Sunday, May 02, 2010
Louisville | Publisher's video statement now online
Arnie Garson says The Courier-Journal has received "tens of thousands of phone calls," after a press failure this morning prevented the paper from printing most of its full run of highly sought-after Kentucky Derby editions. "This is the worst possible time,'' the publisher told an early evening press conference. "If you wanted to pick one day a year when I would choose for it not to happen, this is it."
A repair technician brought in from outside Louisville had not been able to fix the problem by the time Garson spoke to the press conference. He said the paper may need to turn, again, to Gannett's Indianapolis Star to print Monday's editions. The Derby edition, meanwhile, will be delivered tomorrow morning.
10 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."
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Nothing like Sunday's news delivered on Monday. Well...good enough is good enough.
ReplyDeleteThe clearest example of layoffs and failing to invest in your company.
ReplyDeleteArnie may win the Guinness Book of World records for the news maker wearing the greatest number of Lapel microphones. I counted 6.
ReplyDeleteI hate to revel in bad news like this, as it certainly doesn't help those of us who are still employed with this garbage company. That said, it is nice to see some of the hideous decisions that management has made the past few years come back to bite them in the ass.
ReplyDeleteMy experience with Gannett managers has been that nothing is a problem -- no matter how many headaches it means for the staff -- until it is a problem for management. Well, this one certainly became a problem for Garson.
Here's something that hasn't been answered: Will Sunday's paper be delivered to Sunday subscribers, or only to those who also subscribe on Monday. I think they are parsing words here, and will deliver Sunday's copies to "on Monday with Monday's paper..." but I doubt they re-deliver to Sunday-only subscribers.
ReplyDeleteAs a former Ad Exec there - I'd love to be fielding calls tomorrow telling accounts that their $3,000-7000 ads in the fancy Derby Wrap section didn't actually go out to all of the hotels and out of town guests - but they could have seen it all online! In fact, millions - MILLIONS - of increased page views online happened since it didn't go out. That's MUCH BETTER FOR THEM! They'll all be given talking points in the a.m. to spin what a much better value the advertisers got since the paper didn't get published.
Has anyone addressed the question about competency of the production management at Louisville? Is this what happens when you put a finance guy in charge of production? How could he possibly handle both jobs at a newspaper this large? Where is the disaster recovery plan? When was it last updated? Will heads roll?
ReplyDeleteAll of the reductions in the press room are coming home to roost. Wait. Maybe it was sabotage. Yeah. That's it. Deflect blame.
ReplyDeleteAny clue in Louisville what the ad revenue write off will be? Could be huge.
ReplyDeleteEveryone,
ReplyDeleteAs a long-time (now former) C-J staffer, I'd like to say that yes, there was a Business Continuation Plan in place. However, like any plan, it has to be practiced and you can't easily practice a plan like this. Although the decision was made too late to shift ops to INDY, around 4:15 a.m., it took Indy much longer than they thought to get the pages into its pre-press system for imposition on the press. They'd never done this before either. Indy's management will tear the plan apart and make changes. As will Louisville's. I doubt heads will roll as everyone did the best they could under difficult circumstances. The only thing that may change is calling the -30- earlier and shifting operations. As for Apel (VP/Finance) running both Finance and Production, he's really pretty good at it. The PD in Louisville is competent and is allowed to make the spot decisions needed. I believe The C-J will be better off because of this.
The catastrophic press failure was foreseeable and preventable. The people in charge there know that press is a lemon -- it has failed repeatedly, though never for quite this long of a period. Management knows this and has nevertheless failed to take the proper steps to prevent it, because it made more financial sense to roll the dice. Well, they came up snake eyes.
ReplyDeleteThe question now is, What will they do next? Every subscriber and employee of the C-J should be asking that question. It should be put to the publisher in a public manner, and he and his lieutenants should be held accountable if there is another failure. Nothing like this has ever happened at the C-J -- even when employees were gunned down by a madman, even when there was a press explosion and fire at a sister company next door, the C-J managed to publish and be circulated to home subscribers the next day. What happened Sunday is unprecedented and shameful.