The company has made a number of changes in recent years that suggest that it values short-term profits over long-term viability. It does its best to maintain a huge profit margin, in order to pay a high dividend to stockholders. Unfortunately, at times when the company can't figure out how to keep revenues up, it cuts costs by eliminating workers.
Cost-cutting on its own isn't evil. Elimination of inefficiency is a sign of a well-managed company. However, cost-cutting done poorly does little to help the company, and is probably more expensive in opportunity cost.
The company has replaced many working, expensive departments of employees with more streamlined, centralized and less expensive departments. Unfortunately, the people left in these centralized departments tend to be too overworked to give full attention to each site they're supposed to be working for. This can lead to a mistrust of centralized departments by employees at individual sites, as well as a general mistrust of corporate initiatives.
Recent changes to the company's products suggest that the company doesn't regard the quality of the product or the quality of service provided to customers as important. The company wants to print a newspaper, sell ads in it, sell subscriptions to it, and fill the parts that aren't ads with information. But it doesn't want to invest the resources necessary to deliver it to subscribers on time, consistently, or even to treat them well when they call to ask where their paper is. Many people in the community will tell you they love the content in the paper, but feel betrayed by the company because we can't deliver the paper regularly enough.
Some sites in the company no longer have the resources to adequately cover local governments in the areas they serve. Because many newspapers tend to be the only local newspapers, a failure to keep governments in check can end up costing the local community when government gets out of hand.
The workload is usually crushing. Most of my coworkers are taking medications prescribed for anxiety. Frequently, the work you do will be what two to four people used to do ten years ago. In fact, the workload is so excessive that most employees do not have the time in their workday to check the newspaper's web site to see what news is there. This means that most of its employees can't relate to the very consumers for whom they're producing all of the web content.
The pay rate is especially unrewarding. The knowledge that much (or even most) of the money your company brings in from local advertisers doesn't stay local may nag at your conscience, especially if you have to write any stories about the local economy. You may have to marry someone with a lot of money if you want to be in the middle class. This is especially true if you have middle class friends to keep up with.
