Print's future. Corporate sees printed papers for at least another two years, based on the timetable set for introducing the hubs. But I wonder: Is part of this consolidation in anticipation of eventually eliminating or severely scaling back advertising-weak editions, like Mondays and Tuesdays? With fewer editions, you need fewer people to design and produce those printed pages, after all.
New website designs. CCI NewsGate sounds like software tailor-made for integrating multiple publishing platforms, including the soon-to-launch new website templates for the 81 dailies in U.S. Community Publishing. Those redesigned sites are supposed to be live by the end of this year. Today is July 14. We're already past the year's mid-point. Can anyone supply a current timetable on when the papers switch over to the new templates?USA Today. The company's marquee title also will adopt CCI NewsGate, according to the hubs FAQ distributed yesterday. That suggests USAT is being drawn ever more closely into the orbit of the community papers, even as USAT top management plans what is sounding like a major reorganization. USAT is already building national and world news pages for the smaller papers. Will its move onto the same software mean more merging of its content into the smaller papers?
ContentOne. The former Gannett News Service was restructured and renamed last year, in one of the earliest examples of the productivity push across news. In late 2008, CEO Craig Dubow famously described ContentOne as a vehicle for producing "information much more efficiently by eliminating duplication and allowing our local entities to focus on what's important -- a deep, rich local report. It is the logical next step from our local Information Center initiatives, creating a national head to the local content gathering bodies."
Naturally, ContentOne will work off the new CCI NewsGate system. How might it work with USA Today, the smaller dailies, and their new websites as more company-wide news gathering and page production gets further centralized?
Gannett Production Centers. These are the still-developing operations at Des Moines and Indianapolis, where advertising artwork is to be produced for all the community dailies by early 2011. How will that artwork be shipped back and forth between ad salespeople, advertisers, and the page producers at the five new hubs?
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Is attending a "mandatory" meeting tomorrow to view a presentation by a company called Narrative Science. This is a new company that has built technology to "automate" journalism.
ReplyDeleteThe top executives and editors have been invited to learn more about this company and Gannett's plan to use them.
Very, very interesting. I've heard there was growing interest in that start-up.
ReplyDeleteI know that High School Sports is already using them and the LOVE it!!!
ReplyDeleteI don't think shipping the ads from the GPC to the page hubs is any sort of a big issue. All that really needs to be done is to place a final PDF of the ad on whatever server it needs to be on. As far as the page hubs are concerned, either the PDF is there or it isn't. You'd have to wonder what that procedure will be, though, when the PDF isn't there. Some advertisers - including some of the biggest - don't care about deadlines. As long as the ad is in-house by press start time, they get all the leeway they need. That's something that can't fly so easily when you're putting out two dozen papers at once. If the ad isn't there by ad release deadline, will they kill it?
ReplyDeleteAs far as trafficking the ad between GPC, the rep, and the client, though... that's a whole different set of problems.
Maybe they will migrate the sales side over to cci's sales software? Hmmm. I know they just installed ad tracker, but one common system would allow for all sorts of collaboration.
ReplyDeleteThe hubs and narrative science are just two more examples of the controlled liquidation of the newspaper division. Years ago Warren Buffet said the major goal for newspaper owners in the digital age was to maximize cash flow until the business is no longer viable. That's exactly what is going on here. Cut expenses, eliminate fixed costs, sell assets to maximize cash flow for the shareholders and benefits for the top executives. In a few years Gannett will be it's broadcast properties and whatever digital businesses are making money. The pension fund will be underfunded but the SERP will be flush. The shareholders will not have much in dividends or capital gains but the senior execs will make out like bandits.
ReplyDelete