The latest round of cuts by Gannett, the parent company of The Desert Sun, didn’t surprise Christopher Damien.
But they infuriated him—and his colleagues as well.
“We’re angry,” said Damien, a Desert Sun reporter who serves as the unit chair of the Desert Sun NewsGuild, the newspaper’s newsroom union. “I really can’t sum it up any better way than that. … At a certain point, it’s both exhausting and enraging to just see corporate leadership just driving this thing right into the ground. And we’re pissed—and we’re doing something about it (by unionizing).”
The latest round of cuts, announced by CEO Mike Reed on Oct. 12, is brutal: Five mandated days of unpaid leave in December. Severance for “voluntary resignations.” A suspension of 401(k) matches, and more. All of this came just two months after Gannett laid off 400 employees—about 3 percent of the company’s workforce—and said another 400 open positions would not be filled, after the company announced a second-quarter loss of $54 million on revenues of $749 million.
Damien and his fellow NewsGuild members, however, are protected from these cuts. The union was born in December 2020, when newsroom employees filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board, following in the footsteps of newsroom employees at other newspapers, including The Arizona Republic in Phoenix. The union is still in the process of negotiating a contract with Gannett, and the NLRB shields union members from cuts during negotiations. However, the editors and non-newsroom employees at The Desert Sun are not union members.
“We were protected from this round of sacrifices, but our editors aren’t,” Damien said. “They’re going to be hit by all this stuff, and we think that’s unacceptable.”
Damien said Gannett has told union members they’ll have a contract by the end of the year, but that won’t change the fact that Gannett is in big trouble. The quarterly losses are bad—but the $1 billion-plus in debt that Gannett took on as the result of a 2019 merger with Gatehouse could be crippling, according to numerous industry analysts. Gannett reported it had paid down $55 million of that debt since June 30—largely by selling off real estate and other assets, and will be selling $65 million to $75 million in real estate and other assets to pay down more. (Gannett sold The Desert Sun building on Gene Autry Trail in 2021.)
While Gannett is selling off assets, laying off employees, and making life more difficult for its remaining employees, the company is paying its top executives handsomely. CEO Mike Reed earned a whopping $7.74 million in 2021, including a $900,000 salary, a $767,052 bonus, and a little more than $6 million in stock. CFO Doug Horne received more than $1.7 million in salary, bonuses and stock.
“These are the same guys that are getting us on a call—a last minute, less-than 15-minute meeting—a couple days ago and saying, ‘We need to make vast sacrifices for the well-being of this company,’” Damien said.
Damien said the primary goal of his union is to fight for the survival of The Desert Sun. Given how bleak Gannett’s situation looks, I asked Damien what kind of future he saw for the company.
“These guys (Reed and Horne) made this problem; these guys need to fix it,” he said. “You’re asking me what I think they should do to fix it. I don’t know. I’m not a corporate CEO; I’m a local news reporter. All I know is that they need to stop threatening local reporters, local news, and the integrity of our local democracies by driving us further into debt.”
Note: This is the editor’s note that appeared in the November 2022 print edition. Another version of this column was originally published online in the Oct. 17 Indy Digest.
As usual the rich are are getting richer and the poor are getting screwed. Just seeing the amount these jacks are getting makes me not want to even read the name Gannet much less spend a penny on anything they produce. #BOYCOTTGANNET