Gannett digital production hubs

Gannett has posted job openings for digital producers to work in Nashville and Phoenix. But the producers aren't working for the Tenneseean and the Republic, they are working for the "USA TODAY NETWORK"

Word on the street is they want upwards of 35 producers in each hub. Sounds like digital production is going the same direction as print design, with a few hubs full of people who don't know anything about individual local markets doing the production for all ~100 websites.

 

As a former Gannettoid with friends still stuck working there, I heard the same thing. My former site is saying they will keep 1 producer at the local level, but everything else, producing on the digital level, the last line of defense in copy editing, shipped off to 300 miles away. So in the newsroom on a typical night, you could have no one manning the ship at the local sites.

The friend of mine has asked what happens to social media work, and has gotten different answers at different times she's asked. If they are going to ship off Twitter and Facebook social media work to someone 2 time zones away, I can't imagine how badly that could turn out.

Continues to be a fascinating look at a train wreck in progress.

 

Very interesting. Yes, outsourcing social media could be an absolute nightmare. Curious- how many reporters are left at your former site at this point?

 

Ha, former site, so nothing about it is "mine" anymore.

But ... news has 9 reporters, sports has 1, 2 total photographers. And 6 newsroom managers.

 

As usual, look for every other chain to follow this model. *sigh*

 

"Our ratio of newsroom coaches to workers is 1:2, so you can count on exceptionally focused supervision at every turn."

 

I guess they'll save money on office space in Nashville by repurposing (in corporate-speak) the area that used to serve as the newsroom for the former print design studio into a digital studio.

 

It's like anywhere else, I suppose, where there's one manager who does his work and a good chunk of the work of a couple of other managers, a real stand-up guy who could do just about any job in the newsroom - and do it well. Those managers who aren't pulling their share of the work are people who failed miserably as reporters, then were tossed a lifeline by their boss buddies, to try their hand at being a "coach" rather than be fired.

To their credit, though, those managers do a bang-up job of supervising the coffee machine and their Facebook pages all day.

I so very much don't miss Gannett.

 

They experimented with that at my former shop to mixed results. We had all our producers at one shop with one local producer that was there for breaking news and print. Not sure their situation now, but I know I've passed that newsroom a few times in the evening hours and it's completely dark by 8 p.m. Gannett never admits their ideas are bad ideas, and the regional digital producers was a bad idea. Websites went hours without updates, old stories got posted, wrong photos accompanied stories. Seemed like the local editors, errrr coaches, spent most of their time fixing mistakes that a producer in another newsroom made.

Like BWIP, I so don't miss Gannett.

 

Six newsroom managers, lol. Way to go, Gannett. And do those managers produce any content? Hell no. They are 9 to 5ers who manage, I'm sure. What a business model!

 

Hey, those evals and corporate reports don't write themselves.

 

Sometimes it seems only thing you need to qualify as a manager at a Gannett newspaper is a driver license.