The Salinas Californian is slashing its print schedule. What's next?

In April, then-Gannett Co. CEO Gracia Martore performed one of the more bizarre acts of modern corporate journalism. Maybe not as bizarre as former Tribune Co. executive Randy Michaels offering a waitress $100 to show him her tits in front of a group of high-level Trib employees, a story chronicled by the late, great New York Times media reporter David Carr. Maybe not as bizarre as Boston millionaire Aaron Kushner buying the OC Register, hiring more than 350 journalists to staff the expanded enterprise and then almost immediately tanking it.

But still, it’s up there.

During an internal team-building exercise recorded and then later broadcast to employees at a town hall meeting, she and other Gannett executives strapped on guitars and lip-synched to the tune of “Everything is Awesome,” from The LEGO Movie. The video features bad special effects, with confetti shooting in the air, mock explosions of the type you’d see at a hard-rock concert and actors ostensibly playing employees lined up in front of the stage dancing, waving their arms in the air and cheering.

“Everything is awesome. Everything is cool when you’re part of a team. Everything is awesome when you’re living out a dream. Everything is better when we stick together… ”

It’s not clear whether Martore knew it at the time, but as the video made its way through the blogosphere, media observers pointed out that in The LEGO Movie, “Everything is Awesome” is a propaganda anthem sung by an evil corporation.

On that day, though, maybe things were a little bit awesome at Gannett. The town hall happened as Gannett announced it had completed the spinoff of its broadcast and digital unit, comprising 46 television stations or cable networks and websites such as Cars.com and Career Builder, into a separate public company called Tegna. And – bonus! – it was taking the print side’s whopping $4.4 billion debt with it.

The new print side would still be called Gannett. Newly appointed CEO Robert Dickey, formerly president of the company’s U.S. community publishing division, would run it. Gannett would start with a clean slate money-wise (something institutional buyers like hedge funds might find attractive), but maybe it would also start with a new sense of mission, a confident one that print could indeed stand alone.

But that new sense of mission was turned on its ear on Aug. 26, when the Gannett-owned Salinas Californian, founded in 1871 as the Salinas Index (and believed to be the oldest continuously published paper in California), announced it was slashing its print schedule in half. It would go from six days a week, Monday-Saturday, to three days, with print editions coming on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday – favorite days for advertisers. The change will take place at the end of this month.

“We’re a 7-day digital news company that prints 3 days,” Californian Media Group President and Publisher Paula Goudreau wrote in an announcement that ran online that night. Goudreau, a former Comcast sales manager, also runs the Times Delta Media Group, comprising the Visalia Times-Delta and Tulare Advance-Register; the three papers also share an executive editor, Pete Wevurski.

“THE SIMPLE TRUTH IS: YOUNG PEOPLE WILL REFUSE TO PAY FOR NEWS AS LONG AS THEY CAN ACCESS SITES LIKE BUZZFEED, VOX AND GAWKER AT NO CHARGE.”

With the announcement came a “reduction in force” as the paper offloaded a news clerk who dealt with calendar items and listings, and a sports reporter who was hired only four months earlier to take over from George Watkins, a 36-year Californian veteran and the undisputed dean of local prep sports coverage. The new sports guy, Quinn Robinson, announced the move on Twitter, and said he was taking a crime reporting job at the Visalia Times-Delta. In addition to those eliminated positions, the paper’s veteran agriculture and business reporter, Dennis Taylor, had just days before announced his resignation via Facebook. So far, that open position has not been posted on Gannett’s job board. Also recently departed: Valentin Mendoza, the veteran editor of the paper’s Spanish-language publication, El Sol, who’s now teaching video production at Millennium Charter High School. The El Sol opening isn’t showing on Gannett’s company-wide job board, although sources say the position is being filled.

“The demographics of our market have shifted significantly in recent years,” Goudreau’s piece continues. “The Californian will expand its digital-first approach of the past few years by focusing more on news reports and local video on its smart-phone platforms.” Salinas, she writes, has evolved into one of the state’s youngest markets and research says that a large portion of the younger demographic prefers to get their news on mobile devices.

About the demographic shift, and how the younger demographic likes to get their news: She’s not wrong. About 44 percent of Salinas’ population is age 24 or under, she writes, while the median age is 28.6. And while she didn’t provide specific numbers, Goudreau says the Californian’s digital audience has grown 121 percent since last year.

But there are more than a couple of buts. The paper’s circulation has dipped precipitously in the past five years and now hovers between 6,000 and 7,000 during the week, with the figure slightly higher on Saturdays, in a city with a population of about 155,000. (In 2011, it was above 15,000.) TheCalifornian’s digital paywall, in which readers are allowed a certain number of freebies before being forced to subscribe, doesn’t actually work. To get around it, you reset your browser.

Then there are the much bigger questions: Can a small-market traditional daily build enough of a digital audience to sustain itself? Can it provide enough of that life-sustaining content while reducing staff or not filling open positions? And exactly how are they going to get the coveted youth audience to pay attention? (For more on The Californian’s likely digital strategy, see sidebar, p. 26.)

One astute observer says they can’t and they won’t.

“It’s a demographic that’s accustomed to getting its content (music, news, etc.) for free, and has said ‘no paywalls,’” Jim Romenesko, one of the country’s pre-eminent media observers – now semi-retired from blogging at jimromenesko.com – writes in an email exchange. “The New York Times went after that demo with its $8/month NYT Now mobile app; it was forced to make it a free offering after attracting only 20,000.

“The simple truth is: Young people will refuse to pay for news as long as they can access sites like BuzzFeed, Vox and Gawker at no charge,” Romenesko writes.

The Weekly wanted to ask Goudreau and Wevurski these and other questions. We sent several emails over the course of two days and requested interviews from both of them. We also made an interview request with Gannett’s corporate media office in Virginia; they referred us back to Wevurski. He wrote in an email that only Goudreau was authorized to speak about the shifts. He stated that in lieu of talking to her, we should refer to the piece she wrote, as well as another piece he wrote that ran online on Aug. 26.

Goudreau did not respond to interview requests.

If they weren’t willing to tell their own story, then, we would have to find sources who could talk – about whether this sudden shift can work and how it might impact the community.

• • •

Terry Feinberg strolls into a coffee shop in Oldtown Salinas, wearing a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt and a wry little smile on his face, ready to talk about his former employer. From April 2008 to December 2011, Feinberg was the general manager – in essence, the publisher – at The Californian. A marketing veteran (he previously led the powerful industry group Tri-County Apartment Association and ran membership at the San Jose Chamber of Commerce, as well as his own ad agency), he arrived at The Californian just as the world economy was about to tank.

When he arrived, the paper had about 120 employees. When he left shortly before Christmas 2011 (having come into the office one morning and finding three Gannett executives waiting to drop the ax and escort him from the building, a story someone else tells me), there were only about 54 employees left.

It’s nothing he’s proud of, he says, and nothing he saw coming when he took the job. As for his departure: “The timing was not of my choosing, but I didn’t shed any tears,” he says.

The company started to focus on the web around the time he arrived. But, he says, they were focusing on it with entrenched print journalists and trying to get them up to speed.

“Gannett has had a lot of strategic initiatives over the years, and, especially at a smaller paper like Salinas, the time and resources to implement all of corporate’s ideas can be scarce,” he says. “There was definitely a push there, but I don’t think anyone knew yet how big the systemic changes were going to be.”

“I DON’T THINK ANYONE KNEW YET HOW BIG THE SYSTEMIC CHANGES WERE GOING TO BE.”

Feinberg is now co-principal at Moxxy Marketing, a marketing and ad agency based in Salinas he launched in 2012 with Karen Nardozza. Part of what they do is place ad dollars for their clients (they’re heavy in the ag sector), so he has good insight into how those advertising dollars work, or don’t work, in the local marketplace.

Asked if the digital strategy and cutback in print makes sense, for the paper and the community, and he says it’s anything but a simple answer.

“Can people get their news with a three-times-a-week publication and improvement online?” Feinberg says. “There are still a lot of people who won’t read their news online. Also, I’m not sure how the economics work or if they have the journalism resources to support it.”

Local news is getting crushed. That’s the headline on an article by Joshua Benton, the head of the journalism think-tank Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard. In particular, 2015 was not a good year for local news, he writes – the giant platforms, like Facebook, are the only ones really cashing in. “Local news sites are disproportionately likely to be clunky and slow, a real issue on mobile devices, and they generally have terrible technology for targeting ads at readers.”

• • •

Former USA Today investigative journalist, business writer and editor Jim Hopkins, who for seven years (2007-2014) ran the wildly popular Gannett Blog (a virtual water cooler, he says, where Gannett employees could share information at a time of tremendous change in the industry) calls the slash in print schedule at the Californian unsurprising. Hopkins, though, says the Californian may be the first Gannett paper to cut its print schedule since the Detroit Free Press did so in 2009. He expects more small papers will follow and cut their schedules too as the digital dive spreads through the company.

“Everyone knows the future of news will be an all-digital format. There is not a future for print forever. Even though the Salinas market might not be the most tech savvy, it’s where they have to go. They have to find some way,” Hopkins says.

To the extent younger readers read newspapers at all, the digital format is how they will do it. The bigger problem is capturing readers and persuading advertisers to move to digital.

“Whether the Californian can be competitive enough when it goes to digital-only is the big question. Whether you print one day a week or three, you have to figure out how to produce content the younger readers want, no matter how you publish,” he says. “If the stories and information aren’t of sufficient interest, younger readers aren’t going to stick with it.

“Content matters a lot. And local news is the only place where a community newspaper can compete.”

Next week, a look at what’s happening at The Monterey County Herald.