🇨🇴 Hello From Colombia + Jobs Update ✍️✍️ — August 22
Apple, Amnesty, BBC, Bloomberg, ESPN, Hearst, NPR, Politico, Refinery29, Sky, The Guardian, VICE, Yahoo plus more Gannett layoffs thoughts
Hello folks, I’m into week two of my vacation and am now in Colombia. To say it feels like a dream to finally arrive in Bogotá would be an understatement. Partly because I’m on two shitty hours of aeroplane sleep in the past 36 hours, but also because I’m in love with so many things this country has to offer.
I’m talking about the incredible coffee, obviously, but also Colombia’s place as one of the oldest civilizations on earth, and of course my obsession with Carlos Vives and vallenato music. Today I’m off to visit a coffee farm in the famous valley of Salento, which is my first port of call since I missed out on a similar trip due to stupid food poisoning in Peru in January. Lots of pictures to come…
Until then, let’s get through some stuff. Last Monday’s newsletter included thoughts on the recent layoffs at Gannett, as well as some useful resources. In case you missed it, we’re offering all of our services — job board, candidate board, résumé/CV and cover letter help — free for 30 days for any former Gannett employees affected by the layoffs, or current Gannett employees that see the writing on the wall.
And the wonderful Kait Kokal has more than 100 people offering all types of aid and help. Fill out this form or get in touch with her to find out more.
The recent layoffs aren’t a one-off, and local journalism will be hit hard again in the future. There’s been plenty of great research and pieces written since the news, so we’ll go through the best I’ve seen.
Like so many daily newspapers in countries around the world, a group of large corporations own the majority of them. In the U.S., top 25 U.S. media companies own nearly 33% of all newspapers, up from 20% in 2004, according to the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Per the report, “since 2014, most of the 1,200 papers sold have been either family-owned enterprises, or small private regional chains.”
The gutting of reporters on the ground holding local and national politicians accountable by the institutions at the top isn’t new. These private and public firms’ number one aim is to make profit and will do whatever it takes to cut costs regardless of the human capital in their way. According to Pew Research Center, the number of full-time statehouse reporters at U.S. newspapers has declined 44% since 2003. That means there’s essentially on average only four reporters assigned to each of the 50 statehouses.
Throwing numbers around is easy, even if what the stats reveal is shocking. What I find harder is digesting stories of individual newspapers and livelihoods getting caught up in the storm.
In this piece for The Atlantic, former editor of The Aspen Times Andrew Travers details how the newspaper’s new corporate overlords, Ogden Newspapers, censored its own staff from reporting on a Russian billionaire and his links to corruption in one of the country’s richest cities.
Money isn’t the only factor in play here. How much can local newspapers whose staffs have been stripped to skeletons make anyway? Hardly enough for the private equity and investment firms swallowing them all up. This piece by The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins illustrates how Alden Global Capital, owner of the Chicago Tribune and more than 200 other dailies, quickly became the third largest newspaper company in the U.S., and gutted many of them along the way.
The effect that this intentional stripping of local communities of their democracy is having on overall democracy in the U.S. is real. In the U.S., soaring numbers of news deserts have sprung up and show no sign of slowing down.
As Coppins concludes, “The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.”
As contradictory as it sounds, we’ve added hundreds of new jobs to the board, with a snippet of them for you below. Access for free for seven days below, and be sure to spread the word of what we’re building if you can.
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