More CNHI

Thanks for the recap, Baron. Ugh....

 

Here's the story. I clicked on "View the story on the full site."

http://bit.ly/YiOXT4

 

Wait a second: Bill Ketter is in a position of authority for the ENTIRE company? That's astonishing.

 

People at The Patriot Ledger hated Bill Ketter. All I've got.

 

The 14-16 pages quote was to appease corporate. I'm on this desk, and we're churning out between 10-12 pages a night. Writing headlines, sometimes getting wire photos, some copy editing but mostly designing. It hasn't been that bad so far, but we still have a few more dailies to add.

 

the more pages you churn out, the less time you have to think about being creative and making them actually look good. the more pages you churn out, the faster you crank out the section fronts.

 

"We have both kinds of templates: horizontal AND vertical!"

 

who woulda thunk? ; )

 

I haven't read all of this forum, but yes, this is happening and has been in the works for a while. They recently completed a move on papers to a composing hub (I believe from basically the same newspapers that are being added to this design hub), basically every ad in our papers are now designed at a central location and have been for a couple of months.

This is supposed to be completed in the next month I believe. Then the move to a paywall on the Internet is next, I believe that's happening by the end of the second quarter at all CNHI locations.

 

I'mnot a huge fan of the pagination hubs, because it prevents people like myself from multi-tasking. Quite often I would write a story or cover an event and also lay out pages in the same shift, which was valuable at smaller shops.

But I accept that hubs are the wave of the future, so, fine... set them up properly, get the right people who can communicate remotely and multi-task and you have a chance to make it work. Will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

 

I'm the opposite. Design and copy-editing are different disciplines. It was nice, and better, when you had separate teams for each. I'd rather not do both every night.

 

I can tell you what we've been told is they are looking to drastically cut stringers/correspondents because of this. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see reporter cuts as well...

They are NOT going to be doing any editing, headline writing, etc. We have been instructed to give them print-ready copy, they will be paginating only. We're supposed to just send them the typical budget with what story is going to be the lead as well as any art or sidebars we may have.

I think they said the goal was to spend less than 30 minutes per page. If it's anything like the design hub, sh*t is going to get interesting when the paginators have to take their furloughs.

Edit: after reading someone else's post that I hadn't seen yet, they apparently doing some headline writing...as a newsroom getting ready to send stuff to the hub, we are supposed to only rely on them to paginate.

One plus of this was new computers for most of the newsrooms I believe. One newsroom that received new computers was running on like, Mac OS 10.2 with Quark 4 or something insane like that.