With little fanfare, Gannett is moving advertising production work to the land of rock-bottom wages, India -- raising red flags for a Gannett Blog reader at the Pensacola News Journal. GCI has contracted with 2AdPro in Los Angeles to produce ads for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the Press & Sun-Bulletin (left) in Binghamton, N.Y., and other papers. "We are not doing a wall-to-wall replacement like some other newspapers," Austin Ryan, vice president of production, told the trade publication Newspapers & Technology. "But we do believe we can gain some economies and we will be rolling this out at other properties that make sense."The Pensacola reader asks: "Is this the new norm? It has resulted in layoffs (of course). If the local 'small-town' advertisers here, who are very patriotic, get wind of this, the backlash could be a disaster. Not to mention the sales reps are pissed because the ads look like shit."
The question du jour: How long before Gannett starts offshoring newsroom jobs?
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[Image: this morning's Press & Sun-Bulletin, Newseum]
They might not have to offshore jobs if Mr. "MoJo" rises from the newsroom. (Unfortunately, not Jim Morrison :^( )
ReplyDeleteThis mobile journalism effort would make John & Martha Q. Public "staff writers" waxing eloquently on such items as the local drugstore parking lot getting new blacktop or The Cub Scouts having a bottle drive at the United Methodist Church.
What does Gannett have against journalism that makes it so set on destroying it? Is it because Mr. Dubow is a TV savage?
The Gannett site that I work at Florida Today, is now in its in third or fourth round of buy-outs. After buying out one-third of our design department we are now sending our advertising design request to 2AdPro.
ReplyDeleteTheir work is horrible! They do not know the English language well enough to understand our requests. We've received art back that if far to questionable or bizarre to publish and we're all working overtime hours under the radar to keep what little advertiser base we have by fixing all of 2AdPro's problems. We can't put down the hours for fear of being "let go" and everyone is starting to wonder when the paychecks will start bounce. I also wouldn't be surprised if the person who put together 2AdPro is a kid of one of the board of directors.
If you fix 2AdPro's errors no one will ever know that they're doing a bad job. It would be helpful for the other Gannett sites that are going to go live soon if everyone knew how bad they are. You're actually not doing the rest of us (or yourselves) a service by fixing it and not reporting it.
ReplyDeleteMore Gannett sites are going live every month. We can't cover for them. Report it to Brian Ambor at corporate. He's high up in production. Don't be afraid. So far this is still America - Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Equal rights and all that.
We can't cover for them. Report it to Brian Ambor at corporate. He's high up in production. Don't be afraid. So far this is still America - Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Equal rights and all that.
ReplyDeleteYeah, right, like that solves anything. If Gannett Corporate doesn't like responses - cries like this gonna be ignored. Brian Ambor is not even at Corporate anymore. Equal rights???? LOL!!!!
2AdPro has arrived at another site: The Tennessean in Nashville. Announcement was made this week that about 25 ads per day will be outsourced and 2 to 3 artist/designer jobs will be eliminated.
ReplyDeleteEVERYONE... PLEASE talk about your experiences regarding 2AdPro... We just also got the word and we're curious how things are working and what led up to it... Did it start with a few designers and then a few more or what... Talk about what is going on... That's what this site is for...
ReplyDelete2AdPro outsourcing began at Gannett's Fort Myers News-Press at the beginning of this year. So far it doesn't seem to be working out especially well. There were many buyouts but so far no designer layoffs. As others have stated, the ads are just awful and the time required to send, receive, send back and correct them take as much or more time as it would for someone here to just do them. Unless Gannett is willing to sacrifice all quality and customer service, I don't see how they could do all ad production without American workers. Of course, the big wigs in corporate keep pushing us to send more but they aren't seeing all the problems, only the bottom line. And yes, local advertisers will be upset that Gannett is sending their advertising money not only out of the commumity, but out of the country. Real nice Gannett.
ReplyDeleteAlll: Could someone SAFELY e-mail to me an uncorrected version of one of these poorly-executed 2AdPro ads? It would need to be in a format that would allow for reproduction on this blog.
ReplyDeleteSend to: gannettblog [at] gmail [dot] com
2AdPro didn't workout for the Pensacola News Journal. Customers started complaining about their ads. It turned out to be a major cultural communication issue. Ads were poorly designed, typeset and artwork may have worked for the ad in the UK but not in the USA. PNJ production artists had to rebuild most of them. The entire process took to long for a ad to be completed. God help us - if there were revisions.
ReplyDelete