Sunday, September 14, 2008
Sunday | Sept. 14 | Got news, or a question?
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24 comments:
Jim says: "Proceed with caution; this is a free-for-all comment zone. I try to correct or clarify incorrect information. But I can't catch everything. Please keep your posts focused on Gannett and media-related subjects. Note that I occasionally review comments in advance, to reject inappropriate ones. And I ignore hostile posters, and recommend you do, too."
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Here is a rant from a highly placed insider in the field who has nowhere else to pose these questions:
ReplyDeleteNow that we've just finished another weekend of the high school football season, is there ANY improvement in the HighSchoolSports.Net debacle? Last night and the night before, are papers getting their scores for online and print? Are photos and videos uploaded to BleachersTV getting through? Are the locally sold ad campaigns running on HSS yet? Over the last two nights, did HSS get any better at responding to support requests from schools and newspapers?
Does Gannett Digital realize what a total debacle HSS has been? If so, their communication to markets doesn't make it clear that they do and that they realize they and HSS dropped the ball. This further erodes the waning credibility of a lot of people at Gannett Digital.
Tangential sub-rant:
Although the failings are on HSS's part, what accountability is there for those at Gannett Digital ultimately responsible for this? (They vetted HSS, bought it, set the goals, were the interface between HSS and papers and were the ones who decided papers should abandon their pre-HSS systems.)
Are not the senior managers responsible for this deployment debacle the same ones responsible for other deployment debacles such as GO4, Pluck, Maven 1.0 and Rubicon? What (if any) employee names in Gannett's senior digital management structure are common to the four aforesaid disasters and others of the last year?
IF (emphasis) the same people are responsible for all these missteps, are those senior managers immune from the standards that we are held to in the field? If I were responsible for one-tenth of the missteps made by Digital's deployment group, I would have been terminated from my job a long time ago.
RE: UPAID OVERTIME; DYSFUNCTIONAL MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES; SECULAR CHANGE IN INFORMATION BUSINESS; GLOBAL ECONOMIC SLOWDOWN, ETC.
ReplyDeleteWe've seen many posts here from reporters, managers (in many departments), OC Memebers, former employees and Shareholders regarding: 1) unrewarded work, fraudulent timesheets & unpaid overtime; 2) intimidating dictatorial management styles that stiffle organization growth, adaptation & eveolution; 3) threats from the internet; 4) threat from Steep Economic Slowdown (see auto maker begging for $25 Billion in govt loans)......has anyone EVER CONSIDERED the vulnerability GANNETT (and every paper) has from the FACT that the HOME DELIVERY CARRIERS who get paid an average of $0.148 PER PAPER -in many cases- have not recieved ANY INCREASE in their "Independent Contractor" delivery Rate in 10+ YEARS....They pay for their own gas and car maintenance and s\Social Security Taxes ........Gasoline was $1.00 in 1998. These people are MORE DIRECTLY VULNERABLE to circulation declines and reduced consumer spending (I.E. TIPS) than the newpaper compnaies themselves. These people deliver 40$-to-55% of ALL the newspapers in the country. AFTER EXPENSES, They make LESS THAN MINIUM WAGE in many cases. What happens when they say F*CK IT this isn't worth doing. As 50+ of them did at the Obsever-Dispatch in Utica, NY a few months ago? There aren't enough companies employees to handle such an exodus. What happens to Ad Rates when we can't get the papers to the Cunsmers?
If advertisers don't want to do business with their local Gannett paper, they won't. But what about those advertisers who have signed a contract, locked into say a year-long deal of advertising and after the fact realize that the website is garbage and they aren't getting what they paid for. Now not only do we lose advertising revenue, we open ourselves up to a costly lawsuit. For that matter, ARE there any lawsuits filed against Gannett from employees, former employees, advertisers, etc.? This would make for some interesting investigative reporting.
ReplyDeleteThe "Unexpectedly Sherp Decline" in retail sales will push advertisers to lengthen the term of their Accounts Payables (including advertising expenditures). At some point many of these bill due to newspapers will just fall into the Bad Debt Pile and/or be wiped out by advertiser bankruptcies. Newspaper Advertising Bills are Unsecured Creditors in a business' capital structure.
ReplyDelete@4:21 am: Good questions! I've added your comment to a related post, "Trouble for GCI and HighSchoolSports.net,'' which you can see here: http://tinyurl.com/6esr4z
ReplyDeleteAre advertisers complaining to you about Gannett's Web products?
ReplyDeleteJim, you know what would be really interesting, let's compile a list of sites that still have all of their directors in place. There are several out there. I'm very interested to know who still has an Ad director, a circulation director, a production director, a VP of advertising, an IT director, a controller. I want to know why some sites were completely stripped while others remained virtually untouched. It would be interesting to expose those sites and see what their connection to corporate is and why they felt they couldn't run without a full staff.
ReplyDelete@5:02 - Carriers and customer service people should definitely get paid more. Those are the folks who are directly in contact with the customers! If you don't get your paper, or don't get every section, or it's in a puddle, or you call to complain about your subscription -- those are the people you're dealing with. The folks in the newsroom, advertising, production can spend 8+ hours a day putting out a good newspaper, but if the customer is unhappy with the customer service, you'll lose a customer. Don't know why the company doesn't think that far into the process.
ReplyDelete11:18 maybe those sites make money while other sites have a dismal balance sheet.
ReplyDelete4:21 this is what the blog should be. This isn't a rant against "The Man" This is a call to hold folks accountable. We need more of this.
ReplyDelete12:14 PM, I don't think so. It's worth looking into.
ReplyDeleteBurning question---
ReplyDeleteIf an advertiser buys space (excuse my ignorance of the proper terms)on a site based on what someone told her about click numbers, but later notices all the photo galleries, challenges the numbers and wants to cancel the ad, what does the company do?
It's best to sell online advertising honestly. For example, you offer the advertiser a certain number of impressions on the website, run of site (that's the whole site, news, homepage, galleries, etc) for a certain number of dollars per thousand impressions delivered. When the campaign is over, you show them a report listing the placements where the ad ran and how many impressions the campaign got. Don't promise 200K monthly impressions on your weekend entertainment section if you know that section only gets 20K views a month. Simple as that.
ReplyDeleteAnd a pageview is a pageview, whether it's a news story, obit, or photo gallery.
Know your website and talk to your online people (if you have any left) about stats and trends before you promise the world to a customer.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete"And a pageview is a pageview, whether it's a news story, obit, or photo gallery."
ReplyDeleteI thought each photo in a photo gallery was one page view, not the gallery itself. There's a huge difference, I think. How is that information prosented to advertisers?
The comment I just deleted implied that a named person had an improper relationship with another named person.
ReplyDelete"And a pageview is a pageview, whether it's a news story, obit, or photo gallery."
ReplyDeleteWrong, wrong, wrong! If this industry still sees its readers/users as some monolithic, mass audience -- newspapers are hastening their own demise. Advertisers are increasingly ditching the mass market approach. Ask Google. The sooner newspaper companies, and web ones for that matter, can understand who their readers/users are and deliver targeted advertising, the sooner you can charge $25 CPMs. And THAT is about what you need to replace each dollar in lost print revenue.
About the targeted advertising, 4:47 PM, got on comments on what's going on with the privacy advocates and behavioral targeting?
ReplyDelete"Wrong, wrong, wrong!"
ReplyDelete2:23 here. Don't kill the messenger please. I was explaining as simply as I can to the poster above me how we sell online. We've never had an advertiser come back at us and complain that their ad was viewed on photo galleries and those views shouldn't count as impressions. A photo gallery page view still counts as a page view on our locally marketed, locally branded website. If somebody doesn't want Run of Site, we target them to a specific section, or a specific demographic target (zipcode/age/gender) and charge them a higher CPM.
But a great many of our advertisers ARE happy with Run of Site. And if our local advertiser is happy with the results, it is not wrong, wrong, wrong.
11:18 is it possible those sites are the targeted future regional centers. I'm thinking of APP which would be the obvious center for the regionalization of the Jersey papers. Just a guess of course.
ReplyDeleteAnon 5:02a...Jack Williams is the Gannett Executive responsible for all these wonderful tools...Pluck, Maven, HSS, GO4 and the rest of the junk we all are trying to get up and running on our sites. Our former president & publisher said that he is the "arrogant idiot" that is responsible for all these crappy digital products.
ReplyDeleteWhat is Rubicon? Should I be worried?
Jim, we need you to do your watchdog journalism on the scumbags on wall street.
ReplyDeleteThis media storm is nothing. Those Wall Street CEOs took billions of dollars and their greed did them in...now the taxpayer will have to bail them out.
Disgusting. When you leave Spain, get a job watching out for them.
"Crossing The Rubicon" or Rubicon refers to Julius Caesar's taking his army across the Rubicon River to March on Rome and seize power. When you cross the Rubicon you have made a decision you can't retreat on or rescind.
ReplyDeleteCaesar was in command of several legions outside the provence of Rome. I believe is was Gaul (France) or Spain.
In ancient Rome for a Military leader to bring his Army into the home area of Rome was considered an act of treason.
The Rubicon reference above refers to the Rubicon ad network, with is running throughout redesigned sites thanks to the consistent new ad positions. Local markets hate it because it brings in less money than the remnant deals they'd done themselves in the past, and the ads are super-tacky, some of the ads are downright offensive (tits and ass screensavers) and a lot of time the ad tags don't work, which breaks things on the pages (like the local ads.)
ReplyDeleteBasically, you know those Classmates.com ads that you only see on cheap/declining Web sites and small blogs? Remember how you never saw those on Gannett sites -- unlike like two months ago, and now you see 'em all the time? That's Rubicon.
Everyone at the local markets obsess over how much they hate Rubicon ads, and how much of this filters up to corporate I have no idea.