Mail | 'The future is clear and, for those who opt to hold on and play ball, it may be bright. For those who weep for the past, your cab is waiting'

Regarding recent hiring of senior executives from outside the company, and initiatives such as the new corporate brand campaign, Anonymous@1:32 p.m. writes:

Gannett, as promised under CEO Craig Dubow and U.S. newspapers division President Bob Dickey, is transforming into a new, different company.

This new company will be different than the old GCI in many ways. It values marketing more than journalism. It will no longer reward "company men and women," who devoted their adult hoods in service to GCI, with assured pathways to promotion. New up-and-coming players, both inside and outside GCI, will be placed in greater numbers into key leadership roles. Folks in their late 40s and 50s who have spent their careers studying the teachings of Newharth, Curley, McCorkindale and Clark-Johnson will find themselves increasing branded as "newspaper people," which really means old-thinking, old-media or simply old. We will put the emphasis on profit, where it needs to be in a publicly traded corporation, and try to make the hard-to-monetize stuff like the First Amendment, community leadership, moral courage and journalism as affordable as possible (again, without discouraging profit).

Papers 'just about bled dry'
As reported on this blog earlier, say farewell soon to the smaller community newspapers (NT-31s). Many will exist only in name alone, mere shells of their former selfs. Others, clustered around larger metros, will simply be subsets of the bigger sister that enveloped them. The New Jersey cluster has never been profitable (confirmed this summer when corporate really looked at the books and determined how much they got from their big sister); by the end of this year, they really will no longer exist per se as individual entities. The small NT-31 dailies in Louisiana and Mississippi aren't big enough to cast a shadow. The cluster of three small Tennessee papers around Nashville are just about bled dry (two of them have been without a publisher for six months; the other one got rid of the ad director and made the publisher take over sales). Manitowoc in Wisconsin, once touted as the Gannett newspaper with the best audience reach of any of our markets and applauded for its very large return on investments [ROIs], now isn't big enough to warrant its own editor or advertising director.

Frankly, this fits well into our new model. We've spent too much time whining and crowing about the fate of these small papers. While they do bolster the reach and diversity of our national markets, they really aren't worth all the trouble. What's the point of a 20% ROI at a small daily when that really only translates to what we will pay out to our new chief marketing officer and chief digital officer in salary and perks? Is it really worth the worry and work to make so little total profit? We have bigger fish to catch, then fry, and the small papers aren't big enough for bait.

'Tons more we can cut'
Finally, we will and should see more cuts in employment. Everyone keeps crowing and crying that there's nothing left to cut. There's tons more we can cut, particularly if you let go of the past and its baggage of community commitment, watchdog work and local customer service. Design Studios for page production; ContentOne and USA Today for centralized content; regional advertising design; group-level sales management for digital and custom solutions, are all the way of the future. Gannett is no longer interested in having a publisher lead the chamber of commerce or the local United Way, and no longer really values a local editor who puts her kids in the school there and belongs to the Kiwanis Club. We're thinking much bigger than that. And we really can't turn that into profit.

Everyone on this blog said we needed bold change. We're getting it.

Now, those of us who joined Gannett in the olden days that ended just a few months ago must ask this question: Do you want to work for the new Gannett? If you do, then roll with it, baby. The future is here, the future is clear and, for those who opt to hold on and play ball, it may be bright. For those who weep for the past, your cab is waiting.