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By: Angela Fu
The Poynter Institute
Journalists at Lee Enterprises — the chain that owns such titles as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Omaha World-Herald — are well accustomed to cuts at the end of the summer, as the company prepares for the close of its fiscal year.
But this year, some hoped that things would be different. Thanks to a $50 million deal in February, billionaire David Hoffmann had become the majority shareholder and chairman of the company. He came bearing a message of renewed investment in the chain — one he repeated in interviews, during quarterly earnings calls and in a set of profiles that ran on the front page of every Lee paper. “NEW HOPE FOR LOCAL NEWS,” the profiles called Hoffmann.
That hope shattered late last month, when Lee began laying off editors and copy editors at papers across the country. It is unclear exactly how many were affected, but at least two papers lost their top editors. Some papers have also cut travel and freelance budgets. While the scale of the layoffs appears to be much smaller than past rounds of mass cuts, they raise questions about the plans of a man who has repeatedly boasted about his ability to avoid laying off employees at his businesses.
“He says the right things,” said Mark Plemmons, the former editor of the Independent Tribune in Concord, North Carolina, who was laid off Aug. 25. At the time of his layoff, he was the only person working in news or sports at the paper. “The reality of what’s being done does not appear to follow that.”
Hoffmann, who made his fortune as the founder of executive search firm DHR Global, has repeatedly said he got into the local newspaper business out of a desire to save it. In February at an event in St. Louis, he called layoffs a “bad, bad, bad word,” according to Gateway Journalism Review. Two months later, he repeated that message to Forbes.
In May, he gave the opening remarks on a quarterly earnings call — an unusual move for a company chairman. He promised to invest in local journalism: “We’ve also reduced corporate overhead and simplified our operating model, ensuring that more resources are directed to the front lines of the business, prioritizing our content and our customers.”
Over the Fourth of July weekend, every Lee newspaper was forced to run a front-page package of profiles highlighting Hoffmann’s ambitions to save local news. In one piece, he bragged that his company, Hoffmann Family of Companies, had not laid anyone off during the pandemic.
That statement contradicted an earlier interview he had given The Seattle Times last year, in which he mentioned “modest” layoffs. Still, the sentiment remained the same.
“So far in the 21 newspapers we’ve not laid off anybody that we bought,” Hoffmann told the Times. “That’s counter to our culture. We have 16,000 employees worldwide. We had a modest layoff during COVID. … I think being private and big is an advantage sometimes and we don’t believe in layoffs and we certainly don’t believe in salary reductions.”
Despite this, Plemmons received a call Aug. 25 telling him that he would be terminated immediately. Over the next week, editors and copy editors in Montana, Virginia and North Carolina were also laid off. Many of them, like Plemmons, had worked at Lee for years.
Hoffmann did not respond to a request for comment. Lee spokesperson Tracy Rouch said the company remained committed to “producing a comprehensive local news report.”
“We have made and will continue to make necessary adjustments to our cost structure, particularly in management and administrative areas,” Rouch said. “No reporters were affected by any of the recent changes.”
While it is true that all of the journalists Poynter identified as being laid off had “editor” in their title, some of them still wrote articles. Plemmons published three or four stories per week under his byline. He contributed an additional 15 or so stories by rewriting and adding information to press releases, which were then published under a staff byline.
Since Plemmons’ layoff, the print version of the Independent Tribune has not run any locally reported stories, he said. It has run a preview of upcoming community arts events and republished stories by other North Carolina outlets like The Charlotte Observer.
At the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a veteran copy editor who had worked for Lee for nearly four decades was laid off, said Eric Kolenich, a growth and development reporter at the paper. When the company informed the union of the layoff, it said it was prioritizing “content producers” like reporters and photographers over copy editors, he said.
But laying off copy editors makes for a “worse product,” said Kolenich, who also serves as the president of the union representing Times-Dispatch journalists.
“We don’t have people checking, reading the content and making sure the reporters aren’t making mistakes,” Kolenich said. The newsroom — which he estimated to be 25 to 30 people — has been “bare bones” for years and can’t afford cuts to any of its sections. “We need copy editors. We need reporters. We need everything.”
Rouch said that the company expects the number of employees in the “news divisions” of Lee Enterprises and Hoffmann Media Group to increase by the end of the year.
But Kolenich said that so far, his paper has not seen any new hires or salary increases. In fact, its travel and freelance budgets have been cut through the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30. The Buffalo News has three open positions, but they remain unfilled, according to Sandra Tan, a county government reporter at the paper who also helps coordinate the roughly dozen newsroom unions across Lee papers.
Over the Labor Day weekend, Lee papers carried a column by Hoffmann. In it, he lamented the decline of local news and said the chain’s journalists help tell stories that are “part of the roadmap for hope.”
For the people of Concord, North Carolina, that column was a “slap in the face,” Plemmons said. People have told him that they have canceled their subscriptions.
“They’re shocked. Angry. They’re probably more upset now than I am,” he said. “I’ve kind of been expecting it. But it’s just a shock to the community that this newspaper values this market so little.”
