Newspapers should be about more than profit
Corporate greed has just found a new partner – GateHouse Media. In the April issue of the Community Word, one of the lead stories was headlined: “GateHouse to Peoria Newsroom: You Don’t Deserve Your Salary.”
That’s outrageous, but you won’t see more about that in the Peoria Journal Star for obvious reasons.
Journalism is a very necessary profession for a free society. That’s how the public learns about the news stories that affect our world, state and community.
GateHouse Media owns not only the Peoria Journal Star, but also the Springfield State Journal-Register along with a number of other papers. The (Community Word) article offered a glimpse into the world of corporate greed. In Springfield, GateHouse employees have gone without a salary increase for eight years. That’s outrageous, but it gets better. They want to make starting pay for full-time newsroom employees $13 per hour and part-time employees $11 per hour. That’s not far from McDonald kind of wages.
What’s happening in Springfield will happen in Peoria. You can bet on it. Since GateHouse purchased the Peoria Journal Star in 2007, it has eliminated 60 percent of newsroom jobs, cut the size of the paper and reduced community coverage, but increased the price of the paper. The result is that newsroom staff is over-worked and spread too thin for adequate local coverage. It’s a well-established business principle: profits before people. That’s the new business reality, and GateHouse exemplifies that very well. It’s all about profits.
The Journal Star is currently composed of multiple profit centers – commercial advertising, classified advertising, commercial inserts, obituaries, etc. and GateHouse is looking for more. GateHouse is by no means the only example of corporate greed. In the corporate world, the “bean counters” are never satisfied. They always demand more. And so it is. It looks like the Journal Star will be entering a sad and unchartered chapter of its corporate history. One thing for sure, that will affect all of its readers. Sad. Very sad.
Bill O’Brien
Peoria