I’m of two minds about this. Yes, Gannett continues to seek blood from stones, but Austinites had largely stopped expecting much out of the Statesman under prior owner Cox, which among other moves contracted with GateHouse in 2015 to design features sections – the only time I’ve ended up involved in putting out the local paper despite not working for the company that published it – for the AAS as well as other dailies and weeklies.
It’s important to put in context that we are talking about a sliver of time in an overall trend that goes back more than two decades and had already robbed award-winning newsrooms of much of their cachet because of reader-facing decisions. This is not the final straw; the camel has been dead for years, and corporate journalism is engaged in taxidermy.
I’ve been in Austin for nine years at this point. And despite working in a newsroom-adjacent position for half of that time, I’ve never heard anyone say “Did you read today’s paper?”
