EnviroPolitics Blog

New owners for Gannett newspapers. Heavy influence in NJ, NY, PA, and DE

Editor’s Note: The Gannett newspaper chain, purchased this week by New Media Investment, but retaining its name, is an important provider of daily news to residents in New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware–and especially New Jersey. See the list of its holdings in these four states at the bottom of the following post.

Sections of a USA Today newspaper. GateHouse Media, a chain backed by an investment firm, announced that it is buying USA Today owner Gannett Co. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

Rick Edmonds is the media business analyst for Poynter

When GateHouse and its parent company, New Media Investment, completed the deal Monday to acquire Gannett, the expectation was that the GateHouse crew would be running the new company, instituting their systems across the board.

Not so fast.

Two of the top three executives of the merged company (to be called Gannett rather than GateHouse) are from Gannett, including a new operating CEO from outside the industry.

And now that the agreement is public, several executives who I respect tell me that they do not foresee scorched earth for the Gannett papers.

George Stanley, editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, one of Gannett’s largest and most decorated metros, wrote me in an email exchange:

“I tend to be optimistic because each new leadership team has placed a high value on doing great reporting that’s unavailable from other sources and worth the price of a subscription. They’ve encouraged us to continue to be us. Experienced, professional media executives will be in charge of the new Gannett, running it as an independent news company, seeking to build out a business model that supports the reporting of local news essential to our democracy. They’re saying the right things in a way that makes sense. They’re emphasizing the unique combination of national with local markets. They’re looking for growth and see consumer revenue — reader revenue — as a key growth area.”

Like other metro editors — including those at independent papers like the Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune and Seattle Times — Stanley said he thinks the Journal Sentinel is making good progress on its paid digital subscription base, which could be the cornerstone of stronger business results.

“We’ve learned — thanks to best practices shared by Lenfest, API, Poynter and our Table Stakes colleagues — how important it is to serve and gain that next generation of subscribers. Since we launched our digital circulation growth initiative two years ago, we’ve nearly tripled our digital subscriptions.

“Folks who say digital subscriptions will only work at the national level, due to the success of The (Washington) Post and (The New York) Times, aren’t considering how recently regional news organizations began focusing on growing them — we’re several years behind the Times and Post but on the same trajectory. The Boston Globe started from scratch a few years before us and now makes enough money through digital subscriptions to support one of the nation’s best regional newsrooms.”

Stanley stayed on when Gannett acquired the Journal Sentinel in April 2016. Its staff is now smaller than then, but the Journal Sentinel has not lost its investigative bite. Stanley also speaks with some authority for the industry as vice chair of the American Society of News Editors.

Another of my sources, a former editor who still keeps a close eye on the industry, emailed to suggest I should rethink my prediction in a piece Sunday evening that the Gannett executive team would be washed away.

New Media Investment chairman and CEO Mike Reed has the top job in the new company. But Gannett chief financial officer Alison Engel stays on (GateHouse’s CFO left abruptly in February). And a new Gannett hire, Paul Bascobert, will run the operating company for 250-plus dailies.

Bascobert has deep marketing and publishing experience earlier in his career at Bloomberg and Dow Jones, but not, as far as I can tell, in newspapers. His most recent job was as president of XO Group, a vertical for weddings, which has also operated as The Knot.

I have not been able to schedule an interview with Bascobert (or other busy top execs), but his background fits with a digital transition push and may be a particular match to USA Today sports verticals and others at both companies.

The new company’s choices for other slots on the top management team have not yet been announced. But it may be if Gannett is stronger in a given function, its managers will be assigned the lead.

In writing about completion of the deal yesterday, I failed to mention the financing, including a $1.79 billion loan from Apollo Global Management, a private equity fund, at (ouch) 11.5% interest. Even with the $300 million a year savings Reed expects, interest and principal will be formidable to pay down, while simultaneously reserving capital to invest in new digital revenue streams.

Other big qualifiers for the likely success of the deal would be that both companies reported Monday yet another quarter of deep revenue losses.

Wall Street did not stand up and cheer for the merger, either. New Media shares were down 18.6% for the day and Gannett’s down 7.6%.

_____________________________________________________________________

Gannett’s holdings include:

New Jersey

New York

Press & Sun-Bulletin, Binghamton
Star-Gazette, Elmira
The Ithaca Journal
Poughkeepsie Journal
Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester (original flagship newspaper)
The Journal News, Westchester County

Pennsylvania

Delaware

The News Journal, Wilmington

Don’t miss stories like this Click to receive free updates

New owners for Gannett newspapers. Heavy influence in NJ, NY, PA, and DE Read More »

A free copy of today’s EnviroPolitics, the premier source for energy and environment news in NJ, PA, NY, DE, and beyond, is waiting for you

Our daily subscription newsletter is read by leading environmental attorneys, engineers, consultants, business leaders, organizations and people like you who want to stay current with everything that’s happening in energy and environmental issues at the local, state and federal levels.

Click here for your free copy of today’s issue — April 7, 2021

If you like what you see, take advantage of a very special offer–an entire month of EnviroPolitics absolutely free.

Click here to start your free trial subscription. No obligation.

A free copy of today’s EnviroPolitics, the premier source for energy and environment news in NJ, PA, NY, DE, and beyond, is waiting for you Read More »

Give a dam about this beaver spotted swimming in the Hudson River

Jen Chung reports for the Gothamist

Beaver in the Hudson River RALPH STONE / COURTESY OF WEST SIDE RAG

Twelve years ago, when a beaver was discovered in the Bronx River, it was a big deal because it was the first one spotted in NYC in 200 years. Now, beavers are apparently moving further downtown—because one has been discovered swimming in the Hudson River near the Upper West Side on Monday morning.

West Side Rag reported that a man walking his dog in Riverside Park noticed the beaver in the river around 71st Street, just north of Pier I. They wrote, “Ralph Stone took the photos… just after 10 a.m. as he walked his dog. He said he’s never seen beavers before in the area.”

New York City was essentially built on the back of the beaver, as beavers were plentiful in colonial New York and the fur trade fueled the city’s growth (the beaver is on the New York City’s seal). From the city’s wildlife site:

Overtrapping, deforestation, and habitat loss caused by New York’s rapid growth led to a sharp decline in their local populations over the decades. Just two centuries after European settlers first arrived, the number of beavers in New York State fell from an estimated 60 million to almost none at all. However, efforts in the early 1900s to reintroduce beavers by releasing them in the Adirondacks have been largely successful. By 1924, upstate beaver populations were thriving again. And in 2007 a beaver was spotted in the Bronx River, marking the first beaver sighting in New York City in over 200 years. Beavers are now present on Staten Island as well, and have been spotted in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The beaver is also the official New York State animal, “To provide beaver pelts to European markets in the early 1600s, fur traders settled near the present capital, Albany, to trade with Indians.”

*Beaver in the Hudson River (Ralph Stone / Courtesy of West Side Rag)*

While many consider beavers pests, because they love to chomp on trees, they have also been called an “essential ecosystem engineer,” because they can, according to a 2008 study, “create ponds and stimulate growth of diverse streamside vegetation critical for birds, including many migratory songbirds in decline.” In Washington State, a project relocated “problem beavers” to new areas to help restore the upper Yakima River Basin.

Anyway, yet another reason to rejoice in the revival of wildlife in the Hudson!

Update: The beaver was spotted in the Hudson by 59th Street just before 2 p.m.

Like this? Click to receive free updates

Give a dam about this beaver spotted swimming in the Hudson River Read More »

First legal hemp crop in Alabama growing well, near harvest, farmers report

Fran Summerlin checks the hemp crop with her two dogs. A five-acre hemp field grows at the base of Chandler Mountain. This is the first year farmers can legally grow hemp in Alabama.
(Joe Songer | jsonger@al.com).

Greg Garrison reports for al.com

One of the first industrial hemp fields planted in Alabama in mid-May, just below Chandler Mountain in St. Clair County, has an herbal scent, almost like a hint of basil.

Its neat rows of mostly thriving plants range from two feet to four feet tall. They appear almost jolly.

“It looks like a field of 3-foot-tall Christmas trees,” said Ed Glaze, who oversaw the planting of the crop. “They look very cute.”

Fran Summerlin, owns the former horse farm that now has a five-acre hemp field, walks through the rows with her dogs, Zella and Zeke. Deer prints are evident in the dirt between the plants, but there’s no evidence that they’ve eaten any of the leaves.

“Deer don’t like hemp,” Glaze said. “We can’t see where they have eaten anything.”

Nor have bugs noticeably bothered the plants. No pesticides are allowed on the hemp.

“We’ve had no issues with pests,” Summerlin said.

The hemp farmers are more than halfway through the growing season for the first legal crop of industrial hemp, which looks like marijuana but is a species of cannabis that lacks anything but the tiniest trace amounts of THC, the psychoactive ingredient that gets people high.

They are farming hemp for CBD oil, or cannabidiol, which is purported to have a variety of positive health effects and is now widely legal.

Glaze and Summerlin are learning to grow their first crop. Many of the farmers across the state who have been licensed to grow hemp are experienced at growing cotton, soybean and other crops.

“We’ve got some really good farmers in the program that we know can grow anything,” said Alabama Department of Agriculture Commissioner Rick Pate.

“I think people seem pretty pleased,” Pate said. “Most of them think they’ll have a crop. There are smart people hoping they can make a little money. With CBD oil taking off, there are plenty of people wanting to buy it.”

Read the full story

First legal hemp crop in Alabama growing well, near harvest, farmers report Read More »

Recycling is the topic of the NJ Senate and Assembly environment panels’ joint summer hearing

Joint Senate and Assembly environmental committees’ summer hearing in 2018.

By Frank Brill, EnviroPolitics Editor

A trivia question for you fellow-followers of environmental issues in the New Jersey Legislature: How many years have the Senate and Assembly environmental committees been holding their joint summer hearing at the Jersey Shore?

My guess would have been seven. It turns out I wasn’t even close. The first joint hearing took place in August of 2008 in Toms River.

Our official source? Veteran Office of Legislative Services aide Carrie Anne Calvo-Hahn who just happens to have a file on her desk containing every single agenda for those get-togethers.

Carrie Anne also can tell you what the subject was for each. Among them were: Barnegat Bay protection, the state’s energy master plan, beach access, and plastic bag recycling.

This year’s focus will be the broader topic of recycling, as in what impact China’s import ban on U.S. recyclables has had on New Jersey county and municipal recycling programs, and how the state might help to stabilize the disruption and stimulate markets for recyclable materials and recycled products.

The hearing is scheduled to run from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, August 15, in the LMH Room, Toms River Municipal Complex, 33 Washington Street, Toms River, NJ.

See you there?

***Like this? Click here to receive free updates***

Recycling is the topic of the NJ Senate and Assembly environment panels’ joint summer hearing Read More »

Where are the salmon and the orcas? Tribe, scientists grapple with their unprecedented disappearance

*| Lummi Nation spiritualist Richard Solomon offers a prayer for the southern-resident orcas on a private beach in the San Juan… (Alan Berner / The Seattle Times)*

By Lynda V. Mapes Seattle Times environment reporter

ABOARD THE LENGESOT IN THE SALISH SEA — The tote was loaded and full of water, the cedar boughs cut and stacked on deck. But as Lummi tribal members headed out on their traditional waters to offer a ceremonial feeding of live chinook salmon to the endangered southern-resident killer whales, neither whale nor fish was anywhere to be found.

Tuesday marks a month since the southern residents were last seen in their usual home waters in and around the San Juan Islands. Usually, present nearly every day at this time of year, the orcas have shown up only a handful of times this year, and then, only for brief visits before quickly leaving again for waters of the outer coast.

In this historic summer of unthinkables, day after day is passing without the orcas and fish that normally enliven the waters of the inland Salish Sea.

Meanwhile, the chinook runs to the Fraser River the whales are usually hunting in their ancient foraging grounds have cratered. And on a recent weekday on the waters of northern Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands, but for a cluster of oil tankers staging offshore from the refineries in and around Cherry Point, the waters were quiet and still.

“Do you have any fish?” Raynell Morris asked on her cellphone, calling one fisherman after another from the boat. Senior policy adviser in the Sovereignty and Treaty Protection Office of the Lummi Indian Business Council, she and other Lummi tribal members normally would have loaded the tote with fish for the whales before heading out. But with no fish to be had at home, they decided to chance getting some from fishermen as they were out on the water.

As she dialed, Richard Solomon prepared. A spiritualist for the Lummi Nation, his prayers were to be offered along with the fish for J17, a matriarch of the southern residents not yet seen this spring or summer, and feared dead. And for K25, also missing. And for the extended family of the southern residents, or in the Lummi language, qwel lhol mech ten: the people who live under the sea.

After hours of searching for whales and fish, the Lummi decided to offer what they could.

Kurt Russo, a strategist with Lummi Nation Sovereignty and Treaty Protection, carries cedar boughs to be used in prayer as Lummi Natural Resource Enforcement Officer Aaron Hillaire ties up the boat. (Alan Berner / The Seattle Times)

Aaron Hillaire, of the Lummi Nation, docked the tribal police boat used for the voyage at an ancient Lummi village site in the San Juans, dating back more than 4,000 years. Solomon had painted his face for spiritual protection. An ermine skin flashed white from his cedar hat. Morris, carrying the cedar boughs, followed him as he walked ashore.

Solomon stopped and rinsed his face with cool, clean water. On the way to the village site, he suddenly stopped again, and plucked ripe blackberries, fat and succulent. He held onto them though, without eating a one.

Then Morris and Solomon walked down the beach to the water’s edge, where with song and prayer, they offered the berries, floated on cedar boughs, to the whales.

Lummi spiritualist Richard Solomon wears weavings made by Lummi hereditary chief Bill James. (Alan Berner / The Seattle Times)

Afterward, sitting amid driftwood logs on the beach, Solomon scooped up a heap of white shell fragments in his fisherman’s hands, still red from ceremonial paint. He held the shells, and their memories. They had calved off from an archaeological deposit called a shell midden: bits of shell and bone left in the ground from cooking. The midden was layered in white bands in the ground stacked head-high along the shore.

As he walked back to the boat, Solomon paused, looking out over the cove, and sang his grandmother’s song. She had grown up here. It felt so good to be back, he said, with the memories of this place. “This is when we get to time travel,” he said, still holding the shells, pouring them slowly, carefully, from one palm to the other. They made a soft rattling sound.

Ken Balcomb, of the Center for Whale Research, keeps the official count of southern residents, and usually announces the whales born and died since the previous July. But for scientists, too, it is a summer so far without precedent. Research scheduled for summer encounters with the whales has been impossible to conduct.

Balcomb said he would go out in search of the southern residents to take stock if they haven’t come home by mid-August, when Canadian scientists end their field season. Those researchers have recently been seeing the southern residents on the west side of Vancouver Island, he said. L pod was even seen off the coast of California, in Monterey Bay in April, searching for fish.

Morris said she was not yet ready to call the offering the Lummi made for J17 and K25 a memorial. But she knows their family is in trouble.

“We are here for them, and all the whale people,” Morris said. “Famine; there is no word in Lummi for what is happening.”

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2515 or lmapes@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @LyndaVMapes. Lynda specializes in coverage of the environment, natural history, and Native American tribes.

Like this? Click to receive free updates

Where are the salmon and the orcas? Tribe, scientists grapple with their unprecedented disappearance Read More »