The Everett Herald was sold with its parent company to a Mississippi news conglomerate in March 2024.
That company, Carpenter Media Group, promptly laid off over half of the paper’s newsroom staff (read story here and watch video below). Herald news staff formed a union in 2022 and had been trying to negotiate a contract when their employer was sold from under them.
When they wrote a news story about their own layoffs, the new owner censored it, and pasted in a self-serving public relations statement (see that story here).
I don’t know what the economics are at the Everett Herald, whether it was losing money, or the staff cuts are a strategy to fatten profits. I do know two things: Carpenter has been targeting Pacific Northwest newspapers, recently acquiring an Oregon newspaper chain from its elderly owner (see that story here), and newspapers are struggling across the board. Many other newsrooms have suffered brutal cost-cutting.
The community’s need for professional journalism and unbiased reporting is as great as ever; it’s the business model that’s failing. Newspapers used to be filled with classified and display ads from local businesses and people selling stuff, but most of that advertising revenue is gone now, and subscriptions and newsstand sales also are declining (see article here), as more people prefer to get news from the internet.
Or they don’t trust professionally gathered news, and patronize partisan propaganda instead. Do we have a dumber and less informed country now? I don’t know, it often seems so, but I’m sure of this: It’s a much noisier one.