Stop the presses ... in Waco

More penny-pinching from the Cox suckers.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/business/6504426.html

The Waco Tribune-Herald will cease printing and packaging at its Waco shop, effective July 13.

Publisher Belinda Gaudet says the Tribune-Herald will outsource those functions to its Cox Newspapers sibling Austin American-Statesman. She says that move and the elimination of 25 full-time and 18 part-time positions are aimed at cutting costs.

Gaudet says the affected workers will be offered severance of base pay and benefits for eight to 26 weeks, depending on seniority.

The cuts will reduce the staff to 162, down 31 percent from August.

Gaudet notes the consolidation is part of an industrywide trend. The Tribune-Herald will still be written, edited and designed in Waco with finished page layouts sent electronically to Austin.

 

What does it say about a paper that they're outsourcing printing to a shop that is desperately trying to sell and most certainly won't? The Trib kinda sucks anyway, this has gotta be one more step toward the coffin.

Speaking as someone from a paper that currently does this, its a bizarre situation.

 

Interesting thing here: In transferring the printing operation 100 miles away, aren't they going to incur considerably greater transportation/delivery costs?

 

You'd like to think so.

 

Greater transportation/delivery costs, yes, but lower overall costs, I'm guessing. Eliminate 25 full-time workers and their salaries and benefits, eliminate 18 part-timers, etc., contract out as much of the workload necessary for having the paper printed in Austin and save mucho on wages and benefits.

 

I'm guessing it costs a lot less to ship about 40,000 papers 100 miles than it does to employ all the people being let go.

 

You said it more succinctly than I did.

 

The same thing has been done with Media General papers in Virginia... lower costs for the papers that outsourced the printing, more papers being printed at central location.

But, say the press has problems and there are several papers that are being printed in a night, the papers will be late. Really late.

 

Because the paper is being printed 100 miles away, and will have to go to press before the American-Statesman does, you're looking at a 10 p.m. deadline or earlier. Goodbye Friday football coverage — the fourth quarter will be just starting at that time at a lot of games.

 

That's what I was thinking: Friday Night Lights Out.

 

I was at a paper that did this and it more or less killed Friday night football coverage. It can be done, but with great sacrifices to the core of the product.

You employ almost all your resources into making sure you get the scores in the paper. Everything else is gravy. So, in effect, you give no more depth than the 10:30 TV highlight show. And you are minus the highlights unless somebody is sent out with a camcorder and told to put some blurs online.

What ends up happening is you try to replace the breaking news you no longer cover with more "pretty" art and feature work, which is, in this case, a newspaper's way of saying "See, we're working hard...we might not give you what you want, but damn it, look how hard we worked on this piece."

Worse is when they try to make up for the shortcoming by putting a fan story on 1A, as if to say "We do too care about high school football."

It's pathetic.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for enterprise work, but the psychology behind these sort of new-fangled "break out" pieces to replace hard news is pretty disturbing.

It's another instance of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater in this industry.

 

Wow. There are a lot of schools in the Waco area too.

A lot of people are going to be angry if they can't get decent Friday coverage.