Ownership of Gannett/USA Today

[swag]

Sorry, I'm having a busy day at work or would research it myself. If anybody has any info on ownership at Gannett/USA Today, and political leanings contributions thereof, please share.

Gracias.

[LTR]

1. Some things I know

I'm a big fan of USA Today founder Al Neuharth's autobiography "Confessions of an SOB". He's a hilarious, take-no-shit guy who had a vision for newspaper ethics and presentation in the television era. He retired as CEO and Chairman of Gannett a week after his 65th birthday in 1989, and still writes a weekly column. He is fairly nonpartisan, and when in charge preferred his papers to stay that way. During his command, he forbade his papers from endorsing candidates. He preferred a non-biased approach, trying to steer his company's papers from their right-leaning slant.

Gannett had a long history of leaning pretty far right prior to Neuhardt taking the helm. It's previous two leaders, Frank Gannett and Paul Miller, were staunch Republicans, and showed their ideals on their low-regarded daily rags, which were located mostly in smaller markets.

Neuharth ran Gannett as a progressive centrist, deciding that the makeup of the company should reflect the people they were trying to reach. He shook up the board, replacing many of the white aging Republican males with women and minorities, including Jimmy Carter's wife Rosalynn and his buddy Tom Brokaw's wife. He invented short attention span journalism, but is very adamant about journalistic ethics. In fact, he publicly blasted USA Today last year about the reporter fraud scandal involving writer Jack Kelly.

As for donations from Gannett employees, you can look here for starters:

http://www.opensecrets.org/indivs/search.asp?NumOfThou=0&txtName=&txtState=%28all+states%29&txtZip=&txtEmploy=gannett&txtCand=&txt2000=Y&Order=N

And do a little peeking around.

A little history of the company:

http://www.gannett.com/map/history.htm

You can find out more about the company by looking around their site.

[Pallas180]

2. I thought Gannett chain owned by O'Shaughnessey in Westcheter NY

:kick:

[LTR]

3. Nope

Publicly held. For a long time, it was a privately held company.

Company originally based in Rochester, NY. Currently in Northern Virginia, outside Washington, D.C.

They do own quite a few other companies.

[Rob H.]

4. I used to work for one of their newsrags...

...and I can tell you from personal experience (at least at the paper for which I worked) that they treat their lower-level employees like shit. Not that that has any bearing on their political leanings (or does it?), it just pissed me off that the publisher got a huge bonus every year while the frontline workers got jack squat.

The paper where I worked had also driven out a union about a year before I came on board, which does follow the Repub tradition of union-busting. It was an open secret that if you contacted a union rep to come and speak to you, you would be fired; regardless of your time on the job, regardless of your performance, contact a union rep and you'd be outta there. (The state where the paper is located is a "right-to-work" state, so they could've fired me at any time for any reason, anyway, if they'd felt like it.)

That said, the paper--okay, it was The Idaho Statesman, if you must know--endorsed Whistle-Ass for Pres, which comes as no surprise, given that Idaho is a Red state. The Friday after September 11, instead of a photo of the ruins of the WTC or the Pentagon, which would've been appropriate or at least understandable, they had a giant photo of Bush's head on the front page, looking as if he was about to cry. When the results of the recount in Florida were released and it was shown that under any scenario other than the one Gore picked, Gore would have won, it was buried on the inside pages of the paper under a headline something like, "Recount Shows Bush Would Still Have Won Florida."

So draw from those examples what you will. Sorry for the rant, btw--I worked for them for four years and even though I left them about 4 and a half years ago, the experience was so negative that not only will I never work for a newspaper again, I haven't bought a newspaper since!