Lee Enterprises requiring most employees to take 2-week furloughs or salary reductions; some go public with gripes

Map from Lee website, adapted by The Rural Blog

Newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises, one of the last big independents in the industry, is requiring most of its employees "to take a two-week, unpaid furlough or accept a salary reduction, according to an internal memo," Axios reports.

"Since thwarting a hostile takeover from Alden Global Capital last year, Lee's struggles have deepened, prompting some Lee staffers to wonder if hedge fund ownership would have been better," Kerry Flynn and Sara Fischer write. Alden, "an investment firm known for slashing costs at local papers, dropped its bid for Lee Enterprises last year following a bitter legal battle. Lee laid off hundreds of employees across its local papers and at the corporate level amid the takeover drama."

"Nearly three years into the new regime, it's becoming apparent that it might as well have been Alden, as Lee Enterprises is following the same playbook," wrote Jim Heaney, a reporter with the Investigative Post in western New York and a former investigative reporter with The Buffalo News, a Lee property.

Lincoln Journal Star reporter Chris Dunker told Axios, "The size of our news staff at the Journal Star is now less than half of what it was when I started in 2014, even though the issues and people we are covering are increasingly complex and nuanced. The loss in wages adds insult to injury as many haven't received a pay raise in years and are now dealing with inflation the same as everyone else," Dunker says. "We want to serve readers and cover our communities with depth and sensitivity, but [this] corporate model ... is making that almost impossible."

The furloughs do not appear to have reached Lee's relatively few unionized newsrooms, where the move would have to go through the union, Axios reports. Lee's website says it has "nearly 350 weekly and specialty publications serving 77 markets in 26 states." The 2022 State of Local News report from Northwestern University says it has 152 newspapers, third most in the U.S. It's based in Davenport, Iowa.