With luck Gannett will avoid a buyout that ugly. If they’re knocking on the door, you should lock the deadbolt.” Times reporter Matt Pearce tweeted back when it was bidding for Gannett: “Digital First Media’s hedge fund owner slashes local newsrooms to the bone, soaks them for profits and then spends money on things that aren’t journalism. If Digital First ever got its hands on Gannett that would be disastrous. Why? Perhaps because Digital First has also had its eye on Gannett, but back in February Gannett’s board of directors rejected the buyout bid from the hedge fund that owns Digital First Media.

And GateHouse has a reputation for slashing staff even more aggressively than Gannett has.īut that deal may not go through, because MNG Enterprises, the owner of Digital First Media, has just purchased 9 percent of the stock of the parent company of GateHouse Media, with the apparent aim of trying to kill the merger with Gannett. That’s because Gannett is having financial problems which may force more cuts, and because it could be absorbed by GateHouse Media (under a merger plan where GateHouse would get slightly more stock - just over 50 percent - and thus control the new company). Still, that was a 25 percent reduction in staff, which is huge, and there is every reason to believe more cuts are to come. That may be because the JS has always rated near the top among newspapers in market penetration - the percent of residents subscribing to the newspaper - which makes it a slightly larger readership than its metro population might suggest. Today that’s down to 88 staff, a loss of 29 staff, not quite as bad as I predicted.

Back then the Journal Sentinel had 117 editorial staff (editors, writers, photo, design and online people). Looking at the staff count at other Gannett papers, and adjusting for market size, I predicted the Journal Sentinel would lose 35 to 40 editorial staff. Back in the fall of 2015, when the purchase of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel by the Gannett chain was announced, I predicted significant cuts for the newspaper under the new ownership.

Milwaukee journal sentinel