Trouble brewing at Gatehouse Media. Wrote about them earlier on with the Las Vegas newspaper scandal. Seems that their practices are not setting well with the Providence Newspaper Guild

An email distributed by the Providence Newspaper Guild points to continued cuts in the ProJo's staff, the outsourcing of Rhode Island jobs to other GateHouse offices, and a big increase in compensation received by GateHouse's top executive.

"While GateHouse boasts it’s sitting on $360 million in cash to buy more newspapers, and reserves the right to replace us with part-timers and temps, the hardworking ProJo staff has not been given a raise in 8 years and hasn’t had a contract in 1 ½ years," the Guild states in its email. "GateHouse CEO Kirk Davis was given a 129 percent raise last year, from $917,000 in 2014 to $2.1 million in 2015. Projo workers haven't had one since 2007 – and the same or more for our Brockton and Worcester units!"

...

The Guild email continued: "Journal advertisements are being built out of state and out of the country. Sending work elsewhere is hurting Rhode Island’s economy. We need more jobs, not fewer. A 'design center' in Texas is creating a product with more mistakes. Stories cut off in midstream. The wrong comics. Ads intended for other GateHouse papers for businesses we don’t have in our coverage area. Rhode Island deserves accuracy."

Interesting that the *design center* is in Texas. Outsourcing at all levels? More on that design center in Austin

At the time, GateHouse’s reputation was questionable enough already given the company’s penchant for buying up newspapers in bulk (the company’s goal now is to double the number of dailies it owns to 250 within three years), then squeezing them for profits by gutting their staffs and outsourcing design jobs to a central location in Austin, Texas, launched in 2014 by Arkin, the GateHouse senior vice president. (Mike Reed, the CEO of GateHouse parent New Media, has cited the investment in the design center as an example of how GateHouse is “doing more to further local journalism than any other company in the country” — the idea ostensibly being that the expertise and resources available there enhance the quality of local newspapers’ reporting. By 2014, Reed and Davis had been collecting six-figure bonuses for several years while leaving reporters without raises for seven years, forcing one to get a weekend job at McDonald’s.)

Does Gatehouse Media deliberately skew the newspaper towards favorable PR over realistic news? 

But in the time since, it appears that GateHouse still has a dubious interpretation of just what those industry-standard rules are. Earlier this month, exposing another brazen display of the company’s willingness to shrug off clear conflicts of interest, CommonWealth magazine revealed details about a bid proposal GateHouse submitted with the city of Quincy, Massachusetts, where it owns the Patriot Ledger newspaper, for the task of marketing the recently redeveloped downtown and presenting a positive image of the city in part by generating favorable media coverage for it. The bid, Quincy’s mayor told the magazine, was “absolutely not something the city would have entertained” because of the ethical conflicts that would arise if the city’s major newspaper and government marketing firm were owned by the same company — particularly because, in its bid proposal, GateHouse suggested that the city marketing contract would be used to deliver “measurable results” for the Patriot Ledger:

This expertise includes delivering measurable results for our partners in traditional media, digital media, and digital services as well as having considerable content generation serving The City of Quincy tourism, news, and business. Further, we have extensive knowledge and relationships within The City of Quincy and the surrounding communities that may be leveraged to achieve the desired results.

Is Gatehouse Media a house organ for the Chambers of Commerce of the world?

GateHouse’s websites are even more of a cluttered mess than the ones designed by Stephens, but Arkin, the GateHouse senior vice president, wrote last Thursday that his company was working on modern redesigns. “It’s important to try and fail because the old models of journalism just aren’t working,” he wrote. “We have to be innovative and learn — we have to develop new products, solutions and experiences that work for today’s readers.” Encouraging words, but words deserving of skepticism considering GateHouse’s recent track record.

Instead of out-of-state executives who play fast and loose with ethics to make a quick buck, perhaps what theTribune and other newspapers like it need are their own, more well-intentioned Sheldon Adelsons — benefactors with the resources to make enticing buyout offers, interested not in shady political power grabs but in quality, hard-nosed journalism fully managed within their own communities at a time when the continued decline of the industry has been diminishing the traditional role of local watchdog journalism. It’s an idea that has been discussed before in Ames, albeit probably fancifully.

GateHouse Media is the company that owns Glen Rose Reporter