Hubs | Nashville now set for March-April launch; Brevard would be first 'remote' daily to go online

Following Wednesday's web-based conference on the planned page design and production hubs, more details have emerged about the timetable, operations, and hiring, according to an internal memo and one of my readers.

As expected, Nashville, Tenn., is the first of the five hubs scheduled to launch. The executive editor of The Tennessean there, Mark Silverman, sent a memo to staff clarifying how "wire" stories will be edited. Silverman also discussed how and when the first hires will be made for the hubs, called "Design Studios." (Memo text, below.)

The project, first disclosed in July, will consolidate page production for all of Gannett's 81 community dailies at the five hubs. The other four are at papers in Asbury Park, N.J.; Des Moines; Louisville, Ky., and Phoenix. A new CCI-brand front-end computer system will be installed at the 81 papers, to unify word processing, and make possible online page design over great distances. The project is set to roll out over two years.

Nashville gets CCI first
The goal is to cut costs while simultaneously improving page design. Savings are to come through efficiencies: The hubs will employ fewer people doing work remotely -- sometimes, hundreds of miles from assigned papers -- that is now performed by many more locally at each of the 81 sites. Some designers will be transferred to the hubs; others will be laid off; exact figures haven't been made public.

Nashville is expected to gets its CCI NewsGate installation by early December, according to one of my readers. Training is set for late February or March, "and the paper should be up and running by the end of March or beginning of April," the reader says in an e-mail.

"Florida Today will be the first paper scheduled for sometime in June,'' the reader says. "Then one paper or group every other month until [Nashville is] up and running fully. [Nashville will have] all of Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and possibly Staunton, Va."

(Spreadsheet shows five hubs and their assigned papers, as of July.)

Text of Silverman's memo
Folks,

Please let me clarify something that may have been unclear during the Design Studios webinars this week.

The plan is to have a group of wire copy editors in each studio  -- not two as the table of organization at the webinar seemed to suggest. The exact number will be determined by the amount of wire content used by the newspapers using each studio. As newspapers are added to the studios, more wire copy editors will be hired.

They will work as a team, in the same way that teams of designers are envisioned as working on a particular newspaper or groups of newspapers. In hiring the wire copy editors, we will look for knowledge of various subject areas -- sports, entertainment, business, etc.

One more thing: In December we will post the Tennessean producer jobs -- positions that will include local copy editing and headline writing as well as Web work. Interested people can apply for both positions -- those local producer jobs as well as wire copy editor jobs. You don't have to pick one or the other. There will be conversations between staffers, the Design Studio managers (and me) and appropriate Tennessean editors to go through the needs of each job and the interests of staffers. No decisions will be made before January.

I'll be away for a week, but please see me when I return if you have additional questions about the copy editor and producer positions. We will have another staff meeting in early December, and we'll spend a portion of that on the Design Studio issues as well.

Thanks.

-- Mark

[Image: today's Tennessean, Newseum]