Working with a regional design center

Well, that would be expected to be your take, given your posting history. I think more of Rip than that. But that's institutional knowledge of sj.com.

 

I can't speak for the drudgeries of, say, a Gannett design hub. But the design center I work with is full of talented, experienced editors who do great work at a demanding pace. Every single one of them.

 

My doubts in what you say lie with the "great work" if you're talking to people at the destination. It could look like great work to you as people are hitting "send." It might not be at the destination. Because, as I'm sure you know, it's not all about the pretty pictures. It's about the content.

 

Plenty of problems can be traced to the feeders at the "destination," you know. They dump and run a lot.

 

Given what they've probably lived with, I can understand their work mode.

The absolute last thing I wanted when the cuts were made was to be "awarded" one of the few in-house editor jobs. A whole lot of nothin'.

 

I've been on both sides, obviously. Deskers still in the trenches have my respect.

"No, we can't fix the story now. The editors here have all signed off on it."

 

His recent work here would be a strong indicator.

 

Not one person here hasn't agreed that those jobs are tough -- jobs that take a certain ability to be able to take hard hits every night and never score a TD. The problem is it is also a haven for a let's-get-by standard when, instead, they should perhaps just have a machine at the entrance one hooks up to that sucks the life out of you before the shift even begins.

Given those circumstances, not many real success stories at many of them, as in you take a bad idea because of inexperience or lack of knowledge from a pubby on down to an 'editor' and their BS that "We're putting out a great newspaper" (with circulation down 30 percent from year to year, if lucky)....

So you send chicken s--- to design, they spin their magic (if you are lucky enough to have art shot by a real photographer and not just a reporter who loves his or her iphone that allows 'art' of 6 people sitting at a meeting drinking coffee)... and the only one who gets any value out of it ends up being -- 1. kin folk of the 6 people in the blurry picture; 2. people who love simplistic stories about a meeting where 6 people voted that a community can have a picture of a blue turkey hanging from the stop lights every Thanksgiving.

I often think that the newspapers we produce today -- not so much at a national level but the small ones -- are the newspapers Forrest Gump would read and find interesting because they are entertainment -- at best -- only. If they could only include a color by numbers and find a way to put crayons with every paper, the financial crisis would end -- course, that money would not go to the hard-working newsrooms or editing centers, it would go to corporate so the bottom line is a profit of 20 million instead of 8 million. God knows, 8 million profit ain't enough.

Not about all of the people, Rip. It's about the suits and the BS they shovel out. If only those shovels could be used to bury them under their BS, as the world would probably be a better place.

 

And there's another point.

This whole panic-driven move to kill print occurred when newspapers stopped showing a 20% profit margin. It went down to 10-12%, and the most successful newspapers weren't able to hold up the weak sisters in the chain any longer.

 

If you're a big chain, you likely have a ton of debt to service. It can take a 10 percent "profit margin" or more just to do that, after which, of course, your real profit margin is zero.

 

MC

McClatchey, Lee and the New York Times are three places that have a lot of bank debt and/or pension fund liabilities and need to pay that down. One scary thing for executives of the newspaper industry is that they have watched revenues basically go down for 10 straight years. In the good old days a paper generally had an monopoly and could raise advertising rates enough to increase revenue every year. That is why banks were so willing to lend to newspapers, because it was perceived they would always get paid. But know it is likely revenues will go down next year but the debt payments.

P.S. McClatchey is truly an example of a dead company walking. Companies with debt to EBITDA of more than seven to one are considered candidates for the hospice. McClatchey is about 14 to 1.

 

I wonder why McClatchy didn't go Chapter 11 like Tribune did. Of course, it "only" had about $2 billion in debt a few years ago (as opposed to TRB's $12 billion), but still . . .