Sutton and Croydon TUSC

SOLIDARITY WITH SUTTON NUJ STRIKE!

Sutton and Croydon TUSC would like to express its solidarity with the strikers at the Sutton Guardian and elsewhere, who are on strike due to job cuts caused by corporate "efficiency" drive.

Below is a short piece we published on our Facebook page a few weeks ago about who owns the "local" Guardian.  Here is a report in the Guardian newspaper.

"The Sutton Guardian is our “local” paper. The Croydon Guardian does the same for Croydon. 

You might fondly imagine that both are community based papers, concerned for the people of Sutton & Croydon, holding the local powerful to account, and keen to expose local shenanigans in the Council and other places (we are not, of course, implying there are any). 

However, both “Guardians” are owned by Newsquest Media Group. The third largest local paper producer in the UK, with 300 titles. 

Newsquest itself was set up in 1995 when New York buy-out firm KKR spent £210 million of largely borrowed money to buy UK Reed Regional Newspapers, from Elsevier.

After selling various pieces of this publishing mini-empire and buying various pieces from other media groups, such as Pearsons (who own the Financial Times), the “refreshed” company was sold, in 1999, to Gannett Inc, for £920 million - suggesting a very a tidy profit.

KKR is Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts. Before they set up their buy-out operation, they all worked for Bear Stearns in New York. That’s the firm that went bust early in 2008, helping precipitate the global financial meltdown.

Gannett Inc is the ultimate owner of the Guardian. Gannett’s fatuous byline (which most firms seem to want to have these days) is, - “Its all within reach.”

Its headquarters are in Virginia, USA. Amongst other things, the corporation owns 43 television stations. Its total assets are worth around 7 billion dollars.

The Sutton Guardian, The Croydon Guardian: as local as any other subsidiary of a global corporate behemoth!"