Who Owns the Media: Gannett

Gannett 🐔🐔

Capitulation Rank: Compromising
Category: Newspaper & Publishing 
Market Cap:  $559 million

A 2023 Boston Globe article describes how Mike Reed “may well lead the league in bad decisions.” The result,  according to the Globe, is “brutal and probably irreversible damage on already struggling news organizations all across this country.” Reed comes from a private-equity background with a reputation for buying newspapers and cutting them to the bone — mostly through mass newsroom layoffs — then leaving them a ghostly shadow of their former selves.

As Gannett’s chief executive, Reed oversaw USA Today’s decision in October 2024 not to endorse a presidential candidate. The national newspaper had endorsed Biden in 2020 and opposed Trump in 2016.

The 2024 USA Today decision not to endorse didn’t win the newspaper conglomerate any favors. In December 2024, Trump filed suit against the Gannett-owned daily Des Moines Register for publishing a pre-election poll that found Kamala Harris leading among voters in Iowa. While the case lacks merit, many fear Gannett will follow the path of another media conglomerate, Disney, which settled its defamation suit with Trump to avoid a drawn-out and costly legal battle.

DEI Doublespeak:

Gannett’s media network includes USA Today and more than 200 local-media brands. Their website states that the company embraces diversity as a corporate value. But in April 2025, Gannett capitulated to President Trump’s anti-DEI executive order, announcing that it had stripped its website of mentions of diversity and would no longer publish demographic data about its workforce.

What It Owns:

Gannett is the largest U.S. newspaper publisher, and the second-largest newspaper publisher in the UK. Gannett’s U.S. outlets include the national newspaper USA Today, and dozens of local outlets from the Aberdeen American News  to the York Daily Record. Through its UK subsidiary Newsquest, Gannett controls hundreds of international outlets from Bolton News to the York Star. Gannett also owns dozens of advertising-solutions software companies.