bone and couldn’t do it again, they did it again.
Today’s Sun-News is still one of the better newspapers in New Mexico, which is a sad statement about newspapers in general. The Sun-News still employs strong journalists, but they lack the resources to do what we could 15 years ago. Those journalists find ways to cover some important stories, but daily reporting and watchdog journalism have suffered greatly. That’s something I still grieve.
Gannett is running reporters ragged until they burn out and leave journalism. In the meantime it’s pushing them to focus on what gets the most clicks and not providing the time or support to produce the quality journalism the company claims to want.
The problem isn’t just Gannett. A recent study from PEN America reports that more than 1,800 newspapers have closed in the last 15 years, leaving more than 3 million people in the United States without a local newspaper. More than 1,000 additional papers have become what the study calls “ghost newspapers” — those with “little original reporting.” The Pew Research Center reports that 25 percent of journalists in the United States were laid off between 2008 and 2018. Few newspapers in New Mexico, whether owned locally or by big corporations, have been spared by the news business’ transition from print to digital.
But the cuts have been especially deep at Gannett papers. Others in New Mexico include the Farmington Daily Times, Carlsbad Current Argus, Alamogordo Daily News, Deming Headlight, Ruidoso News and Silver City Sun-News. The nearby El Paso Times is also owned by Gannett.
Reed suggested most of Gannett’s pending cuts won’t come from newsrooms. Out of 24,000 people working in the company, he told The Times, “there’s about 2,500 that are actually writing stories every day.” That leaves a whole lot of wiggle room to do the same thing news corporations have done in the past: Say newsroom cuts will be minimal, then chop the hell out of newsrooms.
There aren’t enough reporters covering any New Mexico communities where Gannett operates. If there’s bloat, resources should be redirected there, not into cost savings. And there are lots of journalists besides reporters needed to produce quality journalism. Photographers. Videographers. Editors. Web and print designers. Plus other resources: Money for equipment, supplies, travel, public records and lawyers.
Strong journalism requires intentional planning, team collaboration, rigorous editing and money. It isn’t just making a couple of phone calls and writing a few hundred words.
Reed said Gannett reporters will have stories tracked to gauge output and reader interest. He suggested that could identify places to shift resources so the paper can “do more quality local journalism with the same amount of resources, potentially.”
If I’d had to meet story and click quotas during my time at the Sun-News, I couldn’t have devoted months to investigating child abuse deaths or government corruption.
The decline of local newspapers is a real threat to democracy. One recent study found that when local papers close, government costs rise. Government that isn’t being watchdogged by journalists is more likely to suffer from waste, fraud and abuse, so it costs more to borrow money. That cost is passed on to taxpayers. PEN America’s study found communities frayed and people seriously uninformed.
I’ve been frustrated in recent years to see the Sun-News lack the resources to cover Doña Ana County and the Las Cruces schools with the same tenacity I could in the early 2000s. Scandals that feel eerily familiar have dogged both local government agencies recently. I suspect the Sun-News’ limited capacity contributed to a climate that let local governments backslide.
I can’t think of a more tangible sign in these troubling times of how the oligarchy has eroded democratic systems than corporations buying local institutions that are designed to protect democracy and eviscerating them for profit.
PEN America’s study proposes expanded foundation and public financing to combat local journalism’s decline. Those ideas can help — Certainly, nonprofit news organizations like ProPublica and the Texas Tribune and publicly funded outlets like NPR make a difference.
Several years ago I raised money to start a nonprofit news organization, New Mexico In Depth, from scratch. Nonprofits provide important watchdog journalism. But they generally don’t fill the void created by declining newspapers.
Locally owned newspapers have a better chance of surviving in a form that defends democracy than corporate papers. That’s because decisions are made by people who understand their communities and profits can be re-invested instead of being sent off into the the abyss that is the oligarchy’s bank accounts. It’s because the people in charge care about the people they serve.
The Santa Fe New Mexican remains one of the strongest local newspapers around. Its publisher, after learning in the 1970s that selling to Gannett wasn’t all it was made out to be, fought an 11-year battle in court to take the newspaper back from the corporation — and won. The New Mexican has reinvested in its community by building a new printing press that prints other publications to supplement revenue. The newspaper is fiercely focused on improving Santa Fe and the surrounding communities and has spent its money toward that end.
The New Mexican is evidence that strong management, creative business ideas and stubborn loyalty to journalism can offset declining print readership and revenues.
We have other strong, locally owned newspapers in New Mexico, like the Albuquerque Journal, Rio Grande Sun in Española, Independent in Edgewood and Silver City Daily Press. We need to support these newspapers. Though they have their own flaws and challenges, they make a difference.
Communities should also look for opportunities to take newspapers back from corporations like Gannett. I’d like to see community organizing turn its focus toward activating people to fight for the news they need and deserve, whether it’s an effort to buy back a newspaper or pushing a corporation to invest more locally.
In the meantime, don’t stop supporting your corporate-owned newspapers. Subscribe and simultaneously push for change. Write to the corporate leaders in far-off states to demand that they put more resources into journalism in your community. Send letters to the editor to be published in the local newspapers or their competitors’ publications. Protest cuts.
The employees of the Gannett-owned Arizona Republic recently unionized. They’re now battling a company that is allegedly putting hurdles in their way in violation of federal law. Let’s support efforts to unionize in New Mexico if they happen.
And at New Mexico’s Gannett papers, there’s a bit of good news that requires your help. The Sun-News recently won a Report for America grant to help fund a new position — a journalist who will report for all the state’s Gannett papers on how school districts statewide are implementing a court mandate to increase efforts to help at-risk students. The grant requires that the Sun-News earn public help to fund a quarter of the job. When the paper asks, donate. This is an opportunity to support journalism that can make a real difference for our children.
We have a First Amendment and a free press for a reason. Though Thomas Jefferson said he’d prefer “newspapers without a government” to “government without newspapers,” we’re heading in the opposite direction. This road continues with us not knowing how bad the corruption becomes while the wealthy profit more and more off our ignorance, which they created. This road ends at the death of democracy.
We cannot let that happen.