Gatehouse Media

This was a boffo part of that article: ""While GateHouse boasts it’s sitting on $360 million in cash to buy more newspapers, and reserves the right to replace us with part-timers and temps, the hardworking ProJo staff has not been given a raise in 8 years."

How can anybody justify the bastards who are in charge of this profession. Please don't feel badly when you get laid off. We are all better off being away from the bastards who run newspapers. Even if you are homeless at least you'll have a shred of dignity left. No raises in 8 years. One.Big LOL.

 

Why were they letting a severance package get in the way of finding another gig?

 

I worked in a GateHouse newsroom for several years and corporate management made numerous rounds of cuts. Our chain had several weeklies with a team of reporters devoted to them. They cut a few reporters and then eventually cut all reporters for those papers and made them into submitted content shoppers. The push to the Design Hubs was awful. There were some talented people there, but a lot of designers didn't know what they were doing or have time to do a good job. The software used to get content to them wasn't good either. The Design Hub didn't do any copy editing, which was great when corporate forced every page designer and copy editor out before the switch.

 

I have no idea. I think some wanted to take a bit of time off before starting new gigs.

 

It's kind of beautifully newspaper. You promise someone something for putting up with bullshit. They do it because it's convenient at the time. Then at the end you tell them they need to put up with more bullshit and delay other plans or else they don't get what they were promised and the company pockets the money.

 

I had a friend whose shop was bought by Gatehouse. In addition to getting run into the ground, it was common knowledge in the newsroom someone at the top was holding open four jobs in an attempt to earn a bonus for keeping costs down. Apparently his subordinates would express their disgust to his face. Sounded not good.

 

Our design is now done at a hub but at least it's within an hour from us. Some designers are worse than others, but we haven't had a big screw up yet. A nearby paper in a different chain that's design hub is in a different time zone has many problems, though. A couple months ago after a hoops game that decided a conference title, they had the wrong team winning in the headline.

 

So far, the list of examples of mistakes committed at the design/editing hubs includes errors I've corrected (and committed) while working in the same zip code as the news event. I'm not seeing examples of actual miscues that were caused by the designer/editor being remote, things like street names or town names being spelled wrong, a cutline misidentifying a local public figure, etc. Are those sorts of things happening more than back in the days when the designers were on site?

I'm neutral toward the idea of design/editing hubs -- I think in an ideal world, your designers would be in the same room as editors, but our world these days is far from ideal, and if I'm going to choose between on-site designers and on-site reporters, I'll take the reporters seven days out of seven.

 

FNF, those errors you mention happen quite frequently too.

But I have to say, during my tenure as an SE we never swapped the mascots of the two largest high schools in our hometown. But I guess remoteness might not be the cause and the sheer volume of work the design hub must be handling could be.

 

Interesting. I've heard a very similar story. Sounds like horrible working conditions for morale.

 

Unfortunately though, I think their MO is to just cut both of those budget lines to the bone.

 

Editors keeping positions open for a bonus isn't just a Gatehouse thing, it's definitely a Lee thing and probably a most-chains thing.