After announcing forced, unpaid vacations for its entire staff, Gannett Company, the owner of several Arizona media outlets, said yesterday the move does not mean the company is “in really bad shape.”
In a four-page question and answer sheet sent out to employees, Gannett said the mandatory time off means instead that it “is a solid company and we want to stay that way” despite “facing severe economic conditions.” In the same document, company leaders also said that pay cuts and layoffs are still on the table as the year goes on.
As I mentioned here yesterday, when things are bad for Gannett, they’re bad for Arizona media as a whole. The company owns two of the largest media outlets in the state, the Arizona Republic and KNXP-TV in Phoenix, as well as the Tucson Citizen, and La Voz and KNAZ-TV in Flagstaff (see comments below). According to rough figures posted on Gannett’s corporate website, there are some 3,000 people working for the company statewide.
Despite Gannett’s clear insistence that exceptions would probably not be granted, the weight of the furlough is falling largely on non-union workers and apparently those who work at the Detroit Free-Press, which is in the midst of cutting back its home delivery to just four days a week.
Want to see the company’s full “furlough fact sheet”? Download it here as a 47kb Microsoft Word document.