Questions Linger for Gatehouse and Adelson as He Plumps Up Review-Journal Budget
The 100,000-circulation daily Las Vegas Review-Journal, seldom mentioned in national conversations, has gotten a lot of attention since casino magnate and Republican godfather Sheldon Adelson was revealed as the new owner of the paper in mid-December (“The new breed of newspaper mogul: On Adelson’s purchase of the Review-Journal”).
Now, in the wake of the appearance of a quick reckoning in the desert sands, the R-J is making news again. While it’s been reported that a new interim editor has been appointed and new set of newsroom reporting guidelines adopted (“Las Vegas Review-Journal names Glenn Cook interim editor”), it looks like the injection of few of billionaire ($25.2B in net worth) Adelson’s dollars may unexpectedly add juice to what has been a depleted newsroom.
While questions will linger about the longer-term impacts of Adelson’s ownership and of his association with Gatehouse management in “monitoring” judges actively involved in an Adelson court case, this week’s turn should receive its own share of attention.
The Review-Journal says it is planning to increase staffing by about 30 positions, and I’ve learned through confidential sources how they may be allocated.
First published at Politico New York
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More than one third of the positions appear to be editor and reporter vacancies that had gone unfilled. Cuts go back now to two owners ago. Long-time owner Stephens Media had cut jobs in preparation for the sale of the Review-Journal and the remainder of its dailies, a sale that occurred in March of last year when New Media Investment Group (Gatehouse’s now-formal name) bought all of Stephens’ dailies.
Says one insider, “When Stephens Media was preparing to sell the place, they emasculated it, from having fewer tons of paper on hand to freezing salaries. The worst part was cutting a number of editors and writers.”
Some positions will be allocated to a six-person investigative team, I’m told.
Then, the remainder would be allocated to recreate — within 120 days — a design and copy-desk operation. That creation — the opposite of what we are now seeing in so much centralized or regionalized cost-cutting programs — is particularly noteworthy.
The R-J’s copy desk had been cut to about six positions after Gatehouse bought the paper. Central to the burgeoning chain’s cost-cutting strategy to date has been the movement of page production to regional centers, with many experienced staffers cut at the papers themselves. The R-J’s work had been transferred to an Austin, Texas center. That center, in the words of one of several insiders who have been following its development, has hired designers “right out of college at $30K a year. They offered some of our laid off designers a job for half of what they were making.”
In Las Vegas, editors have kept an almost-daily log of how many errors have been caused out of the Austin operation, and figure that as much as three quarters of errors in publishing have been introduced out of the Austin operation. Gatehouse’s Pahrump (NV) Daily News has the same design as the Las Vegas Review-Journal, for instance. Says one staffer, “Gatehouse is trying to design almost 200 publications in one center with the same design. It’s the opposite of Gannett which has four design centers and strives to keep each paper’s individual design.”
Among those who have been critical of the centralized Gatehouse approach is publisher Jason Taylor. He’s made a point of the need for a major design since joining the paper in the spring. Taylor wanted to free the R-J from the design center — and now the sale aids him in doing that.
The word within the company: its larger paper publishers and editors want to be freed from the severe limitations of the high-profile Gatehouse strategy, a key principle Gatehouse leaders have talked about in how they will profitably manage their new acquisitions.
Ironically, freed of Gatehouse standardization and with some resources reallocated, is it possible the Las Vegas Review-Journal could become a better publication? Mark Fabiani, the crisis management expert and Las Vegas spokesman for Adelson, has compared — to derision — Adelson’s purchase of the Review-Journal to those of the billionaires Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post and John Henry of the Boston Globe.
Such a claim — even with this week’s movement — is triply hard for news watchers to accept. First, Adelson muddied the waters immediately, keeping his purchase secret, which, of course raised major suspicions. Second, the sketchy judge review reporting — still substantially unexplained at this date — makes it difficult to believe in a benign Adelson ownership. Thirdly, Adelson’s own partisanship and track record with the press can’t be ignored.
All that said, and remembered, we’ll watch to see how the new Review-Journal moves along. In hiring Glenn Cook as interim editor, new ownership and continuing publisher Taylor have opted to reward a leader who stood steadfast on principle in the first days of the Adelson affair. “Gutsy,” I called his Page One editorial explaining where the conservative R-J editorial page had differed with Adelson on various positions.
“Glenn is a very smart editor,” says one R-J newsroom source. “ He’s a right-wing hawk for an editorial page editor, but a very smart, deliberate editor. At 45, he looks like an old school basketball coach, but maybe that’s just his throwback crew cut. He’s a really good guy and well respected editor.”
If the R-J seems on a much better track, in the course of a week, Dave Butler deserves some credit for it. The new (as of October) Providence Journal editor is an old hand at dealing with a wide variety of headstrong publishers, including the legendary Dean Singleton, who built Media News Corp. Having just left the private-equity controlled Digital First Media, as overall editor and editor of the Mercury News, he’s a realist’s realist at knowing the many modern constraints of the news business.
Given his wide experience, he knew what an odd set of circumstances he had walked into when he entered the R-J newsroom on Monday, asked by Gatehouse corporate to help calm the waters.
“I was trying to get guidelines in place to protect good journalism, not to hinder it,” he told me, as he left town yesterday. Those guidelines, now published, aim to establish a wall between Adelson interests and R-J reporting. In principle, they are great principles, but the proof will be in their adherence. In this saga, much has been made about a publisher being able to review stories mentioning the paper before they are published, a stipulation that remains.
Contrary to how it may have been executed in the review and changing of R-J coverage of the sale itself, that kind of review has been fairly standard at newspaper companies throughout the years. It’s a sensible one, given newspapers’ dual business–audience concerns, but only if honestly implemented, with a tilt to fullest disclosure possible.
For now, the question that looms: Who exactly asked reporters in three states (Florida, Connecticut and Nevada) to monitor three Nevada judges, including one involved in noisy civil court case involving Adelson?
At staff meetings, co-led by Butler this week, staff pressed on that question, but didn’t get many answers. That staff — described by some as “emotionally wounded” by the weeks’ events — deserve kudos from industry peers for keeping up the pressure for overall disclosure, and for their reporting, since news of the sale broke.
On Monday, the Review-Journal disassociated itself with one person — Michael Schroeder — involved, and Schroeder himself apologized to his Connecticut readers. That removal doesn’t answer the question as to who ordered journalists to be used apparently to abet Adelson’s case in court. As a journalistic entity, Gatehouse must still answer that question. It’s at least an ethical one, but could also draw the attention of the feds if the term “judge monitoring” should be construed as “judge intimidation.”
Related: After Adelson, Review-Journal Moves to Repair Damage