Saturday, November 06, 2010

Week Nov. 1-7 | Your Layoff Comments: Part 6

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59 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  3. To One Of Those Veterans regarding his/her comment to "They've done their bit. Their life is over": Well said! And thank you thank you thank you so much for all you've done and for who you are. You seem to be one of the finest human beings and I wish I worked with you.

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  4. To Jim: Can't imagine why you continue to allow the posts bashing your own self. We know from past blogging that there are those sorts of people out there and that you have taken the high road. Their comments have no place here and I wish you'd stop posting their SLOP!

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  5. I don't know why Jim allows the troll comments either, but every time I read one it just makes me thank and respect and trust him even more. Thanks Jim for your great work.

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  6. Oh, it's so funny how these trolls try to discredit Jim. His work stands for itself. He's an exceptional journalist who did great work at all his newspapers. He's still doing great work! I worked with Jim and know what a great reporter and colleague he is. I left Gannett 11 years ago and the business 5 1/2 years ago, and I just donated to Gannett Blog. I only read it once in a while because my world doesn't revolve around Gannett. Still I'm willing to support the work that Jim is doing because it's so important. If my local newspaper provided this kind of powerful information, I'd pay for it too. Jim, you remain a hero in my book. Keep putting the pressure on Gannett!

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  7. I always chuckle when I read discussions of class-action suits. It ain't gonna happen, folks. What management does is both short-sighted in terms of business success, and reprehensible in its treatment of people. But it's not illegal, and there's nothing happening that opens GCI to civil liability, either.

    They're evil, but they're not stupid.

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  8. I chuckle when I read what the trolls write to try to discourage lawsuits of any type against Gannett. Employment-related lawsuits have happened in the past, and I'm betting they'll happen again.

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  9. Job postings on journalismjobs.com give the impression that Gannett is in big time hiring mode. Look at ones for 11/05/10. USAT needs a designer and Port Huron needs an editor. Weren't they laying off people in those very positions the day before these were posted? Also, if Careerbuilder does such a fine job, why does the company need to go to journalismjobs to find workers?

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  10. I note from the layoff reports that some let go were working for Moms Like Me. Is Moms on the ropes?

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  11. It is obvious to me what the Gannett situation is and how it will play out over the next 5-10 years. Here's my take:

    -- There's no hope of giving Gannett a makeover into a new breed media/technology company. The company has few technical innovators, fewer journalists than ever, and revenue is shrinking every year.

    -- The revenue picture will not improve, even if the economy is rebounding. Print is over; it's on life support. That's an industry problem.

    -- Gannett has no technically driven products to replace its print empire revenue. None. Its web sites are horrible. iPad and iPhone apps are only as good as the content in them and their reliability.

    -- The only solution for the leadership? Maintain profitability by cutting. There's still enormous debt to pay down. There's Wall Street to please, and the only thing Wall Street cares about is profit.

    -- Result? Continual cuts in staff and product, accompanied by hollow declarations of innovation and efficiency.

    -- End game? The company will shrink to a point where 40-50 of the current newspapers will shutter or be sold. Only the largest sites and TV stations will remain, and eventually Gannett will either be taken over or see its best assets sold off.

    What I am doing and what you should do:

    -- Make a clear plan for leaving. Have your resume ready, have a plan for getting new training to move to either a job in journalism where the company is healthy or to a new industry altogether.

    I've survived the layoffs so far, but I have no illusions that will continue or that the company will pull out of the nosedive.

    The only winners here are the top executives who will ride their big salaries into retirement after having carefully managed a dying company all the way to its death.

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  12. To 6:26am, this is the "Veteran" here saying thanks for the kind words. I judge others based upon their character and abilities. Age, race, gender, sexual orientation are unimportant aspects of who we are. Are you respectful and smart, do you work well with others and bust your ass to contribute? Then you're my kind of co-worker. That 9:49pm twerp won't survive at Gannett or anywhere else. Thank goodness. We have enough knuckleheads in this company already so one less would be progress. To everyone else, hang in there. We ain't dead yet.

    And to those bashing Jim, move along because it's not working. Jim, we're telling you its ok to take out the trash, please.

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  13. MomsLikeMe is definitely on the ropes. Nowhere even close to the projected $$$ and dreadful, dated, glitchy technology.

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  14. xxx the only thing Wall Street cares about is profit. xxx
    No, it is just one thing. Look at what happened with the Q3 results: the profits were ok, but what Wall Street didn't like was that revenues were flat.
    Laying off people and furloughs do not improve revenues. You have to have a compelling product to sell.

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  15. Agreed, there are some daunting challenges facing GCI. But poor leadership lowers the odds of its success.
    GCI is squandering its good name and high standing in the information business as it scrambles to maintain unrealistic profit margins. They continue to let the quanity and quality of the information they produce decrease at a time when consumers are clamoring for objective, aggressive reporting. The value of USAT, major papers like the Freep, Indy Star and others continues to decline with each round of cuts. Talented people are sacrificed to maintain 25+percent profit margins. Talk about a formula for failure.
    U.S. automakers have improved their cars to stay competitive. McDonalds focuses constantly on making better burgers. Computer companies invest heavily in R&D to improve their products.
    Gannett? It cuts the quanity and quality of its biggest source of income to finance new media ventures that never pay off. It's like a guy with a really cool wife cutting her loose after 25 years to consort with a 20-year-old. It might seem hip at the time, but it's usually a bad decision.
    How 'bout putting some real journalists back in charge? How 'bout investing in USAT to make it THE SOURCE of hard-hitting original reporting on things like healthcare, Medicare and other issues important to baby boomers who still read. How 'bout telling Wall Street to expect lower profit margins while GCI invests in quality? How 'bout exploring partnerships with some of the emerging news sources that are doing what GCI should have done(Politico, Huffington, etc.)? How 'bout asking Gannett execs to lead this transformation rather than spending most of their time cloistered in meetings deciding who gets whacked next?
    The NYTimes and WSJournal make millions on their credibility alone. GCI spent its credility to meet unrealistic short-term profit demands.
    Bad, bad leadership, I say.

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  16. 10:27's summation is one of the best I've read here in a long, long time.

    I, too, have been especially concerned about the lack of energy behind website development. I know our developers are doing the best they can with the limited resources provided; god bless them for that. But the newest site template simply doesn't amount to a significant advance.

    In total, it continues to look like the Gannett Management Committee and Wall Street are engaged in a wink-wink game: The GMC pretends to push the company forward, and analysts pretend there's a future in the strategic plan.

    This is a tragedy for small investors and employees. And its even more tragic for the communities that are losing credible media to keep an eye on government and serve as legitimate communication vehicles.

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  17. To The Veteran: You're welcome and hats off to you and yours!

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  18. 11:26 a.m. -

    The problem is more advertising than it is quality of the product. Advertisers that once flocked to newspapers in spite of the quality are now choosing to sound their ad budgets in other places in spite of quality. I left Gannett a couple of years ago and am now in PR. Our firm was recently marketing a new service to Gannett community and we had $20k in advertising money. That amount is not small but It wasn't huge either. We had to make some difficult and calculated decisions about where we were going to spend the budget and get the biggest bang for our buck, to be cliche. We cast a wide net and spent the money in a number of places, including the Gannett newspaper, Facebook, digital platforms, etc. The campaign was largely a success, but when we asked people where they learned of our service, not a single person said the newspaper. Facebook and Google ads were 100 times more effective and cost us considerably less. Why were they were more effective? Targeted audiences. The way those software programs target your ad buy to a very specific group of people who have the highest likelihood of engaging your product or service is more valuable than any news content, no matter the quality. The next time our firm has $20k to spend, I can assure you we will spend every penny we put into the newspaper this time around expanding our online approach through search engines and social media targeted advertising. Multiply that statement by 1 million times and you can begin to understand why newspapers are losing revenue. The quality of the content has nothing to do with loss of advertising. It's unfortunate too, as a former journalist and a newspaperman at heart, it makes me sad to know that is the case. Good luck everyone. It's hard to watch these layoffs come to good newsrooms, even if i am no longer a part of one.

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  19. 9:53 AM, I'm no troll. And I regularly donate to support the blog. But the blather about class-action suits is a reflection of how eager people are to turn to litigation to address perceived wrongs, regardless of having any substantive basis for doing so.

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  20. But doesn't good-quality content aggregate the audiences you then target? If not, what's bringing those individuals to the web in the first place? They don't linger on blank webpages, after all.

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  21. Listen to 9:53, folks. If the youngest employees earned the highest wages and had the highest medical costs, then they would be the ones getting laid off.

    Clearly, that's not the case. As you gain seniority, you tend to get paid more and more. And, not surprisingly, that comes as you age.

    Gannett is looking to lower costs. Punishing older workers simply for being old doesn't add to the bottom line.

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  22. It just appears as though Gannett is slowly and strategically "winding-down" its traditional newspaper operations. Does anyone else walk away with the same sense?

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  23. It's an amazing and total lack of vision. The revenue picture tells all the story. The stock market has bounced back to where it was at the time of the Lehman collapse, but we haven't bounced, and show no sign of bouncing. They did the Web sites on the cheap and anyone with any talent has left for greener pastures. They beggared the sites of investment they need, and now they wonder why it isn't working.
    Look at what the NYT is doing. They've assigned someone full-time to produce videos for the Web site, with interesting interviews with reporters on various news stories. They change the format every couple of months, and make creative use of art. The Chicago Tribune has gone far more commercial, which is what I thought we would do. But our sites look so tired and out of date.

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  24. 12:17 Absolutely. This is almost stated in Hunke's reorganization plan for USA Today, and I think it is company-wide. But there is no concept yet of what will replace them.

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  25. Des Moines EE met with top editors late Friday and word trickling from that meeting is that there will be NO layoffs in DM

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  26. 12:34
    A friend who works at Des Moines site has not
    heard anything of that nature.
    Who,or what level is your source?

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  27. Des Moines also has sites in Altoona/Indianola
    and weeklies in eastern Iowa that are
    struggling hugely,what about them ...
    any word.

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  28. 9:44 AM
    I disagree. I think the company is ignorant when it comes to an important add on to the Civil Right Act, and that's the one that protects workers older than 40 with the ADEA. Look at Gannett's promotional material. Think about how many times you hear things like the ones written on this blog at your workplace each and every day.

    Wouldn't you agree that you'd get reprimanded or fired if you said something like "All black people are washed up on the job and need to go to make way for the new generation," or "Women need to go back to the home and make way for this new generation of journalists." Well pal, you can't make those kinds of comments about someone just because he/she is 40 and older. Ya just can't.

    Now, you work for a company that, unfortunately, allows and promotes ageism, in my opinion based on my work time with Gannett. That doesn't mean it's right and it sure doesn't mean you'll get by with it forever. More importantly, it's sad to think that anyone would judge someone's job performance solely on the basis of something they can't change, and that's age.

    I'm no fan of class action lawsuits. I stand more for individual responsibility, and that means holding companies like Gannett accountable for their actions. To me, by calling Gannett out on wrongs might wake them up enough that someone will add "age" to that diversity equation about which the company seems to boast.

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  29. Gannett needs to just shoot the newspaper business and put it out of it's misery! Why don't you just sell the papers to someone who actually gives a damn about the communities in which they are located!

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  30. Did anyone from Bold Italic get axed, and is that publication making any money, anyone know? Isn't it part of Gannett?

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  31. Did any other sites, aside from Elmira & Ithaca, get hit with the 5% cut in pay?
    We were told that since we can't possibly put a newspaper out with any less employees that we have now (thanks to the last severals years of being slaughtered), we'll be expected to continue to do the work of several people, but be paid less to do so. Talk about kicking a guy when he's down!

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  32. 1:20 is on target. Do us all a favor corporate and sell the community papers to a company that cares about journalism.

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  33. Several thoughts on the threads here:

    Lawsuits: I have been around Gannett since the '70s. It loses an individual one here or there, but I think those of you who are beating the class action drum are kidding yourselves. You can argue about whether layoffs are strategically correct or "nice." But legal? I'm betting on GCI.

    Quality of content: I think for a specific big-name web site, like WSJ or USAToday, this may make sense (a big quality push). But company wide, I have not seen any proof that pouring more money and bodies at improving quality will bring more revenue. I can point you toward some specific markets where Gannett just crushes the competition in terms of eyeballs. Where customers are very happy with they quality of content they get (yeah, laugh all you want, but it's true). And the business side is losing the battle in selling it.

    Looked at another way: is there any way to tell, by reading something, how many people it took to produce it? On the web especially, readers are not recognizing or valuing the difference between sites produced by 5 people as compared to sites produced by 50. Until readers can perceive that difference, you have to like the chances of the 5-person shop.

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  34. Sadly, laying off employees is Gannett's way of saying it doesn't know what else to do. This is a real stumblebum company overseen by a board of directors that isn't living up to its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders by either throwing out the entire entrenched management team or, as 1:20 said, selling the individual papers and stations to owners who care about the communities. This is a seriously sinking ship with virtually no glimmers of hope. No judge is going to award wrongful discharge damages to workers who were laid off by a faltering company. Better to start looking around at other job opportunities.

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  35. There is going to be a very serious attempt to improve the quality of USA Today content in coming weeks and months, through a new "team" approach, strong hires and an energized plan for editorial oversight. It might make a difference.

    In fact, if USA Today simply hired the best of those being discarded (the correct word), at Jackson and elsewhere, the newspaper could make a great leap forward.

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  36. 2:11 I heard that the Battle Creek Enquirer here in Michigan is doing the 5% pay cut across the board. The Lansing State Journal already handles their advertising, their obits/death notices, their circ. and their printing. What was left to cut there? I wouldn't be surprised if Port Huron did the same.

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  37. The trouble with a lawsuit is they can always cite the economy and declining business, and the judge will throw it out. These layoffs are all reviewed by H.R., and higher ups, and part of that process is aimed at neutralizing legal suits. A lot of these laws state noble goals, but are deliberately written to be toothless.

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  38. I am not doubting folks posting here, just being cautious in this age of trolls and mayhem-makers.

    So I must ask: IS this true about 5% pay cuts at several sites -- Elmira, Ithaca, Port Huron?

    That's a big deal and big new approach. If true. Is it true or are people just "hearing" that it is true?

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  39. If they were smart, they'd do a 5% cut at the NJ papers BEFORE they become a hub. That way, the bar is set for how much to pay the newly hired as each hub sets itself up. Which other sites are actually in the process of hubbing themselves?

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  40. 4:17 PM
    I would guess that the economy and business conditions would not be a valid reason for laying off a disproportionate number of the workforce 40 and older. Older workers are in a protected class for a reason, like it or no.

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  41. 4:19 p.m.: I've confirmed the 5% pay cuts in Elmira and Ithaca. I cannot confirm any such cuts elsewhere.

    However, I've been told by well-placed readers that wage cuts are being considered at worksites generally for 2011.

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  42. We are going around in circles. If you are over 40 in this profession today, you are dead meat. Face up to the facts that you see around you. There is no future in the newspaper business for anyone over 40. They are paid too much and draw too much health insurance compared to younger workers. The only exceptions are those in executive positions of some sort.

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  43. ...oh, yes, and the tigers in India are a protected class, but that is not stopping them from going extinct.

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  44. 5:25 PM said:
    "There is no future in the newspaper business for anyone over 40. They are paid too much and draw too much health insurance compared to younger workers."

    Thanks for giving this over 40 dead meat (with no future in that business) person another reason to cancel my subscription! Besides that new campaign to start running articles CATERING TO THE DEAD MEAT CROWD, NO LESS, can be read in AARP which will be gaining a new customer!

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  45. I wasn't aware of the US civil rights legislation that covers tigers in India, 5:46 PM.

    And 5:48 PM, I cancelled my subscription years ago.

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  46. The decline of newspaper readership continues to be dramatic. Until a year ago, I worked at the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, NJ. The recent ABC numbers show that paper with a daily average down to about 48,000! I recall the days, not too many years ago, when daily circulation was over 100,000. And who knows if the most recent numbers are accurate. That is, how much is real circulation. How much is NIE and other circulation of no value whatsoever to the advertisers who are left. A couple of friends have businesses who used to advertise in this paper and tell everyone that they get no results at all from this advertising money in that paper. Yet, this paper keeps many of the incompetent and useless people around and on the payroll, especially in the advertising department and upper management. No word this past week on layoffs at this paper, but check out the list next week!

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  47. Friday's meeting also involved a side chat involving Julie Harvey, Carolyn Washburn and Laura Hollingsworth. Susan Patterson Plank may also have been in the meeting, but unconfirmed. The gist is to bleed the other west coast properties and consolidate as much as possible into/out of Des Moines.

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  48. The pay grades are too high generally speaking on the ad side. Commission only models don't work well but Gannett should evaluate what they pay folks on the sale side. They need to be driven to make commission.

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  49. I wouldn't be over joyed to be under 50 and working for a newspaper. Consider how far newspapers have fallen in the last 5 years. Where do you think they'll be 10 years from now? Get out while you're still young enough to find a new profession.

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  50. 2:57, I agree. This just shows there are no ideas but plenty of desperation. For me, the race is on to see whether I can get another job before the next round of layoffs.

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  51. Gannett is a horrible company that treats its employees and customers like dirt, but that doesn't change the importance of journalism. People need information and they love a good story— a concept that hasn't changed since we lived in caves and used stone tools. If the Gannett newspaper and its website vanished from my community, I am certain that somebody would replace it with something a lot better.

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  52. Gannett is worried about class-action lawsuits, that's why all the layoffs are vetted by legal. Might there still be a case against them? Sure. But it's awfully hard to tell. Employees don't have any hard numbers as to who was laid off, how old they are, what race and sex they are, etc.

    Since Gannett has all that information, one might assume they were careful. But you know what they say about assuming things.

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  54. If everyone who has been laid off both in the past and in this current/future rounds used this blog as a tool to communicate, evaluate, and plan then a lawsuit might actually be feasible. Lawsuits against large companies statistically get better results based on the number of people affected that join the in the law suit and. With the right research and planning I am sure that a case can be made against Gannett. Although trying to do it individually would likely be a lost cause.

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  56. For Part 7 of this comment thread, please go here.

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  57. Instead of just talking about class action lawsuits, the first serious step is to get a lawyer who is interested in filing suit. When you have a name and a law firm gathering information, then let us know.

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  58. Laid off during this last round and over 40. I'm really upset about the severance or "transition pay" package I was given. If I find another job, I forfeit my severance!

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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."

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