Gannett Riffs 400 Jobs

Gannett CEO Mike Reed told staff in a companywide Q&A session Wednesday that Gannett laid off 3% of its U.S. workforce, or roughly 400 employees, in August, according to Poynter.org citing three people who attended the meeting.

The announcement comes more than two weeks after Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain with more than 200 papers, executed a round of layoffs starting Aug. 12. Though employees and reporters had repeatedly asked Gannett for information about the scope of the layoffs, the company declined to provide that information until now.

CFO Doug Horne, who was also present at the meeting, told staff that in addition to the layoffs, Gannett would not fill 400 open positions. Executives said the company slashed its marketing budget and made other non-payroll cost reductions, according to two people at the meeting. Gannett also reduced its executive team from 10 members to seven as part of a restructuring announced in June.

Spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton confirmed these announcements but declined to comment further on the meeting. She did not answer questions about who was affected by the layoffs or whether Gannett has more cuts planned for the near future.

The August layoffs started just a week after the company announced it had lost $54 million on revenues of $749 million during its second quarter. That day, Gannett Media president Maribel Perez Wadsworth told staff that the company would make “necessary but painful reductions to staffing.”

It remains unclear how many of the 400 layoffs were journalists and which newspapers and departments were affected.

In the days leading up to the layoffs, the Gannett caucus of the NewsGuild, which represents 1,500 journalists across more than 50 newsrooms, called on the company to reduce executive compensation instead of cutting jobs. They drew attention to the fact that Reed had been paid $7.7 million in 2021 while Gannett’s median salary was $48,419. Reed had also bought $1.2 million worth of Gannett stock, or 500,000 shares, immediately before the layoffs.