Gannett has named Blake Kaplan as the new executive editor of the Bergen Record and NorthJersey.com.
He replaced Dan Sforza, who left in the fall and is now the weekend editor at the New York Times.
“I’m super excited for this new challenge,” Kaplan said in a social media post.
Kaplan spent over 31 years at McClatchy, a national chain that operates 29 daily newspapers in fourteen states. His job as regional editor at the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Mississippi, was eliminated in November; in November 2024, the newspaper reduced its number of print editions to twice a week.
While McClatchy has no newspapers in New Jersey, its corporate headquarters is in Chatham; Chatham Asset Management purchased McClatchy in a 2020 bankruptcy sale.
In 2021, journalists at the Bergen Record, the Daily Record, and the New Jersey Herald voted overwhelmingly to unionize, amid allegations of union-busting that Gannett executives, including Sforza, were forced to confront.
Labor tensions escalated in November 2022, when employees at six New Jersey Gannett newspapers staged a one-day strike just four days before the midterm election. The same six papers walked out again in June 2023, on the eve of the primary election.
A threatened 2025 walkout was narrowly averted after Gannett agreed to a contract following a four-year delay. By then, more than half of the journalists who had signed the original unionization letter had already left.
Compounding the turbulence, New Jersey eliminated in June the requirement that local and county governments publish public notices in newspapers, a change expected to significantly reduce revenue.
Several New Jersey-based journalists have accepted Gannett’s latest buyout offer, though the company has not disclosed who.
Meanwhile, print circulation at the Bergen Record has collapsed since Gannett purchased the paper from the Borg family for a reported $39.3 million — falling from 136,074 daily copies at the end of 2016 to just 14,196 last year.
