Lee Enterprises

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Prairie Lights: A big loss for independent news in Montana

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Funder

Even if you live in Eastern Montana and have never heard of, much less read, the Missoula Independent, you ought to be worried about the fate of that alternative weekly newspaper. The Indy, which has been around for more than 25 years, has had its ups and downs, but generally speaking it was a worthy successor to the underground and alternative newspapers that came before it, and which made Missoula the only city in Montana with a real tradition of that sort of journalism. (more…) Continue Reading →

Filed under: Prairie Lights, Association of Alternative Newsmedia, Lee Enterprises, LION Publishers, Missoula Current, Missoula Independent, YVBC Garage

Bought by Lee, will Missoula Independent live up to name?

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Lee

Missoula Independent Matt Gibson said on Thursday that he chose to sell his business to Lee Enterprises to tap the corporation’s technical capabilities, adding that the Indy’s new partnership with the Missoulian will remain a work in progress as the weeks unfold. On Thursday morning, the Missoulian announced that its corporate owner, Lee Enterprises, had bought the Missoula Independent for an undisclosed price. The announcement that took the community by surprise. (more…) Continue Reading →

Filed under: Montana, News, Lee Enterprises, Matt Gibson, Mike Gulledge, Missoula Independent, Missoulian

Gazette publisher named to lead Missoulian, too

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MG

Mike Gulledge was named publisher of the Missoulian and Ravalli Republic Wednesday as part of a regionalized management restructuring. Gulledge also serves as publisher of the Billings Gazette and as operating vice president for the Missoulian’s parent company, Lee Enterprises. According to a press release from Lee, “The move is part of a trend in Lee that includes regionalizing some operational aspects of the business, especially in markets that have similarities or are located near each other, while maintaining intense focus on local news and advertising.” This week, the Missoulian eliminated half of its daily news and feature sections, moving from a four-part paper to a two-part publication, eliminating a number of local stories and columns in the process. The daily editorial page dropped from two pages to one page on Monday through Friday, with two pages on Sunday. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Montana, News, Billings Gazette, Lee Enterprises, Mike Gulledge, Missoulian

From the Guardian, a look at the future of local news

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Kathleen McLaughlin, whose reporting career has included a stint with the Lee Newspapers state bureau, wrote a great piece for The Guardian about the steady decline of newspapers devoted to covering local news. The story is full of good, thought-provoking stuff, but here’s the gist of it:
“The real crisis in American journalism is not technological, it’s geographic,” said Tom Rosentiel, fellow at the Brookings Institution who founded and ran for 16 years the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Center. “The crisis is that local journalism is shrinking. I wouldn’t say it’s dying but it’s the most threatened.”

This is certainly true in Montana, where a recent study found that people get their news online, but still gravitate most toward the websites of their local papers and television stations. Local press isn’t dead, but it’s fragmented and weakened. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Last Best Blog, Flathead Beacon, Guardian, Kathleen McLaughlin, Lee Enterprises, Maury Povich

Lee goes native with Wisconsin company

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Lee Enterprises, Montana’s media behemoth, has purchased a share of Okanjo, a native commerce company in Milwaukee, Wis. Native commerce has nothing to do with business on the reservation. It’s a technique for presenting ads on web pages so they blend seamlessly with news content. Lee’s investment in Okanjo was announced in May, but the two companies had been working together for a year, according to an article in the August issue of Editor & Publisher. The size of Lee’s investment and its stake in the company were not disclosed. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Last Best Blog, Bethany Grabher, James Green, Lee Enterprises, Okanjo

Billings Gazette’s new redesign, explained

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Somebody was wondering the other day why the Billings Gazette had not announced its new redesign. Good question. The redesign rolled out on July 22, when I was in Texas, so I figured I had just missed the announcement. But going back through the paper, I see no mention of the changes that day, or the next, or on the Sunday opinion pages. Google also didn’t help. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Last Best Blog, Billings Gazette, Jim Romenesko, Lee Enterprises

Independent looks at state’s newspaper landscape

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What happens when a small town loses its local newspaper? Derek Brouwer, a former Billings Gazette reporter now working for the weekly Missoula Independent, attempts to answer that question in a front-page story published yesterday. He writes of the demise of the Bigfork Eagle, which went from independent ownership to becoming a property of Lee Enterprises (publisher of the Gazette, the Missoulian and a few other Montana papers) and then of Duane Hagadone, the owner of a regional media conglomerate. Along the way, Brouwer looks at the venerable Choteau Acantha, a much-respected little paper that has been publishing in Teton County for 123 years. (One of its editors was A.B. Guthrie’s father, and Guthrie worked there as a boy, in the capacity of printer’s devil, a term so old I’m not even sure what it means.)

The article covers a lot of familiar ground—Facebook is the new small-town newspaper, print is nearly obsolete, etc.—but from a purely Montana perspective. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Last Best Blog, Bigfork Eagle, Chaoteu Acantha, Derek Brouwer, Lee Enterprises, Missoula Independent

Pistol-packing editor says gun was an antique

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M.B.

Following up on a story broken by the Missoula Current, the Missoula Independent has new details on the suspension of Missoulian editor Matt Bunk, who violated company policy by bringing a gun to work. Indy reporter Derek Brouwer (formerly a reporter for the Billings Gazette) writes: “In a personal Facebook post he shared Monday with the Indy, Bunk says the incident involved an antique handgun his girlfriend recently gave him as an engagement gift. The editor says he has a concealed carry permit and often wears a gun, but forgot to remove it from his hip before entering the office one day. ‘Someone pointed it out, and I put it back in my car immediately,’ he wrote.” The Missoulian, like the Gazette, is owned by Lee Enterprises, and Brouwer points out that the “antique firearm” excuse wasn’t good enough for another editor at a Lee newspaper. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Last Best Blog, Derek Brouwer, Lee Enterprises, Martin Kidston, Matt Bunk, Missoula Current, Missoula Independent, Missoulian

A sad look at the legions of older ex-journalists

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Scene

I don’t want to be too depressing on a Saturday morning, but maybe if you never worked in the newspaper business this story will only be interesting, rather than terribly sad. It’s about how tens of thousands of older reporters, editors and photographers have been put out to pasture in recent years as the newspaper industry has withered with accelerating speed. Most of the examples deal with people who worked at much bigger papers than we have here in Montana, but their stories sound awfully familiar. One trend mentioned in the article is that women are being targeted disproportionately when it comes to layoffs. “One woman downsized from the Post,” the writer said, “told me that she ‘always got good reviews and often got raises’ in all of her years at the paper. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Last Best Blog, Bill Moyers, Craigslist, Lee Enterprises, Missoulian, Nation, Sherry Devlin

Lee brass insulated from ‘change of ownership’ impacts

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Junck

Finally, some good news from Lee Enterprises. In the midst of stories about layoffs, cutbacks, consolidated “design centers,” smaller papers and higher prices, we learn that there is enough money floating around Lee to upgrade the top executives’ parachutes from golden to platinum. In truth, I don’t know how big the upgrades are, and I suppose it is even within the realm of possibility that the rewards for these folks have been reduced. But that would run counter to every single action taken by the company’s board of directors in the last 15 years. Here’s what we do know: Jim Romenesko, the mostly retired media blogger, reported last week that under an SEC filing dated Dec. Continue Reading →

Filed under: Last Best Blog, Lee Enterprises, Mary Junck, Mike Gulledge, Romenesko