Layoffs hit Gannett's Tennessee newspapers on Tuesday as management cut one percent of the newspaper company's workforce nationwide. At The Tennessean in Nashville, that meant a digital producer and a reporter at the Dickson Herald lost their jobs.
Andy Simmons' departure means that the Dickson Herald, absorbed by the Tennessean/Gannett years ago, is down to just one writer/editor, Chris Gadd. Tabitha Waggoner had been producing content for the paper's 12th & Broad vertical. After previously laying off its editor/community manager, it's unclear what the future holds for the vertical, originally launched as a literary magazine but later transformed into a dumping ground for lists and soft features.
Gannett telegraphed the cuts two weeks ago. CEO Robert Dickey says that "difficult headwinds" in advertising forced the layoffs.
In Memphis, sources say three two were laid off from the Commercial Appeal's newsroom. In Knoxville at the News-Sentinel, two reporters lost their jobs: Don Jacobs, a longtime crime reporter who was one of the staffers leading the fight for open records in the wake of Gatlinburg forest fires, and Wayne Bledsoe, who's been at the News-Sentinel since 1981. Bledsoe was one of the only music writers in the city after the closing of the Knoxville Mercury alt-weekly this summer.Â
Update 5:45 p.m.: This note comes from the Memphis Newspaper Guild:
Company attorney Warren Funk told us this afternoon that two people lost jobs in Memphis as part of company-wide job cuts: one Guild-covered reporter, and one manager.Our union does not cover managers and the company generally doesn’t release information about them to us. At this point I don’t know who the manager is, or what department the manager worked in.
