Centralized desk talk from GateHouse

GateHouse has been slashing practically since the day it bought the Copley papers. I somehow lasted a year and a half after the sale became finalized.

The kiss of death for me was when they gave me a glowing annual review and then told me I was in the budget for 2009; two weeks into 2009, I was gone, a luxury they chose not to afford.

It is a horribly run company with a bunch of dimwits at the top. Dimwits who -- imagine this! -- manage to keep their jobs while they lay waste to the product and the employees who try to produce it.

Forgive me if I sound a little bitter ... because I am.

 

I can see how centralized desks work for wire copy but I don't see the point for local coverage. People still have to lay out the pages, edit the articles, write headlines. And it will most likely will go into one paper.
If the goal is for people to be more productive, editors can be at their home newspaper and help out papers remotely in their down time.

 

This could be said about pretty much every newspaper company still in existence right now. Remember the good ole days when there was good and bad companies to work for? Now everyone is trying to one up each other on how they fuck their future former employees.

 

From my limited experience the "point" is something like this.

Two spokes lay off a combined 48 people. One hub hires 44 people. Where's the savings? Other than having slightly fewer people, the Hub will be hiring 38-40 younger, cheaper people and maybe sprinkling in 4-6 veterans (also hired on the cheap, just not as cheap as the younger ones). People making $60K with 4-5 weeks vacation are replaced with people making $25K-$45K with 3 weeks vacation.

Now it's true that a story only appearing in Spoke paper cannot be handled any more efficiently at the Hub. But the copy editor handling that story also will be handling several stories (or roundups) in his shift that will appear in more than one paper. Thus, the copy editor only needs to give it a first read once, then only tweak length and headline for each paper. It really is cheaper and more efficient, but there are undesirable side effects --- copy editor at Hub likely will not know if a street name is wrong from a paper 150 miles away. But then, that's something we all need to learn anyway when we are new on the job in a new city.

 

It's not just street names that go unchallenged. It's questionable news judgment. That's why the combined McClatchy copy desk in Charlotte ran a story about the Davidson soccer game (a Charlotte school) instead of North Carolina-Notre Dame (which happened to involve the Nos. 1-2 ranked teams) in the Raleigh paper, which covers Chapel Hill locally.

 

I'm not saying it can't be done, but it seems to me that the more a newspaper is detached from the community it covers, the more the community it covers will become detached from the paper.

As much as the beancounters would like to think so, readers are not dumb. They're going to notice.

 

Right or wrong, the suits have decided there's no margin to be made on quality. They want Lucy in the chocolate factory.

 

I left the Springfield (IL) SJ-R back in October, about six weeks after they announced they were bringing in their version of "The Bobs".

Back around Thanksgiving the folks there were told merit raises would be instated in the third quarter. Then word comes down they eliminate the copy desk... starting in the third quarter.

The axe was swung again there on Friday, with at least two newsroom jobs eliminated and a handful more throughout the building. Dark, dark days for Illinois' oldest newspaper.... and a bunch of talented people who worked a hell of a lot harder than GateHouse chose to work for them.

 

I saw one of my former papers last week.
It used to be renowned, but now it has been shredded.
Just totally, absolutely gutted front to back. It's very sad.

 

That's a shame, D-D. Similar backstabbing has been done at other GateHouse papers in Illinois, as Mike Nadel mentioned in this thread. There's been some talented, loyal people cut loose in recent years in Rockford and Peoria, too.

Always great to see corporate beancounters throw the copy desk (and other newsroom employees) under the bus to appease the profit needs of shareholders.

Those employees PROVIDE the company's profits, you GateHouse corporate assholes.

 

The thought that a skeleton crew of a newsroom -- which is all that a lot of places have left anymore -- is cutting into profit margins is laughable to me.

FTEs are not the reason GateHouse is in debt. GateHouse is the reason GateHouse is in debt.

At least Mike Reid still gets his bonus check every year, though.

 

We are asked to go hyperlocal with skeleton crews but must also institute corporate mandated editorial content pieces that eat into our time and make us look shallow and cookie cutter. Not to mention the web video, photo galleries, web updates, the we're not putting this on the web updates, asking readers to fill our paper for us, and do all of this while not getting OT.

Oh and we have the regular take an hour out of your day to listen to a web presentation about the next mandate from on high that you will be fired for if you dont do and you choose to work on your actual paper instead.