Good morning. 
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-seven. Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 37m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 64% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred fifth day.
Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board also meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1963, the Bell System in the United States officially launches a push-button telephone.
Recommended for reading in full:
Erik Gunn reports Another New Owner for Journal Sentinel:
The merger announcement produced widespread predictions that further staff cuts are ahead for the new company, which will own about 1 in 6 newspapers across the country. The two predecessor firms have already cut their workforces repeatedly in the last several years.
Besides the Journal Sentinel, Gannett owns daily newspapers in Appleton, Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Manitowoc, Marshfield, Oshkosh, Sheboygan, Stevens Point, Wausau and Wisconsin Rapids. GateHouse owns the Daily Reporter in Milwaukee, which covers construction and development, and the monthly Wisconsin Law Journal.
Under the merger agreement, New Media is buying Gannett for roughly $1.4 billion in cash and stock, financed with a five-year, 11.5% interest loan of $1.8 billion from Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm. The transaction is scheduled to close Tuesday, Nov. 19.
Naveena Sadsivam reports This Pipeline Cuts Across a Reservation. Wisconsin Might Make Tribal Members Felons for Protesting It:
For more than 60 years, one section of Enbridge’s elaborate network of pipelines carrying petroleum across Canada has taken a detour through the Bad River Reservation in northern Wisconsin.
Some of the easements that allowed Enbridge to keep its Line 5 pipeline on the tribe’s land expired in 2013, and negotiations between Enbridge and the tribe to renew the leases fell through. Yet Line 5 is still funneling Enbridge’s petroleum across the Bad River Reservation. The tribe says Enbridge is trespassing, and has sued the company to kick it off their property.
If a bill awaiting Wisconsin’s Democrat Governor Tony Evers’ signature becomes law, members of the tribe protesting Enbridge’s operations on their reservation could face fines of $10,000 and up to six years in jail.
“It provides these illegally operating companies with the right to basically charge someone with a felony for being on their land,” said Philomena Kebec, a citizen of Bad River and former tribal prosecutor. “And this could be an Indian person on Indian land where the company is illegally trespassing.”
….
The Bad River Reservation, an approximately 125,000-acre tract on the south shore of Lake Superior, was established in 1854 by a treaty with the federal government. Although the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Tribe of Chippewa Indians is sovereign, state criminal laws apply within the reservation as a result of a federal law called “Public Law 280,” which grants several states—including Wisconsin—law enforcement authority within tribal nations. As a result, if Governor Evers signs the new bill, it would apply to Native Americans on tribal land.
This will certainly hurt the already-horrible J-S. The 11.5% interest rate five-year loan tells us a lot. Gannett is promising to cut it’s losses from 7-9% to only 3-4% in the next three years:
So the strategy is to buy a chain of newspapers that will lose you money with a loan at usurious rates??
Might I suggest that there is likely a very different strategy in mind? How about sacking any local coverage, keeping the names of the newspapers on-line from a bunker in McLean, VA with a half-assed generic lifestyle focus, selling all the real estate, then paying off the loan early and pocketing the gravy?
This is how democracy dies…
It’s hard to see how these chains survive. Looks like McClatchy, by its own account, has pension problems. https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2019/mcclatchy-stock-crashed-friday-after-company-warned-of-pension-funding-crisis/
Very true about where this is heading: sacking local coverage.