I'm told that the News Department, led by Phil Currie and Kate Marymont, started holding teleconference meetings with top editors yesterday, to map out news coverage as the community papers prepare for the 10% job cuts disclosed this week.
Executive editors: What are you hearing? Is there serious talk of dropping Monday editions? Please post your replies in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write gannettblog[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the green sidebar, upper right.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
21 comments:
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How the hell does Phil Currie still have a job? News 2000??? First five graphs???? Local Information Centers??? Blah. Blah. Blah. Decades of flailing about with little or no progress or innovation. It confounds me.
ReplyDeleteMe too! Currie I met only once, and was thoroughly unimpressed. Yeah, one "flavor of the month" style of journalism after another. No substance. But he talks a great talk.
ReplyDeleteNo, sorry... like Silberman, he doesn't talk a great talk at all, in my opinion. All the silly little contests and useless trips to conventions....
ReplyDeleteUnder the heading of "Where Are They Now?", or maybe "Whatever Happened To ...", consider:
ReplyDelete1. News 2000
2. The News Pyramid
3. First Five Graphs
4. Real People, Real News
5. Moments in Life
6. Citizen Journalists
7. Local Information Centers
8. Staff Blah, Blah, Blahs - er, Blogs
9. Your News
The only thing worse than a tedius, 3-page critique from Currie was a wasted hour listening to a Calvin Stovall lecture on the phone. May they both end up on the Obit Desk in Poughkeepsie.
ReplyDeleteWhat have you got against the dead in Poughkeepsie?
ReplyDeletecalvin stovall . . . a name i'd almost forgotten. guess i'll just have to try harder.
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame that most current Gannett newsroom folk are too young to have enjoyed the inspirational leadership of Currie's predecessor, John Quinn.
ReplyDeleteQuinn was a meat-and-potatoes newsman, and wasn't afraid of anyone (even Neuharth) who threatened a good news operation.
Currie is a toady. It remains to be seen what his apparent successor, Kate Marymont, is made of. As far as I can tell, she's done some good work (example: revealing FEMA's follies in Florida) but seems to have been elevated to the right hand of the throne mostly because she played around with "mojos" and other goofy, unprofessional gimmicks. But I'm willing to give her a shot. Let's hope it comes soon -- Currie is a millstone.
Currie has been an inspiration to many editors in this company. And while some programs may be gimmicky, they had some good points. Even Real Life, Real News had some elements that were worth paying attention to. Currie is passionate about the First Amendment, and I suspect is as upset about what's happening to the newsrooms as any journalist in the business. After all, he signed off on most top editor hires for the past several decades and has played a central role in developing the direction the newsrooms go in. There are many people to bash at Gannett, but Currie isn't even close to the top of the list. He's caught in the same bind as the rest of us, trying to do the best possible job when higher-ups are doing their best to destroy the news franchise.
ReplyDelete@9:13 wrote: "calvin stovall . . . a name i'd almost forgotten. guess i'll just have to try harder."
ReplyDeletejust imagine working with him on a daily basis ...
Kate was a smart, humane, news-oriented manager when I worked with her in Little Rock. I was very impressed with her.
ReplyDeleteBut that was almost 20 years ago. You have to drink a lot of Kool-Aid to rise to the top in any corporation, especially Gannett.
Still, if she does become Currie's successor, I'd bet on her being a positive influence. The kind of horror stories you see on this blog about people like Silverman and Townes -- notice that you don't see those kind of posts about Kate. That's gotta say something.
Best response I saw to News 2000 pyramid was the metro staff editor at the C-J who fashioned a pyramidal hat out of straws, labelled it "pyramid power" and wore it in the spirit of those who don tinfoil headgear to keep out evil brainwaves. Needless to say, he didn't last long aafter Silverman arrived for his year-long reign of terror to purge the remaining Binghamites.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the laugh 10:22; they are few & far between these days. And hopefully we all have known characters like that who made coming to work less grueling than it could have been.
ReplyDeleteFrom Tim Chavez, www.politicalsalsa.com
ReplyDeleteI met and talked with Phil Currie at Corporate twice for my supervisor of the year award and middle managers training. I got to see the gold-plated bathroom faucets of the Neuharth era. The toilet paper was the regular stuff, however. Damn.
I then met and talked with Currie at site visits in Utica(now Gatehouse) and then at The Tennessean when I was stil held in favor by newsroom management.
On his last site when I still had a job there, I didn't make the greet and meet list even though I had won seven national, non-Gannett writing awards and received the Will Rogers Humanitarian Award for my work through my column in the community.
He was always nice to me and helped me get to The Tennessean in late 1996. I remain appreciative.
However, I saw his hand in The Tennessean newsroom being run by an editor who did not have the readers' best interest at heart and ran the place with a bad case of ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder. The newspaper didn't even have to obey the mainstreaming rules that we followed in Utica.
The editor was kept in power by Currie and the newsside authorities at Corporate. Meanwhile, publisher Craig Moon was kept at bay from having the needed power to make the editor improve his performance for a better newspaper.
Now Silverman is in charge there and remains in power because of Currie. That's despite The Tennessean most recently having declines of more than 5% in circulation on weekdays and Sundays. Thanks, Jim, for providing these important numbers. Leifeld, a transfer from the newsside under Currie, is publisher.
Currie and Silveman were running buddies at corporate when I visited there. And their protective relationship continues.
Meanwhile, the best executive editor in Gannett, Rick Jensen, never could progress up the ladder under Currie. He finally had to transfer out to be a publisher. And he was the publisher honest enough to message his employees earlier this year about the coming cutbacks. Jim also picked up on that news.
Yes, Currie helped me personally. But then he hurt the company and its employees by propping up editors who have no business being in charge of newspapers and good employees.
Thanks.
Currie may have helped me in my career within Gannett; I don't know for certain. But that was a very, very long time ago, and our relationship ended when I went to USAT.
ReplyDeleteThen, and still to a degree now, USAT was so far removed from Currie's domain that it was as if I had transferred to an entirely different company. Our last contact was around the time I turned down a possible job at the Charlotte Observer around 1994; he sent me a thank-you note for staying with Gannett.
Everything has changed now. I have been extremely disappointed in what I've seen Currie doing publicly in recent years, and have expressed that sentiment on this blog. I suspect he thinks I'm showing no gratitude for his support in the past. Perhaps that's the case. But if I'm going to have any credibility as a Gannett blogger, I need to be candid about what I see going on.
Um. So does anyone actually have an ANSWER to the original question?
ReplyDeletePhil Currie hurt the Detroit News in many ways when it was owned by Gannett. When Bob Giles ran the paper, he had the good sense to resist Currie's many formulas and initiatives. Giles and his managing editor knew that Currie was a mediocrity who never rose very high at the Rochester, N.Y., paper before he went to corporate. During the Giles era, the paper won a Pulitzer Prize and countless other national awards. When Giles retired, Currie, who had been seething that his edicts were not being obeyed, put in Mark Silverman, a nasty corporate drone. Currie knows Silverman is a thug, but he wanted a thug to impose all of the latest initiatives out of corporate on the Detroit News. During the Silverman era, the paper won a ton of Gannett awards, but its page design, creativity on the reporting and editing sides and its morale went to hell. The good work that was done at the paper, including a crime project that nearly won a Pulitzer, largely came about DESPITE Silverman. It was only after Gannett removed Silverman's boot off the staff's neck by selling the paper to MediaNews that the News became an interesting publication again.
ReplyDeleteCurrie's career and his overall negative impact on the papers under his watch are a cautionary tale about letting a bureaucrat run newsrooms from afar.
Hopk! If you had taken that job in Charlotte in '94, we would have been working there together. I didn't know Charlotte was courting you.
ReplyDeleteIndeed! I was being courted for the banking beat. But the job was going to pay considerably less than what I was earning at the Idaho Statesman, a much smaller paper by circulation.
ReplyDeleteDid anyone else notice that no one bothered to answer the question? Just another example of the fearmongering, rumor-spreading and whiny-ass shit that goes on on this blog each and every day.
ReplyDeleteUh, dude, have you noticed all the other postings on this site that give readers all kind of updates about the down-sizing pushed for by Currie, Dubow + company?
ReplyDelete