Changes at The Oklahoman?

[Inky_Wretch]

Rumors the desk is moving to Austin and the paper will be printed by the Tulsa World. Anybody heard anything?

 

[steveu]

Don't know about the desk going to Austin, but the part about the presses is correct.

The Oklahoman to outsource production of its print edition

 

[Inky_Wretch]

"Along with other manufacturing changes, a total of 65 full-time and 65 part-time positions will be eliminated."

That's a lot of people for just the press. I'm guessing the desk is gone too.

 

[wicked]

I assume the Austin part would be about GateHouse?

**** that company.

 

[I Should Coco]

And of course, the deadlines just got earlier, too:

(publisher) Reen said in order to ensure the same timely morning delivery of the newspaper, there will be earlier press times which will impact some late-night news stories and sports scores. "We are a multimedia news and marketing organization committed to giving our subscribers a complete experience. Late-breaking news and sports scores will be delivered to your email inbox each morning in our digital replica final edition and, of course, in real time on our websites and mobile apps for Oklahoman.com and NewsOK.com."

 

[wicked]

Except most of the people still subscribing to the paper don't want to get their news that way. Is it that hard to figure out?

 

[Football_Bat]

I assume the Austin part would be about GateHouse?

**** that company.

GateHouse does not own the Oklahoman. But it does provide desk services in Austin to outside companies for a fee. GateHouse also whores out its presses in similar fashion.

 

[wicked]

That's what I was referring to. **** GateHouse.

 

[JRoyal]

I can confirm the copy desk and design move to the Austin Gatehouse shop. Sad to see this. Lots of friends in OKC.

 

[Bronco77]

Any newspaper that outsources copy-editing and design to GateHouse with the idea of saving money will discover that you get what you pay for.

 

[wicked]

Oklahoman has to be the biggest paper being done out of Austin. I'd love to see reader feedback when they can't get a Thunder game into the section because it ran too late.

 

[Oggiedoggie]

The Oklahoman "leadership team" crashed the newspaper into a bridge abutment, and now they're trying to get readers to believe that it was a good idea.

 

[Desk_dude]

Oklahoman has to be the biggest paper being done out of Austin. I'd love to see reader feedback when they can't get a Thunder game into the section because it ran too late.

The Columbus Dispatch, owned by Gatehouse, is about as big as the Oklahoman.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

The Columbus paper is designed in Austin!?!

 

[spadjo martin]

The two papers I work for have been outsourced to Gatehouse for about three weeks now. It has not been a smooth transition.

 

[Fredrick]

Wow this is a huge sign that the print edition is about done. To print the newspaper in fricking Tulsa means deadlines will be amazingly early. I'm assuming this cause it's a helluva drive from Tulsa to Oklahoma City. If deadlines are say 10 p.m., to send the final page in a city as big as OKC, that's it for top-quality coverage of the colleges and Thunder. Anybody know final deadline for copy? Obviously the Oklahoman figures we have about a year maximum left of print product if they are shutting down their presses. Again, if they are designing it in Austin and printing it in Tulsa, odds are this once-fine product is about to become trash so to speak. Hard to believe the industry is about to be all online. This really helps individual journalists. For instance the Oklahoman's fine Thunder writers could put out their own Webpage and it would be way better than the Oklahoman's coverage. That's if the Thunder writers decided to start their own webpage. We need more details on deadline times.

 

[Fredrick]

And of course, the deadlines just got earlier, too:

The 10 a.m. meeting people are going to find out how important sports section is to a newspaper when these early deadlines prevent the Oklahoman from covering Thunder night games and the college night games. Hope OKC natives like reading the internet product cause all indications are the paper will be trash.

 

[Shropshire Slasher]

At our newspaper, all except one of our paginators are also reporters (and the one is on retirement's doorstep).

Hate to say it because of others' situations, but in our case, farming out the pagination would lighten our load considerably without significant job loss.

 

[Inky_Wretch]

What is the contingency plan is if there is an Internet outage or there's a power blackout that prevents the design hub from transmitting the pages to the press?

 

[OTD]

What is the contingency plan is if there is an Internet outage or there's a power blackout that prevents the design hub from transmitting the pages to the press?

Same as what happens now with a lot of papers whose presses are offsite. Even a lot of papers that have their own presses have them in the suburbs. And pages are sent electronically even within a building. Electronic page transmittal is pretty common.