"We still have a very significant number of local reporters full-time in those markets. . . . We're not ceding any of those markets from a local content standpoint."
-- Asbury Park Press Publisher Tom Donovan, insisting that readers shouldn't expect a drastically different product after the current roster of 99 editorial staff members drops to 53 on Feb. 4 at three other Gannett N.J. newspapers. His remarks came in an interview today with Patch.com.
Earlier: In Louisville, Ky., how to damn Gannett with faint praise
Donovan also has some lovely Florida swampland for sale.
ReplyDeleteCan you take Neill Borowski back?
ReplyDeleteThe circulation drop for the C-N is shocking -- less than 20K daily readers! I guess our General Manager isn't much of a manager. JJ's columns don't add much value.
ReplyDeleteWell it's a hell of a lot more than he said to the AP. Tom, I have a used car I'd like you to consider buying, it's responsibilities are ever changing, but it still serves it's market. Oh and I cut the trunk off to save money.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm selling Kool-Aid over here. Which flavor would you like? Will you have what he's having?
ReplyDeleteSo we are to presume that the management had shamelessly been wasting all along the efforts of the half of the staff that won't be part of the new, shrunken team?
ReplyDeleteThe race to the bottom accelerates. What disgraceful PR baloney. Of course, 98 percent of the public knows it's baloney. So must Donovan.
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ReplyDeletePatch.com. That is the future of local journalism and everyone in USCP is feeling the heat. The "Jersey" folks have every reason to be scared. Patch is kicking their asses left and right on breaking news.
ReplyDeleteYes and Patch is hiring in your area.
ReplyDelete"We still have a very significant number of local reporters full-time in those markets. . . . We're not ceding any of those markets from a local content standpoint"
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like the bullshit they gave us when they laid off 12 of our ad designers and switched us to the GPC. We're now ceding our market share to our competitors due to the inability to create useful ads. Add the lack of face time with customers because of the constant need to babysit ads sent to the GPC equals less sales.
Sure sucks to put in 3-5 hours selling, designing, correcting and waiting for an ad from GPC, only to have to write a credit because it was designed by an 9 year old.
@7:41
ReplyDeleteAre there any designers left at your site at all? What do they do? My site hasn't gone to GPC yet and no one is telling the designers here what the new workflow will be.
Why are they making us interview with people who don't know us?
ReplyDeleteThey are destroying the village to save it.
ReplyDeleteMakes you wonder when they will do a similar thing with the relatively closely bunched papers in Green Bay, Appleton, Oshkosh and Fond du Lac, WI.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the post of Patch hiring in your area:
ReplyDeleteThe issue with Patch is that it pays poorly and offers no benefits or even car mileage to its part-time, contractual, whatever you want to call it, reporting staff.
And AOL is even using an old Gannett trick: hiring unpaid interns. Work your butt off for us and get yourself a college credit hour!
Yahoo!
Patch is not the answer. Take a look at the sites. One or two stories a day, tops. Meeting stories published two days after the meeting. They're no great shakes.
ReplyDeleteOh, and Gannett sucks.
So what's the fate of the exec ed at the Daily Record?
ReplyDeleteTom Donovan's no dope. He knows that everyone else knows it's all about tanking circulation and declining revenues.
ReplyDeleteHe's just spouting the company line. And why not? He's getting paid a heck of a lot to pilot a sinking ship.
Now, if Gannett could just make a mite more room for innovators; for folks who can see beyond the next quarter, it might be able to make room for news in its plans.
Totally unrelated: Please check out mediabistro today for an interesting piece about the Tribune Co.
Actually patch does pay for mileage and expenses. They are hiring editors and sales people and are focusing on what Gannett Corporate has forgotten, local community. They are a large corporation similar to Gannett and once hired you can move around and apply to other positions. You might get less money if you are a long time employee of Gannett, but that will happen if you go anywhere.
ReplyDeleteDonovan will ride this sinking ship till the last day possible. What other company would hire him? Having worked with him, he simply lacks the intelligence to be an executive at a successful company. He covers it up with a confidence, actually confidence, that mistakenly leads many to believe he has a clue what he's doing. He doesn't.
ReplyDeleteMeant to write in last comment on TD - "confidence, actually cockiness" - in the next to last sentence.
ReplyDeleteCut the staff in half, yet do the same sort of coverage. That is the new Gannett way. Get used to the idea, because it is coming to a neighborhood near you later this year.
ReplyDeleteThe Star Ledger just shut down its Local News Service, further proof that the days of sending reporters out to sit at school board, planning board, zoning board meetings is over. I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that this sort of local coverage is a thing of the past. Unless there is some hot, controversial issue, don't expect to see a reporter at a city council meeting either. The DR remained a meeting focused paper for far too long and that sort of 'the planning board last night voted...' coverage is passe.
ReplyDeleteI love that Patch did the interview.
ReplyDelete@10:24
ReplyDeleteUnder what sun does any freelancer get mileage and a fantastic wage? Vanity Fair maybe. I've never, in only about 10 years of being a freelancer, ever gotten mileage. That's what a good CPA is for. The deal is this: I get to hustle for as many clients as I want and work when I want and take the assignments I want. In return, you only get part of my time and all my family's eggs aren't in one basket. That's the trade off. Patch staffers get AOL benefits, which I dare anyone to compare to Gannett's. I heard they actually LOWERED costs for their employees this year but I can't vouch 100 percent. And as for interns. Seriously? Post is totally a non-starter.
12:57, like most people here, is only partly right. Stringers used to routinely get mileage for going to meetings. It was based on a scale.
ReplyDeleteFree-lancing is possibly categorized differently. But many part-time writers used to be compensated for driving.
Did Donovan not notice that Patch wrote a stronger story about the cutbacks and it was written by a former Gannett reporter. Growing/shrinking. You can't make this stuff up.
ReplyDeleteJim, why haven't we seen much on this blog about patch eating into Gannett markets? Many former newspaper reporters have jumped to patch, and some have actually seen pay raises and better benefits. I've been told Patch can burn through money for four years before it runs into problems while newspapers keep cutting back. I wonder how many former Gannett reporters now work for patch?
For my two cents: If you know for certain a new venture is going to succeed or fail -- did employee No. 40 of Apple? Google? -- then you'd be a billionaire and probably not on this board right now. But it doesn't take a Warren Buffett-like touch to know exactly where a corporate-sanctioned death spiral ends. Mass layoffs, bankruptcy, both. Preserve your un-movable margins by any means necessary until the business model sputters to a halt. I think a lot of wonderful, talented people still work at Gannett, but anyone who looks sideways at anyone out there hustling to find a better way (and hiring while they do it!) is either intellectually dishonest for a reason or so beaten down they've lost their marbles.
ReplyDelete@12:44
ReplyDeleteMeeting coverage is passe? I submit that no one is buying the daily newspapers anymore because there IS no meeting coverage. Who wants to read a newspaper filled with wire service stories about national events you saw online the day - or two days - prior? People want to know who approved that massive Wal-Mart in town, why the county is buying a parcel of land when it's running a deficit, the dirt from the council meeting, etc.
The newspapers in my area that are surviving are, ironically, the weeklies. That's where something like Patch comes in. If you cover local news, have meeting stories up the next morning (or that night), cover breaking news - all in a format where people don't have to pay to read a poorly-designed, long-winded weekly newspaper, it just might work.
FWIW, the Patch sites in my area are all staffed by reporters - including award-winning reporters - from former Gannett papers. Most of them I've spoken with say Patch is paying them more and they have the free time to work on stories and choose the topics THEY believe are of interest to the community - not what some corporate hack dictates from afar.
Whether Patch.com or some future iteration of online local news is the answers, the bottom line is that information never becomes "passe" and it's always in demand. Media and journalism are NOT going away just because newspapers are.
It doesn't look like they're cutting into Gannett markets in Ohio or Wisconsin. In Ohio, they're centered near Cleveland, and in Wisconsin they're near Milwaukee.
ReplyDeleteOhio and Wisconsin are coming, trust me. They are rolling this out gradually, hoping to adjust. But they cannot make their goals without widespread cuts across all of USCP properties.
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ReplyDeleteI suspect the DR's EE (whose job remains sacred as far as we know -- after all, doesn't every bureau with a staff of 14 need a 6-figure salaried EE who sits in his office and ignores the news?) wrote the post about the DR sticking with meeting coverage too long. Currently the DR has all of one reporter doing meeting coverage and God bless her she is doing an incredible job. Is anyone going to read the DR to read trend stories on topics? People in MC get their sophisticated news from the NYT and they get their state news from the Ledger (used to get their local news there, too, as the Ledger used to do a better job). If they read the DR, it's to find out who got arrested, what are they building down the block from me and what's happening to my property taxes. They have not gotten that from the DR in a long time and no way they will get it under Donovan's plan. If any of these high and mighty editors got their heads out of their a***s they would hear the people begging for local news.
ReplyDeleteDear 8:12, If you really knew the EE at the DR, you'd know that the last thing he will listen to is anything that comes from the bottom up. He was the same guy who killed the education beat at the C-N, failing to realize the reason people put up with high mortgages, higher property taxes and the other rigors of suburban life is to get their kids in a good school system. To ignore what your readers, excuse me what your CUSTOMERS want is to do so at your own peril. To see the DR circulation dip to the mid 20 thousands is shocking. To see the people at the top who make the decisions that lead to such a decline not held responsible for them is even more shocking.
ReplyDeleteThe Patch Business model is suspect at best. The roll out has been half hearted and you have to hunt for a link to Patch on AOL's main page.
They will fill a role where companies like Gannett have abandoned ABC journalism. But if they don't come up with that business model, they'll be a in a similar leaky Gannett fiscal style boat in a few years.
The DR EE all but killed local meeting coverage at the Courier News, with the then-publisher's (also clueless) blessing, which coincidentally coincided with declining circulation. He was also at the helm of the Woodbridge News Tribune when that paper went into the toilet. So, his record is perfect, and in Gannettland, that merits a six-figure salary.
ReplyDeleteI've read many of the Patch sites over the past few weeks, and it seems to me their editorial coverage is half-hearted. There should be more than just one story a day, and some days with nothing. I don't know if it's because these kids they've hired as "editors" just don't get it, or if upper management just doesn't care.
ReplyDelete@8:57
ReplyDeleteThe Patch sites on here usually have 4-5 stories a day - some town-specific, some county news. Usually a column thrown in about a local topic. You can't expect THAT much daily content when you're covering a sleepy suburb of, say, 7,000. Meetings and the occasional arrest is really about it.
Some of the sites covering the bigger towns around here (pop. 70-90K) have a good deal of content.
The DR will bear the brunt of the newsroom job cuts, no doubt about it. The C-N's Sunday columnists are history as well. As Dom DeLouise said in Cannonball Run, "Nothing can stop us now, JJ."
ReplyDeleteI didn't do a full count, but it looks like Patch has something like 100 sites in New Jersey. So does that mean Patch & AOL now employ more full-time journalists than the NJ Gannett papers?
ReplyDeleteHow many full=time reporters are left at the Asbury Park Press, Courier-Post, and Daily Journal?
PAtch has 76 sites in NEw Jersey, but that number is expected to grow to 80 soon. So that's 80 reporter-editors, plus a handful of regional editors. Nowhere near as many local news staffers as the New Jersey Gannett papers combined.
ReplyDeleteBut more than any one paper.
Or the Star Ledger for that matter.
It will be interesting to see how Patch's economic model works out. 80 reporters, 100 reporters, say they make $50,000 each, how do you sustain that? Does anyone know how much money Patch brings in?
ReplyDeleteThe Patch sites I'm familiar with in southern NY and Connecticut have little advertising, certainly not enought to support the sites.
ReplyDeleteThere's a reporter-editor and an occasional freelancer. The reporter-editor seems to do most of the work and the hours are around the clock. The freelancers are not paid much, in fact if they worked a full week they might make as much as they did on unemployment.
This is not an attack on Patch, just my observation. I'd really like to know about their financials because the sites I've seen must be heavily subsidized.
What they need is more public awareness that they're there and have a product compelling enough to make regular viewing the norm.
That Patch is the future or that it is better than the local Gannett papers is a myth - perpetrated, interestingly enough it seems, by Gannett employees!
ReplyDeletePatch has no scoops, it doesn't cover any meetings that the Gannett reporters don't cover. The Patch sites even "link" to Gannett stories and re-write (read: plagiarize).
The Home News Tribune, Asbury Park Press, Courier News and Daily Record have their Patch "competitors" beat hands down end of story thank you good-bye.
Patch's spiel that they are going into towns ignored by the newspapers is also a myth. Where is the Newark Patch or the Camden Patch or the Elizabeth Patch? They go into hoighty-toighty towns already served by dailies and weeklies, where all the ad dollars are.
Plus: Where are the ads -- you know, the things that make money -- on Patch? Anyone? Bueller?
Plus: Who the heck is READING Patch?
Patch does not "care" about the "community." They are owned by AOL, and AOL, like Gannett, only care about sucking money out of Main Street. They hire any ole schmuck to work like a dog 24/7 with no oversight. As soon as AOL decides Patch ain't making dough, they'll drop these "community" blogs like hot tamales.
Patch opens town by town. When they have an editor and sales person for that town they begin the town. It's a start up similar to the other papers and has to start somewhere. The Press does not have enough people to send to all town meetings if you are saying that you are not in the newsroom. The New Jersey Group has not been interested in local news in many many years. I realize Karen and Tom have a lot on their plates but local news is not one of them.
ReplyDeleteUm, why would Patch be stupid enough to let anyone see details of their business model?
ReplyDeleteI disagree with your premise that anyone at Patch is stupid. You sound a little sour grapes. I think AOL/Patch can handle it. There model is no different then any other startup.
ReplyDelete