Telegram & Gazette striving after layoffs, succession of new owners

PHOTO/NATHAN FISKE Central Massachusetts' newspaper of record is continuing on through layoffs and several new owners.

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By Grant Welker

For a century, the Telegram & Gazette filled a four-story building overlooking Worcester City Hall with the typical bustle of a newsroom. First, the presses that churned out 125,000 copies a night closed in 1992, having relocated to Millbury. Then, by the time the newspaper left in 2012 to move across Worcester Common, the building was two-thirds empty.

T&G now takes up two floors of the Mercantile Center tower, but its name adorns the top of two sides of the building. That’s the newspaper today in many ways: reduced in scope but still very much a visible piece of the region.

“We can all see what’s happening at daily newspapers in this country, right?” said Michael Angelini, the chairman of the Worcester law firm Bowditch & Dewey, who tried brokering local ownership for the paper when it was for sale several years ago.

“We’re lucky to have a local newspaper, and I think we have to remember that in Worcester,” Angelini said.

The T&G has faced the same challenges as practically any other newspaper in the country: declining revenues from print subscriptions and advertisers, with online readership growing but not fast enough to offset those other declines. At a time of consolidation in the industry, it has seen many of its printing and editing jobs eliminated, and has closed regional bureaus.

No newspaper may be immune from industry challenges, even locally owned or nonprofit outlets, said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst with the Poynter Institute, which owns one such nonprofit itself, The Tampa Bay Times.

“Journalists don’t like to hear this, but when revenues go down as significantly as they have,” Edmonds said, “it’s pretty hard ... to hold the news side harmless.”

Quick succession of owners

The Telegram & Gazette has struggled with falling circulation to match its shrinking newsroom. In the last year, circulation fell in one year alone by 29 percent, to 33,154, according to annual filings by its parent company New Media Investment Group.

The T&G isn’t alone, of course. Weekday circulation in 2015 fell by an average of 7 percent nationwide, according to the Pew Research Center. But the Telegram has had to endure the tumultuous time for newspapers while also going through a succession of new owners.

The paper was locally owned until 1986, when three families who shared ownership sold to the publisher of The San Francisco Chronicle. At the time, the T&G had a cash-flow margin of nearly 30 percent and almost 800 employees, more than six times today’s number of 120.

By 2000, the T&G was sold to The New York Times Co. – for $296 million.

“Sale brings heady times to the T&G,” a column headline read in the Worcester paper about the sale.

The Times sold the T&G and The Boston Globe to Boston Red Sox owner John Henry in 2013 for a combined $70 million, but Henry appeared to have had little intention of keeping the Worcester paper long.

Henry sold the T&G eight months later to Florida-based Halifax Media Group – “Gallows humor, angst fill newsroom at the T&G,” a column headline said this time – which itself only kept the paper for seven months before selling to GateHouse, which later became New Media.

Now part of GateHouse

The newspaper remains one of the largest in Massachusetts and continues covering a broad swath of the region. In February, the paper won more than 30 awards from the New England Newspaper & Press Association.

The Telegram was just one of several major acquisitions in Massachusetts and Rhode Island in recent years by GateHouse. The company, which now has about 125 newspapers nationally, bought the Cape Cod Times, The Standard-Times of New Bedford and several weeklies in 2013 for $87 million, and The Providence Journal the following year for $46 million.

Consolidation of so many area papers under GateHouse has brought both cost savings and job losses. GateHouse’s nine daily newspapers and 108 weeklies in Massachusetts are printed at only two production facilities. Local jobs once responsible for editing and laying out newspaper stories for the next day’s edition are now done for most Massachusetts GateHouse papers at an Austin, Texas, office, creating common national, international, business or sports pages that the papers share.

T&G Publisher Paul Provost said the past two-plus years under GateHouse have brought stability to the paper.

"For the most part, we have really hit our stride in the most recent past," said Provost, who arrived in November 2015. Looking ahead, he said, "I wish I had a crystal ball. We have a very strong product line, and I think there's a lot of years left in this daily newspaper in particular."

Constrained circumstances

Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University and an author of a book on the modern journalism age, thinks the T&G is not better off under GateHouse.

The New York Times and Henry would have likely cut jobs in recent years, too, he said, but not likely as much as GateHouse, which is known for its cost-cutting.

“It’s hard to think of anyone that’s leaner,” said Kennedy, who is working as an unpaid advisor to the Worcester Sun, an online news outlet.

Cutting local production jobs and moving that work to Austin may have saved the T&G from having to cut local reporters, Kennedy said, but still shrunk the Worcester newsroom nonetheless.

James Dempsey, an arts and humanities instructor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, left the T&G as a columnist in 2001.

Dempsey said he first foresaw struggles for the print industry in 1986, when the Challenger shuttle exploded. With TV news covering the event, he said, he felt his column for the next day's paper was already obsolete.

“There was that, and of course the internet, and the great days of the provincial city paper were just about over," he said.