Good morning. Today’s Poynter Report is not totally Donald Trump-free, but we will not be leading the newsletter with the president, as we have for much of the past two months since his return to the White House.

We lead today, unfortunately, with some more grim media news. But it’s important media news. So for this lead item, I turn it over to someone who can best explain what’s going on — Rick Edmonds, Poynter’s media business analyst.

Here is Rick’s report:

Chicago Sun-Times slashes news staff

The financially troubled Chicago Sun-Times announced Tuesday that it is shedding 23 newsroom employees through buyouts, more than 20% of staff. Among those departing are some of the paper’s best-known journalists, including sports columnist Rick Telander and film critic Richard Roeper.

Chicago Public Media, which also operates the city’s NPR station, acquired the Sun-Times (it was donated for free) in January 2022. It was hailed as an exciting venture that could be a model elsewhere. But even merging the two operations took longer than expected, and it undershot business targets.

In a commendably candid and detailed story, Sun-Times reporter David Roeder explained the seriousness of the problem and the consequences of the reductions. The merger attracted $61 million in donations and pledges from foundations and individuals, including Chicago’s philanthropy’s heaviest hitters, the MacArthur Foundation and the Pritzker family. (That is even more than the $50 million hotel entrepreneur Stewart Bainum Jr. committed to the launch of the Baltimore Banner)

Unfortunately, the launch grants are due to expire at the end of 2026, Roeder wrote, leaving Chicago Public Media headed toward “a fiscal cliff.”  Pressure to improve operating results with cuts is severe, and this week’s action is expected to save $4.2 million.

At the same time, with veteran high-profile journalists heavily represented in the group taking buyouts, it seems inevitable the Sun-Times will lose important attractions to its audience.

Those leaving include editorial page editor Lorraine Forte and two other editorial writers. Besides Telander and fellow columnist Rick Morrissey, Bears and White Sox beat writers took the buyout.

The Sun-Times rescue was the subject of glowing profiles as recently as late 2023. But by the middle of last year, reverses at both the Sun-Times and radio station WBEZ were too big to ignore. Melissa Bell, co-founder of Vox and former publisher of Vox Media, was brought in to engineer a turnaround.

She told Chicago Magazine in an October interview, “It’s a tough market. It’s a tough industry. I don’t think anyone’s blind to that, but it doesn’t feel in any way to me an organization that’s fearful or defensive. It feels open to what the future holds.”

In an interview with Roeder Tuesday, she conceded that memberships, contributions and advertising have not yet come close to covering losses.  The Sun-Times, in line with public media practice, does not have a paywall and so does not have digital subscription revenue.

As the second newspaper in a two-newspaper town, the Sun-Times has had decades of financial challenges and flirtations with closing. Over the last three years, the newspaper industry has been buffeted by what are euphemistically called audience and paid digital “headwinds.” Public media has also seen plateauing or losses in member and corporate support. And there is nothing particularly rosy in this year’s outlook.

When the acquisition was announced, I wondered, too — and wonder now — whether radio and newspaper news and advertising cultures are so different as to make collaboration harder than it looks.

No austerity in the Gannett corporate suite

And here’s yet another item from Poynter’s Rick Edmonds with the latest from Gannett.

Gannett named a new chief financial officer Tuesday, promoting Trisha Gosser, who has been deputy CFO. A required Securities and Exchange Commission filing shows she is getting a generous compensation package, as is her predecessor, Douglas Horne, in severance.

According to the filing, Gosser’s base salary will be $630,000, with an opportunity to earn 100% of that in addition as a “performance-based cash incentive award.” And she “is also eligible for a target long-term equity incentive award opportunity equal to $740,000.” That adds up to exactly $2 million.

Horne’s severance can total approximately $2.5 million, depending on the value of Gannett shares at the end of the month.

At a glance, these did not look to me way out of line with typical executive pay packages at mid-sized companies. But an online reference said for a $2.5 billion revenue company like Gannett, a CFO would likely have a base salary of around $500,000 and a bonus of 30% to 60%.

Lark-Marie Antón, Gannett’s chief communications officer, declined to comment when I asked about the size of the payouts or to say why the company had changed CFOs.

Since it was acquired by GateHouse Media in 2019, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper company with about 200 dailies, has done several rounds of layoffs and has reduced print frequency and printing operations. In February it sold the Austin American-Statesman to Hearst.

Italian newspaper launches generative AI experiment. It’s not going well

For this item, I turn it over to my colleague Alex Mahadevan, the director of MediaWise and Poynter faculty member. He has written, studied and taught about artificial intelligence tools and journalism. For this item, he writes about Il Foglio’s AI-generated broadsheet. Alex told me it’s innovative but lacks sufficient transparency and guardrails. Here’s what he had to write:

The image reeks of generative AI. The warped, watercolor-esque style. Reuters spelled “Redutrs” and El País with an accent over the wrong letter.

It’s currently the main image of the Italian newspaper Il Foglio’s article about AI use in newsrooms — which was written with AI. The image was created with ChatGPT, according to the cutline, as were several others in a new insert in its daily editions called Foglio AI.

“Foglio AI is the first daily newspaper in the world, a real daily newspaper, made every day, the result of discussions, the result of provocations, the result of news, made entirely using artificial intelligence,” the newspaper said in an announcement. “For everything. For the writing, the headlines, the captions, the quotes, the summaries. And sometimes even for the irony.”

I am usually a fan of bold experiments like this, and bristle at the hand-wringing that often comes in response to emerging technology.

But, so far, it’s a case study of how bad AI is at writing the news. Along with the misspellings in images, an article about Donald Trump’s falsehoods has inaccuracies and lacks attribution for anything, two missteps caught by Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust & Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech and former director of the International Fact-Checking Network.

The writing isn’t particularly engaging, and stories end with generic sign-offs. “In conclusion, Donald Trump’s recent statements highlight a tendency to spread inaccurate or misleading information on a wide range of topics. It is crucial for the public and the media to maintain a critical and fact-based approach when evaluating such claims, in order to ensure an informed and transparent public debate.”

As I’ve said before, these tools, if not used properly, write like a hungover college student rushing through a midterm exam.

“(I) don’t have more time to spend on this stunt just now but I expect it to deliver some preposterous results over the month of its pilot,” Mantzarlis wrote in a Bluesky post. “I wish the methodology behind it had been a little clearer.”

I can’t find an AI ethics policy anywhere on Il Foglio’s website. And the article announcing the experiment is vague about the production process, only providing what sounds like a catchy slogan: “We journalists will limit ourselves to asking the questions, in Foglio AI we will read all the answers.”

There are no details about whether humans edited the output. While the outlet discloses its use of ChatGPT and Grok under some images, it doesn’t explain which AI tool was used to write the articles.

To be fair, Il Foglio does ask for audience feedback. And, who knows, their readers may appreciate having more stories to read each week. Writing and reporting be damned.

The writer used Google Translate, Claude and ChatGPT to translate Il Foglio’s articles. Two Italian speakers, including Mantzarlis, were consulted to confirm the context of statements from the newspaper’s announcement.

Who’s up today?

President Donald Trump, shown here on Monday in Washington. (Pool via AP)

OK, we do have some Trump stuff today. In what has become an almost daily feature, which media person or outlet was President Donald Trump upset with on Wednesday?

Apparently, he was angry with Jacqui Heinrich, senior White House correspondent and anchor for Fox News. Trump has always had a love-hate relationship with Fox News — typically based on what the network says about him on any given day. Anything less than fawning and approval is typically met with scorn and ridicule from Trump.

On his Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump wrote, “I watched Jacqui Heinrich from Fox over the weekend and I thought she was absolutely terrible. She should be working for CNN, not Fox. Not surprisingly, I later found out that she’s a fan of the White House Correspondents Association!”

Wait, he’s surprised that a White House correspondent is a fan of the White House Correspondents’ Association, the very organization that represents, uh, White House correspondents?

What set Trump off?

Mediaite’s Isaac Schorr surmised, “Trump was seemingly referring to a segment from Sunday in which Heinrich noted that Tesla, the electric car company owned by Elon Musk, had raised concerns over Trump’s implementation of tariffs and asked Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) about Trump checking out a Tesla in front of the press on White House grounds.”

Not so fast

In Wednesday’s newsletter, I linked to a Bloomberg report that said ESPN chair Jimmy Pitaro has told friends and the Disney board that he is not interested in replacing Bob Iger as Disney CEO when Iger eventually retires. Pitaro has long been considered one of the favorites to take over Disney after Iger steps down, which made the Bloomberg report a tad surprising.

Pitaro addressed the Bloomberg story in an interview with The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand, and while he reiterated how much he enjoys working at ESPN, he didn’t sound as if he had totally closed the door on wanting to be considered for the Disney CEO job someday. And he sounds content, too.

Pitaro said, “I’ve been pretty consistent on this. I’m passionate about sports. I’m in my dream job. This is the job that, as I said before, I never thought I could have. The fact that I have it right now, I wake up every single day and I say to myself, ‘I have to earn this.’ I’m surrounded by the best executives in the industry and the best employees in the industry. I love the brand. I love our road map. I love what we’re doing right now. And so that is what I’ve said publicly, and I will continue to say publicly. Some folks have interpreted those words in a certain way, and that’s their prerogative. But all I can say, as I sit here right now, I love my job.”

More from Pitaro

In his conversation with Marchand, Pitaro also talked about being a bit surprised by the comments from Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred after ESPN ended its TV deal with MLB earlier this year. ESPN will carry baseball this season but opted out of the final three years of the deal that paid Major League Baseball $550 million a year.

At the time, MLB put out a statement saying the two sides “mutually agreed” to end their deal. But make no mistake, it was ESPN’s decision. The Athletic’s Evan Drellich obtained an internal memo written by Manfred that said, “We do not think it’s beneficial for us to accept a smaller deal to remain on a shrinking platform.”

A shrinking platform?

As Marchand notes, “ESPN has felt the effects of cable cord-cutting, which is in 65.3 million homes, according to Nielsen’s numbers last November. This fall, ESPN will offer its television services without a cable subscription, which The Athletic previously reported is expected to be priced in the $25-30 per month range.”

However, it also needs to be pointed out that ESPN/ABC is loaded with big sporting events, and in the coming years will host Super Bowls, the NBA and Stanley Cup Finals, and the women’s Final Four in basketball, plus a slew of other major sporting events.

Pitaro told Marchand, “To be honest with you, I don’t know where they stand. They made some statements once we opted out that were not flattering. We’re grown-ups. We’re unemotional. You kind of grin and bear it and you move on from that. I was caught a bit by surprise by some of those comments, but, at the same time, I’ve got to keep emotion out of it. I have to do what’s best for the business. If folks on that side are interested in re-engaging, we’re always going to listen.”

Clearly, Pitaro has not ruled out eventually signing another deal with the MLB. He told Marchand that ESPN loves baseball, and that there still is time to reengage in talks.

Media tidbits

• The Associated Press’ David Bauder with “CBS’ ‘60 Minutes’ is unflinching in its White House coverage in the shadow of Trump’s $20B lawsuit.”
• The Hollywood Reporter’s Alex Weprin with “ABC News Chief Sets New Mission and Structure As Division Seeks to Move on From Tough Layoffs.”
• For Nieman Lab, Laura Hazard Owen with “The New York Times picks up the shuttered FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracking database.”
• New York Times media reporter Benjamin Mullin tweeted Wednesday that Washington Post CEO and publisher Will Lewis told the Post Opinions section in an email last week that they would not be writing about the Post. Lewis reportedly wrote in his email, “I would also like to use this opportunity to restate our house policy on using our own pages to comment on the inner workings of The Washington Post. This is not permitted.”
• New York Times media correspondent Michael Grynbaum has a new book coming out on July 15: “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty that Reshaped America.” Hmm, sounds interesting. Grynbaum is a good reporter and writer, and Condé Nast — which produces The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue and GQ — is a good topic. Axios’ Mike Allen has more details about Grynbaum’s book.
• Writing for The Nation, Alisa Solomon, director of the arts and culture concentration at Columbia Journalism School, with “Trump Took Over the Kennedy Center, but Silencing the Arts Will Not Be So Easy.”

Hot type

• The Los Angeles Times’ Stephen Battaglio with “Why fans are still coming to ‘The Office’ 20 years later.”
• Ready for baseball season? The Athletic’s Grant Brisbee, Andy McCullough and Stephen J. Nesbitt have “MLB Preseason Power Rankings: Where is your favorite team starting the 2025 season?”

More resources for journalists

• The Poynter Leadership Academy is our signature program for established leaders and managers. Apply by March 24.
• Integrate principled AI guidelines into your newsroom operations. Start here.
• Master the complexities of immigration policy with Poynter’s Beat Academy training. Enroll now.
• Sharpen your editorial judgment with the Poynter ACES Advanced Certificate. Enroll now.

Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at tjones@poynter.org.

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