More (bad) industry news

From my pipeline: 2 papers in Alabama: Decatur Daily and TimesDaily (Florence) will begin outsourcing their pages to Gatehouse in Austin, Texas in late May. 7 or 8 people will be unemployed at that time. Word came down Friday and it was totally out of the blue, except that apparently it had been in the works for a while.

 

I thought all newspapers outsourced the design of their pages. Oh year, we are talking about Alabama. Word reaches those parts slowly.

 

I want to know what kind of skill it takes to work at those design centers because they do truly horrible work.

 

You have to be able to smile while making $23,000 a year.

 

The layout is horrible. There's no flow to the sections. There's grayspace everywhere - it seems like every story is stacked on each other on the inside in a 6x6 format. Sure, they have some cool graphics here and there, but for the most part it's just garbage. It sucks because in RI there's two papers that have good design and both are hyper-local (a daily and a weekly in the same company designed by two different guys who do greast work), so it does the rest of the state no good. The rest of the state's broadsheets put out trash (but like to pretend it's a fucking Monet) and the tabloid is so stacked with ads there isn't much room for proper design.
I don't think the people who live/work in this state realize what a truly great newspaper looks/reads like.

 

Yes, it does mostly suck. Spent several years working in a Regional Design Center for Lee, until they closed us down late last year. Landed at a much better place that appears to still value good work in all facets of the business. Happy to come to work now; the cattle-call of the design center is haunting me less and less every day.

 

Smiling is optional ...

 

Having worked in both of those shops in the past, I cannot begin to tell you how much this sucks.

My wife, who once worked in one of those shops, can have the last word on my behalf: "Whoever did this is a heartless bastard."

I'll concur.

 

Any business that outsources any function to GateHouse is deciding that the beans are more important than having any semblance of quality.

Gotta love how we keep kicking the people who still pay for the damn news in the nuts, repeatedly. Great business sense to piss off your best customers.

 

Some executive whose newspapers have worked out a production deal with GateHouse recently called the company a "low-cost producer." In other words: In terms of quality, GateHouse is the journalistic equivalent of a Yugo. Or Acme Industries of Wile E. Coyote infamy.

The Cox job cuts detailed in a post last week supposedly are a GateHouse thing. In addition to the six jobs lost in West Palm Beach, more than 20 positions were eliminated from a central features desk in Dayton, with production of Cox's features sections soon to be done by GateHouse. Word is GateHouse also is taking on some news pages and shared sports pages currently produced in West Palm Beach; hence, the staff cuts there.

 

Design centers, for having 8 hours to produce nice layouts are consistently unimpressive to be nice about it. I am pretty confident many of the reporters I have and do work with could have done the same work as designers and that is 6 years ago when it was write a story, take prep calls, make budgets and design pages. Crazy to think all of that and more in 8-hour shift and could do the same work as designers.

I was copy editor, now a reporter and worked with design center on pages and I think yes, we can pile on designers, but really those working with them are just as much to blame. Not on high horse, but I work with some 'producers' that really don't give a sh**. Not hard to IM them back-and-forth to improve the pages. Many just go with what designer does and that is where the product goes down the tubes. Want a different layout just tell them and work with them and a lot of producers are lazy and just go with it. Move different pics that tell a better story from the jump to the cover or vise versa etc. The other day there was a CP headline 3 decks deep at like 40-point font. That is as much on us as it is on the designer especially with a boring headline like "(pro team) likely looking at TE options ahead of Draft." That is a horrible CP headline. Horrible and that isn't on the designers as much as it is on the people that can just say hey that won't work and improve headline and have them bump up font and make picture bigger if you need to to fit copy.

Yes, the designers can give more initially to have less work improving the layout and paper as a whole, but onus is on editors and producers, others to make sure it looks good and not just going with dogsh**. At least put some window dressing on that dogsh**.

 

I've been out of newspapers (was a small daily SE) since 2010 and left just before my former paper when to a local design hub. And so I've wondered - what is that job like? Hours, responsibilities, morale - it's hinted in the above quote, but I'm not sure I've read from anyone who's worked one of those jobs. I'd be interested in hearing what it's like to gain a better frame of reference.