The names and the impacts of Gannett's newsroom layoffs: At one daily in Ohio, the sole reporter covers only sports

The Jeffersonian's building (Photo by Kristi Garabrandt)

The story of the latest rounds of newsroom layoffs at Gannett Co. newspapers is slowly becoming one of names more than numbers, and of the impacts on communities. Elahe Izadi, media reporter at The Washington Post, rounded up several examples, some of them startling, for a story over the weekend.

Izadi's first citation is a daily newspaper in Ohio that now has no news reporters: The Daily Jeffersonian, better known as The Daily Jeff, in Cambridge, Ohio, pop. 10,000, seat of Guernsey County, pop. 38,000. Mayor Tom Orr "has seen the Daily Jeff shrink its staff, cut back on printed papers [now three times a week] and publish photos from faraway communities," Izadi reports. He told her, “I love this town and I don’t like to see it suffer, and that’s what this is causing it to do: suffer.”

Laid-off reporter Kristi Garabrandt told Izadi, “The community paper is pretty much what holds your community together.” There's not much of that on the paper's home page; it's mainly sports stories (the paper still has a sports reporter and freelancers) and a subscribers-only story about the stock price of Intel Corp., which is building a computer-chip plant 75 miles to the west, near Columbus.

At The Columbus Dispatch, one staffer on the layoff list was Darrel Rowland, a reporter and editor there for 31 years. He told Izadi, “I can point to laws that were changed because of our reporting. How do people find out what their elected officials are up to? How are they finding out how their tax money is being spent? To me, [these] are the basic, fundamental questions and one of the fundamental reasons for journalism to exist.”

Izadi reports, "Rowland has also seen his paper shrink from 200 employees to 70, and eliminate its statehouse bureau and rely instead on a centralized Gannett bureau that feeds stories to all Ohio papers, effectively making local papers less local. . . . Now, Rowland worries whether newspapers have the resources and expertise to dig through millions of records the way he and others did on consequential stories, such as inflated prescription-drug prices."

The Poynter Institute has tallied at least 70 layoffs across 54 newsrooms by Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain. Poynter's Angela Fu reports, "It remains unclear exactly how many people were let go."