The Star-Ledger is ceasing print production in less than two months. NJ Advance Media’s poor reorganization effort has put a massive dent in Devils reporting while removing a potential future national writer from the hockey world.
Over the past 10 or so years, New Jersey Devils fans have had a very inconsistent group of reporters covering the team. From Tom Gulitti, to Rich Chere, to Chris Ryan, to Andrew Gross, to nobody, to Ryan Novozinsky, to Gabriel Trevino. These days, The Bergen Record, having merged with North Jersey Media Group and owned by the Gannett Company/USA Today, is more focused on New York than covering sports teams that play in New Jersey. That is what happens when private equity funds from Manhattan own your local paper. The Star-Ledger, meanwhile, gained many Devils readers back when they brought on Ryan Novozinsky to cover the team. Novozinsky’s reporting spurred feelings of change in Devils fans’ hearts and minds, appreciating the attention to detail that had been largely missing from team coverage after Gulitti became a regional writer for NHL.com.
As it happens, The Bergen Record is not the only New Jersey paper that is owned by people who are unserious about protecting the integrity of local news. When Ryan Novozinsky announced he was leaving the Devils beat to cover the New York Giants for NJ.com, I wondered. This was August 7, at this point, and Novozinsky was replaced by Trevino after Novozinsky finished out a week’s worth of articles. Novozinsky last published a piece on the Devils on August 14, and Trevino first published about the Hughes brothers on the NHL 25 cover on August 20. I wondered, as a subscriber to NJ.com, what changes would follow? As far as Devils coverage went, the entire month of September is empty in the NJ.com archive.
On Wednesday morning, October 30, NJ.com dropped a couple of bombs on the Jersey news world. First announcing that The Star-Ledger — the largest newspaper in the state — would cease print production due to “rising costs.” The Star-Ledger was not the only casualty of the day, as that same production facility printed The Jersey Journal, with that facility’s closing killing Hudson County’s local newspaper, as the Journal was not willing to attempt a transition to online publication. NJ Advance Media also announced that The Times of Trenton and the South Jersey Times would join The Star-Ledger in online publication.
NJ Advance Media claims that NJ.com does very well, “as the #1 local news site in the country,” with a readership that rivals smaller national publications. Print media might lose a couple dollars in comparison to the easy advertising of the internet, but a lot of people read the work that comes from Star-Ledger reporters. The only explanation for the level of reorganization these papers — many of which are owned by the same people or groups — is profit motive. For UVaToday, Bryan McKenzie wrote in 2023:
“The big hedge funds and the big conglomerates that buy up newspapers around the country and then starve them and don’t invest in the basic functions of a newspaper in a community are really performing an enormous disservice,” said Evan Smith, practitioner fellow with the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy.
“The problem with owners of news organizations outside of the community is that they don’t have a sense of what the community wants or needs. They don’t have an investment, in a literal and existential sense, in the well-being and civic health of the community,” he said.
McKenzie notes that Gannett — the company that owns The Bergen Record and NorthJersey.com — closed 127 newspapers between 2019 and March 2023, firing 10,100 employees in the three years after they merged with Gatehouse. Obviously, Gannett is not the only offender. Advance Publications, which owns NJ Advance Media and The Star-Ledger, owns newspapers in several states, with their most significant local presences being in New Jersey, Michigan, and Alabama. Advance also owns the company that operates several national publications, including The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair, among others.
Large media corporations with advertising interests and investors who have their hands in too many pots, with subsidiaries that rise and fall together despite (supposedly) not directly coordinating their efforts with each other, only care about the dollar at the end of the day. Now, over the next month — if it hasn’t happened already — The Star-Ledger will see layoffs, as NJ.com reported the affected employees will receive severances. As Terrence McDonald of the New Jersey Monitor wrote back in October, claims from NJ Advance Media that the end of print publication allows them to invest more into their journalists is “just rosy spin from a company that just axed dozens of people from an outlet that has shed hundreds of jobs in the last decade.”
So I find myself with questions about the way NJ Advance Media went about the shift in their Devils coverage. Were the winds of change already blowing, leading them to move one of their best writers from hockey to football, where he would presumably get more readers and certainly have more security from potential future layoffs by their corporate leaders? I think this is possible, as a look at Gabe Trevino’s author section on NJ.com shows his page as riddled with posts on buying seats for college football bowl games, while Ryan Novozinsky has been allowed to focus on the Giants in full despite not being the only football writer on staff. While Novozinsky currently has the run to do his job, it is clear that the Devils are low-priority for NJ Advance Media, with Trevino being asked to create broader, simpler content for clicks. I find myself thinking that everything in this situation with NJ Advance Media is linked in some way. They love that ad money, but they don’t love preserving institutions.
And why wouldn’t they love ad money? By NJ Advance Media’s own words, they are a “data-driven marketing agency.” Providing news is secondary — just a byproduct — of having acquired, merged, and closed so many newspapers. They are here to cut costs and publish as cheaply as possible in pursuit of the most advertising profit they can muster. And, in effect, NJ Advance Media and Gannett have taken tens of thousands of local jobs away while severely limiting the reach of news: and not just sports news.
Ryan Novozinsky was a fantastic hockey reporter in his time covering the Devils. He proactively contacted agents, reached out to contacts, and did his best to get ahead of things. For a local, fresh-out-of-college beat writer, he was good. And he still is good, but I think his work gets drowned out a bit more in the article-a-minute sphere of football coverage. I used to think, oh, we are going to lose this guy to national coverage like we did with Gulitti. But that would have been very welcome. In the NHL’s current media landscape, there are very few writers — if any — that I would take over Novozinsky in a one-or-the-other decision. I hope Novozinsky, whichever direction his career takes him in the future, gets the recognition he deserves. I just think he could have been one of the guys in hockey.
At this point, though, I do not know what to make of Trevino. I do not remember seeing any reports from NJ.com on the Dawson Mercer negotiation, which was resolved at the beginning of preseason. Had Novozinsky still been employed as a Devils writer, I imagine we would have seen reports prior to Mercer’s signing. That is just one example, though, as Trevino’s coverage has been spotty, and he has seemed disinterested at times. However, I do feel he has improved since the start of the season. His piece on Legare was very nice. Perhaps hockey is not his sport, and he is just making the best of it while trying to pick up on the things that fans expect from the beat reporters. But I also cannot help but feel that NJ Advance Media did their best to fail him in this transition. What resources does Gabe seem to have? How much time is he spending creating click-content for NJ.com instead of reporting on the Devils?
The media landscape for the Devils now more resembles the recent years when Amanda Stein was the primary local source, though she is currently more of a team content creator than a reporter. Trevino’s best content at the moment is not very dissimilar from the work that Stein and Sam Kasan. It is a disappointing turn for a team beat, as Novozinsky seemed to seek out information rather than wait for it to be posted by national writers or by the team content reporters.
I do not know where NJ Advance Media plans on taking the Devils’ beat next, but I am not looking forward to it. With the limited resources they seem to be allocating, I would not be surprised at all if it went away yet again. I can only hope that Trevino continues to grow into the role and that NJ Advance Media surprises me by letting him focus on the Devils while giving him more resources to make contacts and get on the ground, getting information in the way readers want to see from their journalists, whether they work in sports or otherwise.
I do know that when The Star-Ledger ceases print production in a month and a half, I will be reconsidering my NJ.com subscription. NJ Advance Media’s priorities seem more aligned with their profit motive than they are with the goal of providing good, reliable information to their readers through local writers and journalists. So, when the time comes — when we lose our biggest newspaper in the state — I encourage all of you to reconsider that subscription with me.