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Globe Gazette to fire as many as 12 employees, admits $2 million used printer is worthless

The once-proud Globe-Gazette is
one step closer to the abyss.

MASON CITY – The geniuses that call the business shots at the Globe Gazette in Mason City are firing as many as 12 employees due to the failure of the $2 million used printer they bought and installed just a few years ago.

Many in town have noticed the Globe Gazette’s ever-shrinking size, razor-thin pages, slanted journalism, glaring errors and extremely blurry photos in what is left of the once-proud newspaper that produces nothing on Monday’s.

Back in 2014, the Globe proudly proclaimed their “flexo pressline” printer was being removed from the building and a used “refurbished” Goss Urbanite “offset printer” press was purchased and to be installed at a cost of $2 million.

“Our company is making a huge investment in this facility,” the former Publisher of the Globe Gazette, the late Howard Query said.  The “new” used printer was supposed to make their newspaper better.

According to a 2014 report from NewsandTech.com, “Offset printing will provide a more consistent print job with sharper color, allowing the paper to provide “the quality we want to produce for our customers,” late Globe Gazette Publisher Howard Query said. “It’s a new beginning,” Query said. “After Wednesday’s issue (was) printed, we (pulled) the plug on our flexo press, a technology many companies thought years ago was the wave of the future. But it just wasn’t cost-effective.”

But, as anyone who has picked up a paper in Mason City knows, the photos, images and graphics in the Globe’s print products never looked good and were consistently blurry and unprofessional-looking.

Tuesday, the Globe Gazette, in a slyly-worded statement, said they would be printing their newspapers in Des Moines and attributed the decision to “a cost-prohibitive capital investment that would be required to meet the demands of today’s advertising and subscriber customers.”  We are to ascertain, then, that their behemoth printer sucks and likely due to the fact the parent company Lee Enterprises is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, a second try at getting a printer that actually works would not be happening.

The Globe said Gannett publishing services in Des Moines will be printing the very small, thin newspaper they offer.

The Globe Gazette has fallen on hard times
and will likely never recover.

As a result of their print operation going out of business, the Globe says they are firing up to a dozen employees.

“The affected employees, about a dozen, are part-time workers. Those who qualify will receive severance packages,”  The Globe admitted.  NIT will find out what that amounts to, if anything, through our sources.  (They didn’t have the guts to write that those folks are actually losing their jobs – just “affected”.)  For some reason, the Globe slipped into their statement Cerro Gordo county’s low unemployment rate, seemingly saying that they can’t hire anyone for the glamorous job of working in their distribution center and that may have contributed to their decision to go out of the printing business.

Just last month, the Globe was still advertising for a press operator – a job no one seemed to want nor will ever hold.

NIT will report the next phase of the Globe Gazette’s obvious downsizing and possible going-out-of-business announcement.

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