(Updated.) Gannett has quietly hired Yuri Victor of The Times of Northwest Indiana for a Corporate position of product design and development manager.In a new comment, below, Victor graciously corrects some misconceptions I may have created about his new job, in an earlier version of this post. "I will not be redesigning any papers,'' he says. "I will be creating new products or improving existing products. . . . I, too, am upset about the layoffs in journalism and will always do what I can to help. Many of the new products I work on do increase profit and create jobs and the improvements to products can save the company money."
Victor gets high marks from Charles Apple of the widely read Visual Editors Blog, who writes today: "Yuri is one of the brightest, most impressive young people I've ever met. If he's working on it, then perhaps there's hope."
Apple quotes Victor saying: "I got a call out of the blue from Gannett Corporate. They offered me product design and development manager. I accepted and started a week and a half ago. It feels [odd] to make a move in this climate, but I'm already working on projects to increase profit, create jobs and reduce costs through smarter, more efficient process systems. Not cuts."
Victor was most recently innovation strategist and product development manager at the Times, a Lee Enterprises newspaper in Munster, Ind., according to his LinkedIn profile.
[Image: today's Times, Newseum; bigger, more readable view]
Aw Christ. Not another one.
ReplyDeleteLook at the splashy revamping of the Tribune newspapers if you want to see what's up. But only part of it is splash, but the revenue-producing part of it is increasing the ratio of ads to news stories. This means a smaller number of pages in each edition, reducing sections. Yuri says this can be done without more payroll cuts, but he hasn't dealt with GCI before. I think it means more payroll cuts are certainly coming in the new year.
ReplyDeleteYou say it is for the community papers, but I think it is also for ailing USAT, which is stuck in a stale design created more than 20 years ago. It needs a new look.
ReplyDeleteJeez, can they make the cartoons even more smaller than they are? We already have agate cartoons. Kids are going to need a magnifying glass to read them if they cut any more.
ReplyDeleteUmmmm. So. Gannett attracts the best and brightest with that talent development program. And the company has a workforce of about 30,000. But they had to recruit someone from outside the company to take the job? Pitiful. Just pitiful.
ReplyDeleteReader told Jim: "I bet this means that a drastic reduction in the size of newspapers is now in the cards for next year."
ReplyDeleteNext year, hell! I see this happening next month!
Lookie at what the Muncie Times, where Victor came from, looks like now. Wow. I don't think I have ever seen such a radically redesigned product as this. From an editorial point of view, I might think the story about Indiana needing $330 million from the feds might be a better story than the treatment it got as an ear, but the Thanskgiving driving story and the poor abandoned pets are real readers.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf26/IN_TT.pdf
Not Muncie, but Munster, Ind.
ReplyDeleteYes, the turkey and the pooch stories got my attention, too. Why didn't we thinking of a Thanksgiving driving story?
ReplyDeleteNothing drops circulation like a new redesign every two years.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if this is that important -- you can get a degree but still stink -- but there is some doubt as to whether he graduated from college. His LinkedIn profile says he was at Purdue 00-05, but that doesn't necessarily say he graduated. In person, he repeatedly evaded answering.
ReplyDeleteHe's been in DC since early November...follow his tweets at http://twitter.com/yurivictor for all the details.
ReplyDeleteA new design of the community newspapers will not matter if you are still feeding people the same fluff and not enough hard news. Maybe this design guru can figure out how to splash Metromix promos all over the front page.
ReplyDeleteWenalway, where are you? Come out, Wenalway!
ReplyDeleteI expect to see him here soon. There's some dipshit named Wenalway who appears in every crevice of the Internet, shitting on designers whenever he can.
Naturally, he -- or she -- hides behind anonymity.
USA Today's design still works. Just because it's 20 years old doesn't mean readers don't like it. Just look at the numbers. The paper is still No. 1 in circulation. You still don't have to flip back and forth to read a story. You don't have to search endlessly for where a regular feature resides. It's clean and it reproduction is still very good.
ReplyDeleteI will concede that lately the paper seems to be going off in different directions design-wise, which may not be a good thing. Readers like clarity, consistency, color and form/function. Yet, it appears some designers at USAT are determined to stamp their own personalities on certain pages. Page 1 has also lost some punch in recent months, I noticed. I am wondering if all the cutbacks there have something to do with that? While I am kind of a newspaper design junkie and tend to notice the little things, I wonder if the readers notice these subtle shifts?
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/dont-count-out-big-media-yet/
ReplyDeleteGreat...bring in some 26 yr old to "change things up" and be innovative and redesign the paper.
ReplyDeleteOr in other words, some kid can do whatever he wants and will then move in on a year and leave other people to clean up his mess.
And the whole degree thing - you don't need a degree if you've got somebody influential on your side. Don't you know that?
As newspapers lose more and more print staffers because of layoffs, look for page designer jobs in particular to start disappearing rapidly. Templates will replace those jobs. And in that regard, papers like USA TODAY are pretty well situated with their modular, set designs. You will still need creative peeps to produce the content for those pages or make certain calls on design or style, but you probably won't need entire staffs laying out pages.
ReplyDeleteAnd while it's rarely mentioned here, many other jobs outside of the newsroom are about to go the way of the dinosaurs, too. It's very unfortunate for all. And even the new Web-ites might regret seeing some of these print people go because I am almost certain, this being Gannett, web folks will not be able to just focus on the web in the future. They will need to wear many hats and will have to support other Gannett products, even some that they might consider antiquated.
As someone else mentioned on here, losing print people may seem like a benefit to some who support hiring more digital peeps, but what's going to happen is that those digital folks are going to need to cover some of the duties left behind by the layoffs. So be nice to that old print editor or content person you sit next to. Their jobs and responsibilities, the ones you hate, might become partially yours when they are gone.
Maybe GCI is working on a centralized page design. This way print can look as boring as the websites. And they can eliminate more jobs through centralization like the toning centers.
ReplyDeleteI concur! USA Today, love it or hate it, is still an easy read and a functional design.
ReplyDeleteSome web sites could benefit from stealing a page or two from the better designed newspapers. The web designers keep thinking they need to reinvent the wheel and use every gadget at their disposal. But some design principles are the same whether you are designing a newspaper, web site or automobile dashboard.
ReplyDeleteThe ideal GCI employee of the future is Al Gorythm, the lone soul who puts together the Google News Report 24/7/365. He never sleeps, never leaves the office, and screws up only a few times delivering news to hungry readers. What's more, Al doesn't require a salary, so he's much more in demand than peeps.
ReplyDeleteWeb sites need to be clean, easy to navigate and feature more video and fewer of these stupid animated graphics. Few of them tell me anything other than the designer knows a little something about Flash or other web software! Video is where it's at. Moving little cartoon people around in an online graphic does nothing for me except make me click, click, click... Timelines are particularly infuriating. I much rather see a timeline done the way print publications do them so I can read it in one glance rather than dig and dig and dig just to get one more sentence of copy or an extra picture. And when they don't work smoothly, forget it, I am gone. Get the content, get the video (preferably high quality, newsy stuff), keep writing interesting stories and display them in an easy-on-the-eyes way, and the web media sites will continue to grow. Clutter your sites up with ads that can't be distinguished from editorial material, popups, curtains and dumb, almost childish info graphics that freeze half the computers out there, and you won't succeed.
ReplyDeleteThe comment on page designers disappearing is right on the money. Papers should have been combining the copy editing/paginating duties years ago to prepare for the massive layoffs that are hitting. The smaller to mid-size dailies are the ones surviving because many of them have done this. It happened where I work (75,000 cir, not a Gannett paper) and we've had no layoffs, just unfilled positions.
ReplyDeleteI even remember a copy editor job at in Louisville about a year ago that even said in the ad something like "our copy editors don't paginate, they just copy edit." I'm thinking, not for long.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/11/watching-the-ti.html
ReplyDeleteWatching the Times struggle (and what you can learn)
Mucho visuals talk today... My two cents worth:
ReplyDeleteI like explanatory graphics and illustrative art on newsprint, photos/video on my computer scree and stories on either platform. I simply don't go to a media web site to look for graphics, but will almost always look at a graphic while flipping through a newspaper or magazine.
It's difficult for me to understand how anyone on this blog could have a problem with Gannett actually investing money to improve the product, regardless of what they intend to improve or how. For crying out loud - it's an investment, you dummies!! That's certainly better than laying off people!!
ReplyDeleteGet a grip!
Too bad it was Gannett's plan to push their graphic artist away from print and towards the web. Now their work hardly appears in any of the platforms. It will be interesting to see how long they survive the cuts. It would be much cheaper for Gannett to hire freelancers rather then have them on staff.
ReplyDeleteImprove the product???
ReplyDeleteFor crying out loud. Look at the comments readers make. You'll be hard pressed to find a single one that begs for more graphics and dancing ads. People want news on news sites. Why is that so hard for Gannett to understand?
Why all of the hoopla over this?
ReplyDeleteHe is just a mid-level manager in Digital. He works for Kevin in the Digital Product Incubator cell. It isn't like he is going to be redesigning anything for print.
Just what Gannett needs, more people sitting around planning and incubating and designing and discussing and innovating---at the expense of hiring people to report the news!
ReplyDeleteThis makes perfect sense -- they drive away great in-house talent like J. Ford Huffman (http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/amid-usa-today-buyouts-farewell-begin.html), who was quickly scooped up by the Washington Post after he took the buyout, so they can replace him with outside people.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how much less (or more?) Victor will cost than J. Ford.
If you want to get Chillicothe looking like Fremont, that's fine, but a centralized page design begins to run into a number of obstacles, including different pagination systems and different page sizes.
ReplyDeleteCould be worse, though - they could have gotten Robb Montgomery.
You don't need to have a college degree to be smart... I'm 20 my paper hired me when I was 19. Literally right out of highschool. Obviously I must be doing something right if I was even considered for my position and even the salary I make. Give the guy a break. You guys come on here and chew everyone out without seeing what they can do. Grow up.
ReplyDelete2:30: When was the last time you worked on a copy or design desk?
ReplyDeleteMaybe there are papers out there that have more consistency in their newshole, even from week to week, and can use a "template" format. But at my paper, it's a crapshoot how much space is available on a nightly basis. Some nights A is wide open, and we're scrambling to fill it with volumes of wire copy; other nights, B is in desperate need of filler. A large part of our local copy needs depend on the space taken up by obituaries, which vary widely from day to day.
Modern page design, as it is practiced at my paper, is a harried designer tossing story and photo boxes onto pages and shipping them out to the copy desk as fast as they can, trying to get everything rimmed and slotted with minutes to spare, if he or she is lucky. It's nothing fancy - "meatball journalism," to adapt a phrase from MASH. Cutouts, fadeouts and graphics are reserved for section fronts only. The only time anyone gets remotely creative is on a big Sunday project or on the features pages, on a rare day when the copy gets in on time.
Alas, I predict that some of the hardest-working people at my paper - the copy editors and designers - are going to find themselves on the street next week. Rumor has it the paper is shrinking in size and combining sections, which will leave much less work for folks on the backend... and thus a smaller staff.
Gannett already has a ton of really smart people inside who could do that job, if they were freed from their handcuffs. It says a lot about the arrogance and stupidity of Corporate that they have to go outside the company. And it should say a lot more to the design directors, innovation gurus and up-and-coming idea folks at GCI papers across the country that they weren't considered good enough for such a gig. My old copy desk chief could do that job in a heartbeat.
ReplyDeleteI don't mean to criticize or slam Mr. Victor - I hadn't heard his name until today - but Gannett doesn't respect you unless you're the flavor of the month. C'est la vie.
The designers at my paper are so clueless they couldn't design a three-car funeral.
ReplyDelete6:36, I agree with you and I'm sure your old copy desk chief would do a great job. But the AME of design at our site couldn't design his way out of a paper bag but he could fake it by copying what has been done by good design papers. And he definitely has the intimidation skills that Gannett loves in their managers.
ReplyDeleteWho does Victor report to?
ReplyDeletethis post is a little over the top. he works for Kevin Poortinga. i'm sure that his ego was nicely stroked by the post but really, you think this is big news? he may not be making any friends by some of his public posts though.
ReplyDeleteWe may be grasping at straws, but I for one hope that this does mean a sensible and coherent redesign. GCI scraped the bottom for the previous generation of designers, who are hopeless. We so clearly need a good designer.
ReplyDeleteOne more layer of Reston-dictated "journalism" to override local autonomy. Just like the 7-column format a few years ago. And where is that initiative now? On the scrap heap, along with GCI's other brilliant dictates. And I agree with those who are critical of going outside the company for a designer. If the best and brightest are already in Gannett ....?
ReplyDeleteTo quote Mario Garcia, a remarkable designer from Miami:
ReplyDelete"Cosmetics won't revive a cadaver."
I hope designers, especially the ones who completed Gannett's talent development program, start asking some tough questions about why the company had to reach outside to fill this postition.
ReplyDeleteLooks like you got screwed on this one. You got doubly screwed if the company didn't even post the job.
I hope veteran designers and innovators question HR, too. If you're experienced, qualified and in a protected class, ask them why you were not considered for this postition.
Hello. I am Yuri Victor.
ReplyDeleteNo, I will not be redesigning any papers. I also did not do any redesign work at The Times.
I don't handle cuts. That's pay grades way above mine. I'm sure you didn't hear anything about my hire because I'm pretty low on the importance chain.
I will be creating new products or improving existing products.
I too am upset about the layoffs in journalism and will always do what I can to help. Many of the new products I work on do increase profit and create jobs and the improvements to products can save the company money.
I'm sorry to the people in the above comments who haven't met me and already don't like me. I like to start off better. If you're ever in D.C., or you live here, and want to grab a beer, I'm new and looking to meet people, so first round is on me.
If you have any follow up questions, you can e-mail me at yuri.victor@gmail.com.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Welcome to Gannett Blog and to Gannett, Yuri! And thanks for stopping by.
ReplyDeleteFIrst: I don't think anyone here dislikes you; how could they, when they don't even know you!
Second: I apologize for any confusion I caused in an earlier version of this post that carried an imprecise headline. I've since fixed that.
As you may have heard, Gannett won't answer even my most routine questions about company developments, so I often have incomplete information when I hear about new hires like you.
In any case: Happy Thanksgiving, Yuri -- and keep coming back!
Yuri sounds like a legit guy, to bad he is getting involved with such a dysfunctional company. He says he is not redesigning any papers, which is on point with GCI plan, no additional resources for print because we want it to go away faster than expected. All resources go towards the web. Isn't this the thinking that that got GCI in this mess?
ReplyDeleteThere's a big difference between working on new products and actually developing them. Working on products neither saves jobs nor money.
ReplyDeleteTypical Gannett-like, though, to focus on a process rather than a specific, measureable outcome. It reminds me of the talk about how flashy, intrusive ads are going to save the day.
To Anonymous 7:07 AM:
ReplyDeleteI know I'm not going to save journalism. I'm not going to be able to help the 20 people being laid off from USA Today. The number itself is hard to digest because we know these are real people with real stories. These are people who may have to tell their children Santa won't be coming this year.
I realize creating, developing and improving products is a small piece of a larger puzzle in helping papers.
But it doesn't mean I'm going to give up. I always look for measurable outcomes in everything I do. If it's been your experience Gannett does otherwise, then maybe Gannett is changing.
I believe what we do in journalism is worth something. I love it and I'm going to keep fighting and keep trying to help.
OK. Spill the outcomes. Make me a believer.
ReplyDeleteIn your last job, how many "products" did you develop, how many jobs did you save and how much money did you save that organization?
Hey, I just saw my invitation!
ReplyDeleteAnon 9:58:
He'll never answer your question. He's a design dolt, and design dolts never offer proof. They simply concoct and chant.
He's a clicking robot who's exactly what a failing organization like Gannett wants.
It's really good to know a hire like this can be made just before a ton of layoffs.