Update: Gannett world — USA Today for sale?

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

Mizzou, if you're around long enough, you see them come and go. What scares me more is that people look at the shit Gannett does and think its the way to operate a business. That's just not right.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

And the stupid thing is that sort of corporate mentality can backfire.

In '08, Hopkins' blog forced Gannett to announce that there were going to be layoffs, only it was going to happen five-six weeks later. The mentality of my newsroom, besides the natural fear, when we were doing our work was, "Oh well, we're getting fired anyways."

We'd screw something up in print, and instead of getting worried over getting written up or disciplined, we'd just shrug our shoulders. We figured we were all goners at some point anyways. Instead of making that extra call to a source to enhance a story, or bother about getting a minority source, or check a page one last time for mistakes, we'd just let it through.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

I sure wish I worked at one of those well-managed newspaper chains right now.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

Gannett New Jersey is going to get hit. Hard.

Cuts of more than half in one department ... and the lucky survivors will have interviews for the few spots left on the lifeboat. Knowing Gannett, the boat probably already has a big hole in it and no rescue vessel for 1,000 miles.

Anyone know what Craig Dubow will get as a bonus for continuing this crap?

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

Gannett New Jersey, Gannett Wisconsin and Gannett Louisiana will get hit the hardest.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

So, given that those state already had regional publishing arrangements, they feel like the kinks have been worked out and they can now gut the individual newsrooms?

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

That's the popular feeling. They're likely to combine papers and cut the remaining staff by as much as half.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

Not sure how much more Gannett Louisiana can take. Maybe advertising and circulation can take the brunt of it this time. I know in the newsrooms, they're pretty much bare-boned. Lafayette sports has only three full-timers and one part-timer. Just three years ago, there was six full-timers and two part-timers.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

Why the fuck is Gannett, of all papers out there, doing this? Most newspapers, or so it is told, are stabilizing. Does the BOD want a bigger bonus next year?

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

I'm not sure how much any paper can take. If you look at where Gannett can cut (in their minds, not mine) you look at the states where they have several papers. You combine the staffs of a couple and then you just sub the old paper with the new paper and they hope circulation doesn't take a huge hit. In some places it will, in some places it won't.

The result will be a huge Christmas bonus for Craig Dubow.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

I can see where in a place like Louisiana, which has five Gannett papers, one sports editor being named to oversee all of them. The next time they cut, it will be down to the one sports editor and just stringers at each of the five papers. Boy, wouldn't that job suck.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

With the way things are structured now, I think I'd rather be a stringer than a full-timer. Most of my duties now consist of laying out pages for the incompetent copy desk in Monroe. We're almost two years into this "change" and they still can't do agate or any of our "special" pages such as our Game Day pages or Insider pages. On most nights, they're short-staffed over there because someone called in sick or someone is on vacation so we end up doing most of the section over here. I guess we could just let them fail miserably and miss deadline several nights in a row, but we have a little bit of pride left.

The problem is that our "management" people either don't know all the work we're doing for the copy desk, or they don't care. I think their perception is that we have all this time to write now that we're free of pagination and we're not making good use of our time.

In football season, our stringers got more work than our writers.