In this extraordinary time, local journalists are needed more than ever to help people understand the deadly COVID-19 virus, to shine a light on the government's handling of this crisis and to hold people and institutions accountable. But The Ledger's parent company, Gannett, is violating a union contract and forcing unpaid furloughs on all company employees, including the journalists who are the backbone of this paper, along with the two full-time editors we have left and our advertising staff.

We are all required to take one unpaid week off each month through June.

The announcement of the furloughs came the same week as departing Chief Financial Officer Ali Engel received a $4.8 million payout - enough to cover one week's salary for every Ledger employee for about 150 weeks, or nearly three years.

CEO Paul Bascobert - one of TWO Gannett CEOs - is declining his salary during this time - $180,000 out of his $720,000 salary. But he accepted a $4.5 million signing bonus in cash and stock when he was hired in November. Enough to cover one week of Ledger salaries for 140 weeks.

That same month, our outgoing CEO, Kirk Davis, received a $3.5 million payout. Enough to pay Ledger employees' salaries for 109 weeks.

The other CEO, Mike Reed, actually works for a company called Fortress, which was paid more than $35.7 million last year year for a "management fee." The only thing Fortress listed in financial papers as a cost was Reed's management.  It's safe to say that Reed's salary would cover the salaries of almost all Gannett employees' furloughs at 260 newspapers across the country.

In addition, the two companies that merged in November - Gannett and Gatehouse (The Ledger's owner from 2015-2019)- paid out $329 million in ad revenue and profits to shareholders over the last two years - all as the company continued to lay off more and more journalists, including multiple people on our editing staff almost a year ago, saying they needed to cut costs.

Twenty years ago, The Ledger's newsroom had nearly 100 employees and a reporter to cover every municipality, every cultural event and every crime in Polk County. Today, we have 12 journalists, including six on the metro staff, to cover 720,000 people, seven cities and county government in Polk County.

We're asking our friends, neighbors and subscribers to stand up for us and demand that Gannett practice better business decisions regarding executive bonuses and stock dividends, reduce the number of furloughs, and guarantee that there will be no layoffs during or after the furloughs. In addition, we would like those concerned with saving local journalism to demand the company provide a valuation for each newspaper so we can seek local buyers for our newspapers, who are more interested in serving our communities than corporate executives and shareholders.

Thank you - The Ledger News Guild