Springfielders still mourning the decline of their daily newspaper can take heart, in a roundabout way, from news reports June 5 of the walkout by hundreds of journalists at about two dozen newsrooms owned by Gannett, the country’s largest newspaper chain. Gannett’s Illinois newspapers, which include Springfield’s State Journal-Register, did not participate this time, but they suffer from the same corporate misbehavior affecting all the others. The walkout was to protest working conditions at Gannett, where executives have eliminated more than half of the combined workforce in the past four years, while paying its chief executive, Mike Reed, $11 million over the past two years. “Gannett has created news deserts everywhere you look,” said one of the protesting reporters. The labor action helps to clarify that the problem isn’t a declining interest in journalism by the American public, but corporate mismanagement and greed. – Fletcher Farrar, editor
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