RIP Design House 2012-2014

GateHouse Media to close its design hubs in Rockford, IL and Framingham, Mass and move to a yet unknown location less than two years after going to the desk hubs. No clue what this means for current Design Housers, but I'm sure someone in corporate will get another bonus.


http://apple.copydesk.org/2013/05/14/gatehouse-to-close-its-two-new-production-hubs-and-open-an-even-newer-one/

 

So they are just packing up the whole shop and moving it to a different location? Or redoing things?

 

This sounds like another cluster**** from Gatehouse. It's another in a line of "how many people can we layoff." They really don't want to pay for paginators and ad designers. Design house wanted papers in California, Colorado and the midwest to have everything built in Massachusetts while the big operations were built in Illinois. The transfer software Gatehouse tried to use was a joke. A few of us argued our way out of going the design house route and I'm glad we did. I think what they may be doing is shifting the design houses closer to some of the papers and increasing the amount of sites so those of us who fought the change can't use our same arguments.

I don't think this is the death of design house, I think it is changing where they house this. Gatehouse recently sold off some of their Illinois papers, so they may want to be getting out of Rockford.

Saxotech is a joke. They moved the small papers over from Zope and then held off moving the larger ones over when they realized just how bad the Saxotech set up is.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZZ96J_PVbk

 

Maybe they can go join the <duh duh DUH!> Thunderdomers!

 

Food for thought.

http://www.ghnewsroom.com/blogs/david-arkin/x1084481428/My-2013-GateHouse-Media-content-resolutions

"By the end of the year, the Design Houses will become recognized centers for high-quality design."

 

Wokkah wokkah wokkah, yadda yadda yadda.

 

Typical corporate stupidity. No plan beyond the next quarter, other than collecting bonuses.

Feel sorry for everyone, especially anyone who moved so they could work at the hubs. It's one thing to say that, with this industry, they should have known what they were getting into. But even so, you'd think that they'd stick with a new plan for longer than a year.