Silence is rotten: What Gannett no longer reveals

[Bunker mentality: Growing silence from The 11th Floor]

Reflecting the industry's worsening slump, the New York Times Co. said today that revenue from continuing operations fell 14% last month from a year ago, on a 21% plunge in advertising sales.

NYT Co. disclosed the figures in its monthly revenue summary, a version of which Gannett published for more than eight years -- until October, when Chief Financial Officer Gracia Martore frustrated Wall Street by abandoning the practice.

Martore announced the change during the third-quarter earnings teleconference. Growing volatility in digital revenues made the reports less meaningful, she said. The final one, for August, showed publishing ad revenue had plunged a record 16.8% (chart, above).

Unhappy analyst: Why now?
Martore's decision fueled the impression Gannett was hiding information that it expected was about to get really bad, just as the company entered uncharted waters. Without monthly reports such as today's from NYT, Gannett's investors would be forced to wait three months -- until the quarterly earnings release -- to know what's happening inside the company.

Analysts were skeptical. "You guys don't stop printing a newspaper when the news is really bad,'' analyst Craig Huber of Barclays Capital told her at the time. "Why is this being stopped now?" Martore shot back: "You are making an assumption that we are stopping it because the news is bad, and that's not why we are stopping it temporarily."

In a comment, Anonymous@2:41 p.m. isn't surprised: "Silence from Gannett? Whooda thunk it?"

Hush-hush: Dubow gifts, layoffs
Martore's disclosure appears to be part of a broader, growing effort by the nation's top newspaper publisher to impose greater secrecy on operations at the very time investors and employees need more information:

• For more than three weeks now, the company has refused to reveal how much money its charitable Gannett Foundation has diverted to CEO Craig Dubow's private scholarship fund at a little-known North Carolina University.
• Gannett this month eliminated nearly 2,200 newspaper jobs without any formal acknowledgement -- no 8-K filing with securities regulators, nor even a simple press release. The real total is certainly higher. Indeed, official spokeswoman Tara Connell only acknowledged a layoff was planned after it was reported here; if anything, Connell tried to downplay the news.
• Corporate last month abandoned the Daily News Summary -- highlights of internal and external news that had been delivered Monday through Friday to thousands of employees.
• In September, Connell confirmed in an interview with Columbia Journalism Review that she had ended virtually all communication with this blog's more than 10,000 employees and other readers. That followed USA Today Publisher Craig Moon's plea for employees to stop airing dirty laundry here -- an advisory that was immediately ignored.

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[Photo: Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects]