Add another trove of data to the pile Corporate has yanked from public view: Employment by worksite, across the rapidly shrinking company of 41,500 workers. That's a rare screenshot, above, of what I'm talking about: The Arizona Republic's profile page, from Corporate's website; I've circled the paper's employee count: 2,650.Until recently, Gannett published the same employment figures on most of its profile pages for newspapers and TV stations. No more. Yesterday, while researching five Gannett employment regions, I discovered that someone had pulled virtually all the figures from all the pages. The Republic's was one of the few left intact.
The figures may have been cut because that was easier than keeping them current, when multiple staff cuts made them out of date. But at a time when Gannett has pulled other data from view, Corporate is looking less like a First Amendment company -- and more like an outfit, needlessly keeping investors in the dark.
Our own worker count
We've still got this list of site-by-site employment at 72 of the 85 U.S. papers, after December's 10% job cut.
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Yawn.
ReplyDeleteyou can find what the counts were if you go to archive.org
ReplyDeleteI would venture to say that even that number is out of date. No way the Republic is employing that many people. All you have to do is walk though the main building in downtown Phoenix. I swear you can hear crickets on several floors. Heck, even in the newsroom, there are a multitude of empty desks.
ReplyDeleteIt's very difficult for the outsider to tell who is working at the Republic. The newpaper purposefully misleads the public by continuing to list many employees it has laid off on its web contact pages.
ReplyDeleteIt's very difficult for even insiders to know who works at the Republic these days.
ReplyDeleteIn many cases, clients and employee contacts have no clue who's still at the Republic. People are laid off, walked out of the building with no plans to forward email or voice mail. I know of at least one instance where a 20+ page annual advertising piece has been produced but the ad reps have been eliminated. Their "replacement" actually called the client contact asking how to sell the product, to whom they should be calling and when the process starts. The process has always started with an announcement to the industry in January after appropriate planning in December. At this rate, they may only be 3 months behind and probably jeopardizing $150K- Good job Gannett and AZ Republic!
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