Local journalists at the Utica Observer-Dispatch and The Herkimer Times Telegram are currently in a fight for the preservation of local news and the negotiation of a fair contract against Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain.
On Jan. 30, The Utica News Guild held a virtual town hall to inform the community about how Gannett has harmed local news coverage since its 2019 merger with GateHouse Media. During the one-hour meeting, local journalists represented by The News Guild of New York, a labor union representing nearly 6,000 media professionals at New York news organizations, spoke about their experiences and the challenges they face under Gannett’s management.
In August 2019, the owner of the newspaper chain GateHouse Media announced their intention to merge with Gannett, the owner of USA Today and more than 100 other publications nationwide. In November 2019, the two merged in a $1.2 billion deal, creating the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. Since the merger, the total headcount of the company has decreased by approximately 59%. Gannett has eliminated 117 locally focused websites and cut 127 of its weekly newspapers according to regulatory filings.
Amy Roth, Health & Education Reporter for the Utica Observer-Dispatch, described the newsroom’s decline: “The vibrant newsroom I joined in 2005 is now covering a fragment of local news, running story after story from other non-local newspapers and failing to connect our readers to their community.”
“Gannett prefers maximizing its profits and paying huge salaries and bonuses to corporate bigwigs over giving us the resources we need to cover [the] community,” she continued.
Since the merger, Gannett has slashed local paper staffs of all reporters. Casey Pritchard, public safety reporter for the Utica Observer-Dispatch, pointed out that papers such as the Ohio Daily’s, the Ashland Times Gazette, The Alliance Review and the Port Clinton News Herald are all unstaffed.
The result has been an increase in so-called “ghost papers”––what New York Times reporter Marc Tracy defined as “thin versions of once robust publications put out by bare-bones staff” in a 2019 article about the merger.
“Gannett recycles homogenized news across the country, leaning into its USA Today content and giving readers the appearance of local news coverage, yet their communities are not covered at all,” Pritchard said.
Pritchard pointed to the growing number of Gannett-owned ghost papers by examining their recent news coverage. When looking at the Salinas Californian, Pritchard found four stories––three of which were from USA Today and one from the Associated Press. There were zero bylines about Salinas or Monterey County. The Port-Clinton News Herald in Ohio had three stories from the Vermont News Messenger and one from USA Today’s staff. None of the news coverage was about Port Clinton, Ohio. The Herkimer Times Telegram no longer has any staff. Content comes from USA Today and copied-over stories from the Observer-Dispatch.
“This is what Gannett does,” Pritchard said. “Smoke and mirrors designed to try to fool readers into thinking their communities are being covered.”
Gannett has even used artificial intelligence to cover local news. In August 2023, the newspaper chain experimented with an artificial intelligence tool to write high school sports stories published by the Columbus Dispatch. The tool produced content that was widely ridiculed for its repetitive structure, lack of details and incorrect uses of sports terminology.
Gannett CEO Mike Reed was given a total compensation last year of $3.9 million, a 14% increase from the previous year, according to the company’s annual proxy filing. Meanwhile, Gannett’s median employee compensation was $50,856, which fell by $179 last year as inflation rose 3.4% over the same period.
“In contract negotiation, members of the guild highlighted Gannett’s appallingly low, stagnant salaries for staff at the OD and how many on-staff can’t afford to live in the community they cover,” Pritchard said.
A journalist at the Observer-Dispatch with three decades of experience is receiving a salary of $33,000 a year. Meanwhile, a living salary for a family of two working adults with two children in Utica-Rome, New York is around $53,000, according to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator.
“We’re having a terrible time recruiting new reporters,” Roth said. “We’re also having a terrible time keeping reporters. And then when reporters leave, because of the salary, it can sometimes take years to fill the positions, or they end up cancelling the position, and we never get it hired.”
The Utica Observer-Dispatch has one education reporter covering 30 school districts, one sports reporter covering a two-county area, no business reporter, no staff producing content for opinion or editorial sections, and no coverage of restaurants or arts & entertainment.
“Executive salaries and bonuses certainly suggest that [Gannett] has chosen not to invest into the Utica newsroom,” said John Pitaressi ’70, who spent more than 43 years as a sports reporter and columnist for Utica newspapers. “This is an investment that would bring stability and experienced journalists, fill more positions and expand and improve coverage, which you would think would eventually lead to a product that is easier to sell,” Pitaressi said.
New York elected officials have come out in public support of the Utica News Guild. The union received a letter on Jan. 22 signed by members of the New York State Assembly and another letter more recently from the New York State Senate. The News Guild has filed numerous unfair labor practice charges against Gannett, and the National Labor Relations Board has found merit in many of them. Several of the News Guild’s charges are currently under investigation.
“At the beginning of the year, we took on this very same fight against the corporate media execs at Gannett in Rochester,” said Susan DeCarava, President of The News Guild of New York. “It was a fight that we eventually won with a contract. And we want to do the same thing here in Utica.”
“When you’re dealing with a company run by venture capitalists, if you don’t fight for proper journalism, no one else will,” Roth said. “And we didn’t get into this to do bad journalism or sloppy journalism or sponsored content. We got into this because we want to help our communities, and journalism, when done well, is an extraordinary way to do that.”
“Journalism is the only profession that’s mentioned in the Constitution as an integral part of our democracy,” DeCarava said. “And so there is a sacred trust that any media company has, whether or not they acknowledge it, that they must fulfill.”