Corporate Media Cuts At Gannett Affect Shasta County’s Record Searchlight

Editor’s Note: Shasta Scout supports the critically important work of ethical local journalists including those at the Record Searchlight who have been affected by corporate cuts at Gannett.

Shasta County’s historic print paper, the Record Searchlight, recently promoted two women into positions of increased leadership. Jenny Espino, the paper’s former Managing Editor, is now the paper’s Executive Editor while former Senior Reporter Michelle Chandler has been promoted to Managing Editor.

But alongside the visible promotions is a second change at the Record Searchlight. The loss of Chandler’s reporting role, which represents another cut to the Record Searchlight’s local reporting resources, which have declined significantly in recent years.

After both Record Searchlight and Gannett corporate staff declined to comment on staffing levels, Shasta Scout used an internet archiving website to review the changing contents of the paper’s staff information page over the last five years. 

Those records show that from 2018 to the present, the Record Searchlight’s reporting staff has shrunk substantially — from ten reporters to four.

2018 was also the year that the Record Searchlight’s former Executive Editor, Silas Lyons, received an expanded role at Gannett to provide editorial leadership for not just the Record Searchlight, but also three other small California Gannett-owned papers.

Since then, one of those papers, the Salinas Californian, has lost its last full-time reporter, although the paper continues to publish regional and national news that it accesses through the larger USA Today network. 

Two of the other papers Lyons has managed, the Visalia Delta-Times and Tulare Advance Register, maintain separate names and identities, but have operated as a single newsroom for some time due to their close proximity and shared coverage, a Gannett spokesperson told Shasta Scout by email.

That spokesperson emphasized that the four small papers Silas has managed have deep roots in the communities they serve and that Gannett remains committed to providing resources while relying on the larger network for coverage.

In other words, Gannett could someday choose to continue operating the Record Searchlight just as it now does the Salinas Californian, without any local reporters at all.

Gannett’s sharp cuts to local reporters, and the resulting loss of local news, are part of efforts by Gannett’s leaders to shore up profitability while paying off the company’s enormous debt.

In 2019, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, was acquired by America’s second-largest newspaper chain, Gatehouse Media, after that corporation’s owner, Fortress Investment Group, was bought out by a Japanese telecommunications corporation in 2017. The acquisition involved a high-interest $1.8B loan from private equity firm Apollo Global Management to the newly merged Gannett.

The Knight Foundation’s Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics, Penelope Muse Abernathy, wrote about how the changes illustrate the devastating effect of corporate buy-outs on public service journalism.

“The purchase of a U.S. newspaper chain by a Japanese company,” Abernathy wrote, “is emblematic of the dramatic and dizzying change in the industry in recent years. New ownership structures, backed by complex – and often opaque – financial transactions, have transformed family-centered media businesses into diversified, highly leveraged investment entities that prioritize shareholder return over producing all the news that’s fit to print or publish online.”

“New ownership structures, backed by complex – and often opaque – financial transactions, have transformed family-centered media businesses into diversified, highly leveraged investment entities that prioritize shareholder return over producing all the news that’s fit to print or publish online.”

Penelope Muse Abernathy

Since the merger, Gannett has reduced its U.S. staff by more than half and sold off almost a quarter of its daily and weekly papers in efforts to cut costs and repay debt on the Gatehouse buy-out. And Gannett has recently announced plans to sell off even more small local papers in attempts to focus their news production on metropolitan markets.

Gannett escalated its cost-cutting efforts in the last quarter of 2022. In October, Gannett paused hiring, suspended matching 401k contributions, and sought voluntary staff buy-outs. In November, the company cut another 200 news jobs. And in December, the corporation required all employees to take a week of unpaid leave.

This month, Gannett released its first quarter earnings report for 2023, which according to Gannett CEO Michael Reed, shows significant progress across the majority of the corporation’s key financial measures. Reed says he believes those results demonstrate the effectiveness of Gannett’s 2022 cost-cutting measures which were, he says, designed to “position the Company for long-term success.”

It’s a strong indication of what Gannett views as success when it comes to the business of local news.

While significant cuts in the numbers of reporting staff may increase the corporation’s profitability, those cuts also decrease the quality and quantity of local news production in communities across the United States, including Shasta County.

According to the California News Publisher Association, Lyons, who had been the paper’s executive editor since 2007, will remain with Gannett, based in Redding as the head of the corporation’s newly-opened Center for Community Journalism, an umbrella organization for Gannett’s small dailies and weeklies, including the Redding Record Searchlight.

A Gannett spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for further information about the Center.

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