Pros
I work at a unit of BH Media Group, which owns lots of newspapers.. It is a great place to work, provided you are independently wealthy. The management hands out a cupcake to each employee on the Friday before each holiday, which is very sweet. The management will spare no expense on improvements to the physical plant. And they invest heavily in holiday decorations that are about the tackiest things imaginable. The management will hire a frozen lemonade truck once per summer and each employee is allotted one small frozen lemonade, upon presentation of your employee badge. (There is a downside to this, see below) The management will have an on-site picnic and provide free hot dogs and hamburgers (it is potluck for the sides). The departments also hold nice parties for all the workers who are leaving (see below). They have a company holiday party, catered by a cafeteria that is very popular with senior citizens and bums. The turkey is dry as a bone, the green beans are overcooked to mush, the stuffing tastes just like Stove Top and the gravy is so salty it would kill an infant. But, it is free. Management is quite willing to change a business practice or a policy VERY quickly and that can be a good thing if you despise corporate inertia. (But see below). The management is VERY nice to employees. They will frequently praise your work and joke around with you and slap your back and engage other cameraderie. But there is a good reason for this (figurative) stroking. (See below).
Cons
BH Media does not believe in raises. Ever. That is a company policy. The salary you are hired at will be your salary for your entire tenure there. It is frozen forever unless you are promoted. The free frozen lemonade may remind you of your frozen salary. In that way can be a downer. Management believes in another way of rewarding hard work. They call it a SPIFFY. A Spiffy is a bonus of a couple hundred bucks (it's a very small percentage of your salary) that you will get once per quarter if your company unit meets/exceeds its profitability expectations. If it does not you get nothing (except very flattering praise for your exceptional work). The bonus never gets built into your base. There are no cost-of-living increases. Management frankly states this in staff meetings. If you are interviewing there, you should inquire about this, and see if they are frank with you about it. Ask about the Spiffy, too. Essentially, management is playing two games here. The one for younger workers is called The Churn. They will hire young men and women cheap right out of college. In one or two years the young men and women move on because (understandably) they want to earn more money and they cannot do this at BH Media because it is against company policy. The game they're running with older workers is called The Screw. They know it's hard for older workers to get hired elsewhere, because of rampant and unchecked age discrimination in the hiring marketplace. And they know that older workers frequently have deep roots in a community so it's harder for them to move elsewhere. Management takes maximum advantage of both, and this breeds great resentment among older workers. There are hardly any company cars for work. This means if you are a district manager in circulation, you use your own car to run 3-4 routes daily (because few contract delivery people will do that job for what the company is willing to pay). And BH Media will give you 34 cents per mile driven, which is 22 cents below the federal allowance for tax writeoffs. I wonder (but do not know the answer) whether BH Media is claiming 56 cents of writeoff on every mile that they reimbursing employees 34 cents for? The problem with changing business practices very quickly is that frequently little planning goes into such maneuvers. That causes misadventures that can be quite entertaining (or frustrating if it's in your department). The health insurance sucks. You have high deductibles before any insurance kicks in, and the employees pay a lot for this coverage. It is a joke. BH Media charges employees subscriptions to the newspapers they work at. Employees get a 50 percent discount. This is almost unheard of in the industry (where almost everyone gets a free subscription). But, they do not force you to buy it.