The shakeup continued this month among Gatehouse Media’s central Iowa newspapers, with two of the company’s weeklies now without editors following the recent departure of Brandon Summers from the Perry Chief and Whitney Sager from the Boone News-Republican.
Sager’s resignation in November after 2.5 years at the helm of the Boone paper followed the October firing of longtime Boone News-Republican publisher Claudia Lovin, whose departure coincided with the paper’s switch from publishing three times a week to once a week.
Summers left the Chief after about four months on the job. He previously wrote for the Fort Dodge Messenger. His absence leaves the Perry paper with no editorial staff.
The Chief’s freelance sports writer, Caesar Toledo, lives in Georgia and files Bluejay sports stories remotely, normally several hours after publication of ThePerryNews.com’s on-scene reports by Jeff Webster.
The Perry and Boone weeklies — along with Adel’s former paper, the Dallas County News — are owned by GateHouse Media Iowa Inc., a division of New Media Investment Group, a holding company based in New York.
Stephens Media, a Las Vegas newspaper chain, bought the Dallas County News in 2010 and the Perry Chief in 2013. Stephens sold all its newspapers in 2015 to New Media Investment Group.
Gatehouse Media’s Iowa holdings are managed out of Ames by Scott Anderson, a senior group publisher with GateHouse. Anderson moved to Iowa from Idaho in June 2015 and has directed the restructuring and layoffs at the Gatehouse papers.
Gatehouse quit publishing the Northeast Dallas County Record in February, and in July it closed the Adel office of the Dallas County News and moved the operation in with the Perry Chief.
The closure of the Adel office followed similar shutterings of Gatehouse’s Story County papers. The Nevada Journal, Story City Herald and Tri-County Times now operate out of the offices of the Ames Tribune, the company’s flagship paper in Iowa.
Summers’ departure follows that of Stephanie Ivankovich, who quit in July after 18 months with the Perry paper. Toledo also quit in July after spending less than one year on the job.
Their departures followed the resignation in May of former publisher Patricia Saulsbury Snyder, who left after three years at the head of the Perry and Adel papers.
Sager was the editor of the Boone paper for 2.5 years. After graduating from ISU’s Greenlee journalism school, she worked at the Nevada Journal and Tri-County Times for two years before taking on the editorship of the Boone News-Republican in March 2014.
In 2014 Sager was awarded the Genevieve Mauck Stoufer Outstanding Young Iowa Journalists Award from the Iowa Newspaper Association.
Last month she accepted a position as communications coordinator for the Iowa State University food science and human nutrition department.
The newspaper continues to go downhill. It isn’t what it was when I first moved to Perry. Even the shopper is getting worse. More ads in it from Ames and Boone than there are from Perry. I doubt if either of them will be around much longer.
A once reputable media outlet for Perry is the victim of corporate cannibalism, and so are we all.