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Ailes Heats Up Cold Spring with Newspaper War
How much does Roger Ailes love business bloodsport? Enough that, having evidently bored of trouncing CNN and MSNBC in the cable-news rating race, he's trying to wage a newspaper war in New York's sleepy Putnam County.
As I've reported before, Ailes has over the past year acquired two weekly newspapers, the Putnam County News & Recorder and the Putnam County Courier, installing his wife, Elizabeth, as publisher of both.
This week, the News & Recorder went after its chief competition, the Gannett-owned Journal News, with a populist-tinged broadside that will be familiar to anyone who's followed Fox News's persecution of GE and The New York Times.
In an article headlined "Journal News in Trouble: Shrinking daily newspaper tries to cover Putnam from Westchester," reporter Joe Lindsley Jr. recaps the Journal News's recent layoffs, circulation declines and format-shrinkage, as well as the cost-cutting measures, including furloughs, at Gannett.
That's the set up. This is the punch line:
While Journal News staffers have been losing their jobs, the paper's brass seems to have escaped the recession, for now. Mr. [Michael] Fisch, president and publisher, purchased a $3.1 million dollar home on Penwood Road in Mount Kisco in January 2008. He also owns properties in the upscale communities of Mesa, Arizona, and Lakewood, Colorado. The paper's editor, Mr. Henry Freeman, lives in Mount Kisco on Greeley Court, where home prices average about a million dollars.
Lindsley also accuses Fisch of hypocrisy for saying that it's fair game to publish the addresses of newspaper owners (and the salaries of policemen) but not those of newspaper publishers. The story's behind a pay wall, unfortunately.
I asked Elizabeth Ailes whether she's looking to pick a fight with the competition. This was her response, via email: "Absolutely not. We covered a decline in the local newspaper business and responded to a few things that they had brought up in their coverage of our purchasing the paper."
I haven't heard back from Fisch.
