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When Carpenter Media Group purchased Pamplin Media Group, Austin White, then the Portland Tribune’s managing sports editor, said many newsroom employees had never heard of the company.
“We still didn’t really know what to expect,” White said. “We thought we had maybe sold to a better company, one that might not be like a Gannett that’s coming in and trying to slash a bunch of stuff. It felt like maybe a little more friendly to editorial folks.”
Quickly, however, that feeling changed. White said he began researching the reporting staff at other Carpenter-owned newspapers in different parts of the country and noticing a trend: sports sections with just a single editor and very few, if any, reporters.
“I just kept seeing that over and over: Georgia, Texas papers, Nebraska, all kinds,” White said. “To me, that just signals, well, if there isn’t a profit here, they’re going to keep slashing until they cannot anymore.”
Eventually, that’s what happened at the Tribune: White lost his job in June along with a number of his colleagues. The Tribune, which is no longer being printed and is now published exclusively online, was left with just two newsroom employees.
The Tribune’s fate is indicative not just of the ongoing challenges facing newspapers across the US, but also of the modus operandi of Carpenter—a relative newcomer in the media space about which little is known.
Carpenter, which was founded in 2023 and is based in Mississippi, says on its website that its media holdings are “the cornerstones of their communities” and that the corporation as a whole aims “to forge a well-informed, interconnected, and prosperous society—one community at a time.”
Carpenter owns newspapers across the country, including dozens of papers in the southeast. But over the last year-plus, its footprint in the northwest has grown rapidly.
Last June, Carpenter bought Pamplin Media, then the largest newspaper group in the Portland area. Then in October, Carpenter expanded its regional footprint by purchasing EO Media Group, which owned a number of publications in Central and Eastern Oregon. Carpenter has also acquired numerous newspapers in Alaska and Washington.
Those purchases have made Carpenter the fourth-largest newspaper owner in the country by circulation. But because Carpenter is a privately held company, very little is known about their business strategy or underlying motivations.
Courtney Scott, the executive officer of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, which represents unionized employees at the Bulletin in Bend and Everett Daily Herald, said that has made dealing with the company more difficult.
“Part of the issue with Carpenter is that we don’t really know who is an investor or who they’re attached to,” Scott said. “It’s completely shaded: We don’t know how much money they have, it’s very secretive, and we don’t know what their aim is.”
Even within the world of newspaper acquisitions, Scott said, that lack of insight into Carpenter’s acquisition strategy is relatively uncommon. Carpenter did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Scott said that in a number of other cases, corporations like Alden Global Capital purchase newspapers primarily to take control of the property those newspapers own and potentially flip it.
“That is definitely not the case with Carpenter,” Scott said. “I don’t think they’re coming in for the real estate. It seems strange to us that they went from relatively unknown outside of typical news guild markets to now the fourth-largest by circulation [media publication owner] in the country.”
What does seem clear thus far is that Carpenter is bent on cutting costs, whatever the impact for the markets they serve.
In October of last year, the Carpenter-owned Honolulu Star-Advertiser laid off 20 percent of its newsroom staff. Earlier this year, Carpenter discontinued print editions of the Sandy Post and Estacada News while laying off the reporter who staffed both newspapers.
For communities without the multitude of news outlets Portland has, the impact of Carpenter’s cuts may be particularly steep. There is a similar worry in Bend, where Carpenter has laid off non-union workers at the flagship Bulletin and has only been prevented from laying off more workers because its union does not currently have a contract in place.
“They know exactly what they’re doing,” Scott said of Carpenter. “They are, in my opinion, being predatory to small markets in a field where it is harder to find jobs, and taking advantage of journalists who want to work in these small markets, want to work in their own community.”
Contract negotiations between Carpenter and the Central Oregon News Guild have become fractious enough that the News Guild has urged subscribers to cancel their subscriptions if Carpenter does not give them an acceptable contract offer.
One of the sticking points in that negotiation, which is ongoing, is the number of stories Bulletin reporters will be required to produce each week. Unionized reporters at the Everett Herald, also recently purchased by Carpenter, are locked in a similarly contentious contract negotiation.
“We do already have a quota—it’s three to five stories per week, which is doable and reasonable,” Noemi Arellano-Summer, the Bulletin’s schools, youth, and families reporter, said. “The quota that Carpenter is proposing is 10 to 12 stories per reporter, per week, which I don’t believe is reasonable or sustainable in the long-run.”
In addition to the effect that kind of publishing pressure might have on journalists, Arellano-Summer said, it would also likely impact the kind of reporting the Bulletin is able to produce.
“That [quota] leads to very short stories, one-source stories, and little time for longer pieces or more investigative journalism,” Arellano-Summer said.
Then there’s the matter of what Carpenter wants to pay its reporters. According to Arellano-Summer, who is a member of the Bulletin’s bargaining team, Carpenter has proposed paying reporters a starting wage of $20.50 per hour—with raises available only to those reporters who meet the publishing quota.
At Carpenter’s non-unionized newspapers, including the former Pamplin papers in the Portland metro area, some employees make less than that, according to current and former staff.
Arellano-Summer, who said she already lives with roommates on her current salary, said Carpenter’s wage proposal could drive her out of Bend entirely.
“I would like to be able to afford a one-bedroom apartment and feel like I could stay in Bend for some time,” she said. “With the salary the company is proposing, I don’t know that I really see that happening.”
Indeed, according to MIT, a living wage for a single adult with no children in Deschutes County is $25.52 per hour—about $4,200 per year above what Carpenter has proposed. Scott, who said she is currently part of seven different contract negotiations on behalf of the News Guild, said Carpenter’s compensation offers are “by far the lowest.”
White, the former sports editor, said overall, there’s very little evidence to suggest that Carpenter is invested in the civic life of the places where its newspapers operate.
“It’s based in [Mississippi] and they just keep buying and buying papers,” White said, “so how much are they really going to care about Oregon?”
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Abe Asher
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