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Friday, May 13, 2011
38 comments:
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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For Part 3 of this comment thread, please go here.
ReplyDeleteYou will all love this, but I believe it with all my heart:
ReplyDeleteWhat Gannett needs is more corporate and divisional leadership, more centralization, and much less of each market wandering around aimlessly and insisting on doing things their own way.
You are all so very loud complaining about attempts to streamline and to stop reinventing the wheel that you scare corporate to death, especially USCP. But you are hastening your own demise in the process.
Can you take a deep breath and even consider it for a moment? Is the truth to much to bear?
It's time to take what works in successful markets and COPY it. To offer true direction from central points (hubs) and from McLean.
If you don't stop doing everything a different way in every market, it will all be over soon. I know, you are very proud and you each believe you know best but you DON'T. None of your markets are one iota as different as you think you are.
You are eliminating your own jobs with this ridiculous approach. And nope, I'm not at corporate. I'm not even at Gannett anymore. Soon, you won't be, either.
OK, fire away. (But it is true.)
1:52 -- Radio centralized long ago and it has become absolute crap. The only time I spend listening to local corporate radio is in the morning when you can actually find a morning team that isn't piped in from somewhere else in the country.
ReplyDeleteYou can believe what you like, but centralized media is garbage and has limited interest. The more my local paper becomes like USA Today, the closer I get to dropping it, subscribing to the New York Times and abandoning the local product altogether.
Obviously, the McDonaldization of the local media is the way to go.
ReplyDeleteBecause after sixty years of McDonalds, we've finally gotten rid of all the local restaurants, all the local flavor, all the local initiative because the buying public has realized restauranteurs were just reinventing the wheel when they weren't doing it the corporate McDonalds way.
What a load of crap, 1:52.
Whatever it turns out to be, DealChicken didn't start in McLean. Each week, best practices come out from Andora Gandy and none of them were initiated at the CP. You just can't foster initiative at the same time you're force feeding "the holy book of G - the way Things Must Be Done."
Not allowing flexibility at the local level means trying to shove Detroit solutions into Fond du Lac problems, or vice versa. Though the circulation is about the same now for those two sites, the resources, markets, products and audiences are entirely different.
What we need is the freedom to create our own place in our hometowns, not rules that force Salinas to change into Cherry Hill.
The financial sites crow that GCI is the best of the newspaper stocks. Well, it doesn't look that way to me and my piddling holdings. Anyone else notice how the stock has been sagging for the last month, and the business plan of this operation seems completely off the rails? Now it looks to me as if they can't even plan the finances of this company from quarter to quarter. What's gone wrong? It looks like the CP is panicking. The ineptness of these corporate executives is going to kill off this company before long.
ReplyDeletePlease help me get through another day at the APP. Please let me live through all the fakery and the Mean Girls in advertising.
ReplyDeleteThis is certifably crazy. They are gutting some of the most profitable newspapers in the company by cutting back on Palm Springs. Look at the 1988 report and you will see Palm Springs got a 38 percent return of profit and some $40 million in profits. Laying off employees at this paper is absolutely silly. It guarantees that profits will decline at Palm Springs and these other profitable newspapers, and that circulation will drop and so ad revenue will drop as well. For what are they doing this?
ReplyDeleteThe financial sites crow that GCI is the best of the newspaper stocks. Well, it doesn't look that way to me and my piddling holdings. Anyone else notice how the stock has been sagging for the last month, and the business plan of this operation seems completely off the rails? Now it looks to me as if they can't even plan the finances of this company from quarter to quarter. What's gone wrong? It looks like the CP is panicking. The ineptness of these corporate executives is going to kill off this company before long.
ReplyDelete5/12/2011 6:53 AM
It is the best of the newspaper stocks but all newspaper stock have no long term growth.. you seem out of touch.
The greed started when small newspapers (or radio or TV stations) sold to big media companies. And when people like Saridakis sold to Gannett. The truth is entrepreneurs build to sell. And Gannett bought and they are now in charge.
ReplyDeleteLook to your previous owners who took the money and ran. Wall Street runs corporate America. Greed is alive and well. Everything is a business. Even journalism. That's a reality of capitalism. Sad but true.
If greed "is alive and well" why is Gannett playing catch-up in Tampa Bay? WTSP changed its on-air handle last year, the station is adding hyperlocal pages to its website, yet WTSP is floundering in its own back yard.
ReplyDeleteYes, they are killing the most profitable papers. Go figure.
ReplyDeleteI love it that these people who keep harping on "centralization" in business are probably the same yokels who are railing against the centralization of the federal government telling states what to do. If centralization didn't work for the Soviets, with their endless 5-year plans, why would it work for Gannett? As we have seen time and time again, centralization makes you less nimble, less efficient (since you need ever more layers of bureaucracy to manage far-flung sites), and ultimately less profitable. What you really want is not centralization, with everything controlled from a hub, but standardization, of the kind introduced with Henry Ford's assembly lines. If it works at one site, let's replicate it at another. That's the power that corporate should be giving us. And Gannett had that with Moms. Moms worked in Cincy, so lets roll that out with each site managing a Moms site. But look what happened when they tried to "centralize" with Momslikeme.com... Disaster.
ReplyDelete10:07 -- I agree that a heavy investment in any newspaper company would be pretty silly right now (unless you have a lot of money to throw around and the bulk of it is in other places). That said, I don't think Gannett is the best of breed. I would go for the New York Times Co. or another paper that has taken less drastic cost-reduction methods. The reason being is that paper retained the quality of its products and has a better chance at growing if the economy rebounds. Gannett will just keep cutting costs until somebody buys the company and splits it into pieces. You might make money in that scenario, but it's a lot riskier.
ReplyDeleteCentralization will only work when the people doing the centralizing know what they are doing. That is not the case in G A N N E T T. Our leadership is not only heartless they are clueless. Everything they touch goes to sh*T. Moms, Metromix, High School Sports, Content One, the COE, and the GPC are some examples of that. There are about to screw up Deal Chicken by putting it in the hands of folks that don't have a clue. Until they get some competent staff at corporate we should let the folks that know what they are doing do the doing.
ReplyDeleteAlthough Gannett is no longer doing mass, coordinated layoffs (likely in an attempt to keep its name out of the news), the recent items on Asheville and Arizona seem to indicate that we've hit crunch time again.
ReplyDeleteJim are you hearing about similar possibilities at other properties. I haven't noticed a lot of activity and closed-door meetings at my site. These usually precede layoffs. I just find it odd because we're in an area that has been hammered economically, so I can't imagine us escaping another round of furloughs or layoffs.
1:52, You would be wise to freshen up your knowledge of recent business history. The "rollup" model of corporate growth, in which companies bought up competitors to create economies of scale and national brands, pretty much ran its course in the late 1990s. It was all the rage for a while, as aggregators bought up medical practices, car dealerships, flower shops, equipment rental outlets, garbage haulers, etc., but the trend crashed pretty hard and many of the rollups stopped buying, broke up or, in some cases, went out of business. Gannett, for some reason, persisted and wound up buying papers at what would turn out to be exorbitant prices. It'll never get that money back. I think a foolish overblown sense of pride keeps Gannett management and its directors from admitting failure and selling individual stations and papers to the highest bidder, which would have been a really smart thing to do in 2004, when GCI's stock price was at its all-time high of $90. So centralization has had its golden years -- the 1960s and 1990s -- but the twin secular trends away from centralization and monopolistic media make it a bad idea for Gannett.
ReplyDeleteAs the woman in the Comex commercial says, "size matters." The bigger you are, the more success you will have. Profitable doesn't matter as much as size. Small profitable papers aren't worth the bother and so are vulnerable to reductions or closing. USA Today, on the other hand, thrives.
ReplyDeleteSo, I'm hearing gutting at Asheville. Possible gutting at Palm Springs (need more info) and across the board layoffs at Arizona. Any more? What happened with that meeting in Tuscson?
ReplyDeleteAs the woman in the Comex commercial says, "size matters." The bigger you are, the more success you will have. Profitable doesn't matter as much as size. Small profitable papers aren't worth the bother and so are vulnerable to reductions or closing. USA Today, on the other hand, thrives.
ReplyDelete5/12/2011 12:49 PM
What in the world are you talking about....there are no thriving papers anywhere and never will be again.
Thriving papers?; Wall Street Journal, 12 or 13 British titles (national papers only counted). German, French papers,etc.
ReplyDeleteThere are no absolutes, but it does occur to me that there are papers surviving if not thriving in this climate because they have no debt. That seems to be the secret of making it through this recession largely unscathed. The British papers manage their affairs largely on circulation, and that seems to be the model USA Today is adopting with the Internet. But papers with hefty debt loads are being slaughtered, witness Lee, MNI and GCI.
ReplyDeleteYou know one topic of conversation I'd like to see here is what people think is going to happen to some of these Gannett papers. Will the company keep hacking and slashing and just shut them down one by one? Or will it peel some off and try to unload them at fire sale prices? And if they were to do that, would anyone line to purchase them?
ReplyDeleteI remain of the opinion that many of the papers owned by Gannett would be profitable and viable if they were not stuck operating under the company's overall trajectory of collapse.
2:14 I agree with you the problem I see with that is Gannett will squeeze the life out of the papers until there is nothing more to squeeze, by that time no one will want to purchase the paper. No matter what the price!
ReplyDeleteCraig will be able to sleep better at night knowing he has a huge bank account and thousands of ex-gannetters are unemployed.
2:14 I certainly agree with you and think that GCI is in a position it would accept offers. The trouble is that they probably would want to put a price of at least 10 times annual earnings on any of the properties, and at those prices, it would require a wealthy multi-millionaire or divorcee seeking a retirement toy. Don't scoff that this is impossible when you remember divorcee Wendy McCaw bought her local paper with her divorce proceeds. McCaw raises the other issue because who knows if a new owner will be any better than what you have got. It's a little grasping at straws.
ReplyDeleteHow many newspapers still have their own press? No one would buy one without a press.
ReplyDelete@2:47 - The Bergen Record has its own press, but that's still family-owned.
ReplyDelete2:14 I certainly agree with you and think that GCI is in a position it would accept offers. The trouble is that they probably would want to put a price of at least 10 times annual earnings on any of the properties, and at those prices, it would require a wealthy multi-millionaire or divorcee seeking a retirement toy. Don't scoff that this is impossible when you remember divorcee Wendy McCaw bought her local paper with her divorce proceeds. McCaw raises the other issue because who knows if a new owner will be any better than what you have got. It's a little grasping at straws.
ReplyDelete5/12/2011 2:38 PM
In reality newspapers have lost all of their value. The expense side is just to huge in this day and age. Sure a wealthy individual could buy one in their own market, but they would have to 100% completely fund the operation, as most are just barely profitable (those are the only ones that could be sold) and just barely profitable means - soon to be loosing money. Wealthy individuals that like to subsidize things for fun or personal satisfaction fund charities, buy sports franchises or build hospital wings......buying a newspaper really? REALLY?
I don't think that consolidation is necessarily a bad thing. Anyone who has ever been at a company that acquired another one has probably had to absorb all of the new customers with the same sized staff. And, after the initial gulp, it can be done.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I don't believe that Gannett plans and implements their consolidations effectively or efficiently.
A few years ago, I sat through a series of Gannett webinars on Invoicing Best Practices. The ideas were good, and everyone was encouraged to go out and implement them. The problem with this is the that piece-of-crap system, Genesys, couldn't easily accommodate the best practices.
So, rather than spend the time, effort and (dare I say it?) dollars on a system that actually worked, all the sites were being forced to convert to Genesys and lose utilities that they may have once had in the system they had to discard.
How do you go forward when your business system pulls you backward? How do you retain customers when your system isn't nimble and responsive?
When we went to eInvoicing in Genesys, our site was forced to adopt an ugly, non-user-friendly format because someone who didn't know anything about invoicing forced it on us. Input was not sought from the people who could have provided valuable information. Someone said "Our invoice looks good. Let's use it for all of the sites." No one took the time or effort to question whether the form still served the customer.
It is this lack of attention to the details that will doom Gannett. There are too many businesses who manage to get this stuff right, and people do notice.
Anon@1139: The New York Times Co. got out of broadcasting over the last 2 years. It sold all its TV stations -- one of them has 40% and 50% shares for local news -- plus prestigious New York radio station WQXR. Even with that the Times Co. is still on life support.
ReplyDeleteThe Boston Globe was purchased by the NY Times in 1993 for $1.1 Billion and is now being potentially sold for $200 Million ($900 million loss on investment and that is just in the sale price, they have sunk millions into that property since 1993, they might have well just made a bonfire out of 1.1 billion dollar bills). So that is a major newspaper in a major metropolitan city, trust me most newspapers are worthless.
ReplyDeleteHey Jim. Confirmed as of yesterday at the Asbury Park Press. Wage freezes. Supposed small amount of money for workers that excel.
ReplyDeleteif i were looking to buy a newspaper, i would specifically look at those that DID not have thier own press ... why get saddled with the old infrastructure/people/envoronmental issues/etc. there are too many commercial printers available to do the manufacturing ...
ReplyDeleteYou can pick up a used press real cheap. That's not the problem. The problem is getting the pressmen to come back and run it. Once you slip into retirement or another job, it's difficult to go back to what you once did. So do you know how to weave a press? Remember used presses don't often come with users manuals.
ReplyDeleteComments originally on this post were lost during a recent outage; here are some of the ones that I've recovered:
ReplyDeleteYou will all love this, but I believe it with all my heart:
What Gannett needs is more corporate and divisional leadership, more centralization, and much less of each market wandering around aimlessly and insisting on doing things their own way.
You are all so very loud complaining about attempts to streamline and to stop reinventing the wheel that you scare corporate to death, especially USCP. But you are hastening your own demise in the process.
Can you take a deep breath and even consider it for a moment? Is the truth to much to bear?
It's time to take what works in successful markets and COPY it. To offer true direction from central points (hubs) and from McLean.
If you don't stop doing everything a different way in every market, it will all be over soon. I know, you are very proud and you each believe you know best but you DON'T. None of your markets are one iota as different as you think you are.
You are eliminating your own jobs with this ridiculous approach. And nope, I'm not at corporate. I'm not even at Gannett anymore. Soon, you won't be, either.
OK, fire away. (But it is true.)
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 1:52 AM
1:52 -- Radio centralized long ago and it has become absolute crap. The only time I spend listening to local corporate radio is in the morning when you can actually find a morning team that isn't piped in from somewhere else in the country.
You can believe what you like, but centralized media is garbage and has limited interest. The more my local paper becomes like USA Today, the closer I get to dropping it, subscribing to the New York Times and abandoning the local product altogether.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 3:06 AM
Obviously, the McDonaldization of the local media is the way to go.
Because after sixty years of McDonalds, we've finally gotten rid of all the local restaurants, all the local flavor, all the local initiative because the buying public has realized restauranteurs were just reinventing the wheel when they weren't doing it the corporate McDonalds way.
What a load of crap, 1:52.
Whatever it turns out to be, DealChicken didn't start in McLean. Each week, best practices come out from Andora Gandy and none of them were initiated at the CP. You just can't foster initiative at the same time you're force feeding "the holy book of G - the way Things Must Be Done."
Not allowing flexibility at the local level means trying to shove Detroit solutions into Fond du Lac problems, or vice versa. Though the circulation is about the same now for those two sites, the resources, markets, products and audiences are entirely different.
What we need is the freedom to create our own place in our hometowns, not rules that force Salinas to change into Cherry Hill.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 3:35 AM
Comments originally on this post were lost during a recent outage; here are some more of the ones that I've recovered:
ReplyDeleteThe financial sites crow that GCI is the best of the newspaper stocks. Well, it doesn't look that way to me and my piddling holdings. Anyone else notice how the stock has been sagging for the last month, and the business plan of this operation seems completely off the rails? Now it looks to me as if they can't even plan the finances of this company from quarter to quarter. What's gone wrong? It looks like the CP is panicking. The ineptness of these corporate executives is going to kill off this company before long.
5/12/2011 6:53 AM
It is the best of the newspaper stocks but all newspaper stock have no long term growth.. you seem out of touch.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 10:07 AM
This is certifably crazy. They are gutting some of the most profitable newspapers in the company by cutting back on Palm Springs. Look at the 1988 report and you will see Palm Springs got a 38 percent return of profit and some $40 million in profits. Laying off employees at this paper is absolutely silly. It guarantees that profits will decline at Palm Springs and these other profitable newspapers, and that circulation will drop and so ad revenue will drop as well. For what are they doing this?
The greed started when small newspapers (or radio or TV stations) sold to big media companies. And when people like Saridakis sold to Gannett. The truth is entrepreneurs build to sell. And Gannett bought and they are now in charge.
Look to your previous owners who took the money and ran. Wall Street runs corporate America. Greed is alive and well. Everything is a business. Even journalism. That's a reality of capitalism. Sad but true.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 10:17 AM
If greed "is alive and well" why is Gannett playing catch-up in Tampa Bay? WTSP changed its on-air handle last year, the station is adding hyperlocal pages to its website, yet WTSP is floundering in its own back yard.
Posted by Chucky to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 10:26 AM
Yes, they are killing the most profitable papers. Go figure.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 10:54 AM
I love it that these people who keep harping on "centralization" in business are probably the same yokels who are railing against the centralization of the federal government telling states what to do. If centralization didn't work for the Soviets, with their endless 5-year plans, why would it work for Gannett? As we have seen time and time again, centralization makes you less nimble, less efficient (since you need ever more layers of bureaucracy to manage far-flung sites), and ultimately less profitable. What you really want is not centralization, with everything controlled from a hub, but standardization, of the kind introduced with Henry Ford's assembly lines. If it works at one site, let's replicate it at another. That's the power that corporate should be giving us. And Gannett had that with Moms. Moms worked in Cincy, so lets roll that out with each site managing a Moms site. But look what happened when they tried to "centralize" with Momslikeme.com... Disaster.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 11:01 AM
10:07 -- I agree that a heavy investment in any newspaper company would be pretty silly right now (unless you have a lot of money to throw around and the bulk of it is in other places). That said, I don't think Gannett is the best of breed. I would go for the New York Times Co. or another paper that has taken less drastic cost-reduction methods. The reason being is that paper retained the quality of its products and has a better chance at growing if the economy rebounds. Gannett will just keep cutting costs until somebody buys the company and splits it into pieces. You might make money in that scenario, but it's a lot riskier.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 11:39 AM
Comments originally on this post were lost during a recent outage; here are some more of the ones that I've recovered:
ReplyDeleteCentralization will only work when the people doing the centralizing know what they are doing. That is not the case in G A N N E T T. Our leadership is not only heartless they are clueless. Everything they touch goes to sh*T. Moms, Metromix, High School Sports, Content One, the COE, and the GPC are some examples of that. There are about to screw up Deal Chicken by putting it in the hands of folks that don't have a clue. Until they get some competent staff at corporate we should let the folks that know what they are doing do the doing.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 12:10 PM
Although Gannett is no longer doing mass, coordinated layoffs (likely in an attempt to keep its name out of the news), the recent items on Asheville and Arizona seem to indicate that we've hit crunch time again.
Jim are you hearing about similar possibilities at other properties. I haven't noticed a lot of activity and closed-door meetings at my site. These usually precede layoffs. I just find it odd because we're in an area that has been hammered economically, so I can't imagine us escaping another round of furloughs or layoffs.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 12:26 PM
1:52, You would be wise to freshen up your knowledge of recent business history. The "rollup" model of corporate growth, in which companies bought up competitors to create economies of scale and national brands, pretty much ran its course in the late 1990s. It was all the rage for a while, as aggregators bought up medical practices, car dealerships, flower shops, equipment rental outlets, garbage haulers, etc., but the trend crashed pretty hard and many of the rollups stopped buying, broke up or, in some cases, went out of business. Gannett, for some reason, persisted and wound up buying papers at what would turn out to be exorbitant prices. It'll never get that money back. I think a foolish overblown sense of pride keeps Gannett management and its directors from admitting failure and selling individual stations and papers to the highest bidder, which would have been a really smart thing to do in 2004, when GCI's stock price was at its all-time high of $90. So centralization has had its golden years -- the 1960s and 1990s -- but the twin secular trends away from centralization and monopolistic media make it a bad idea for Gannett.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 12:46 PM
As the woman in the Comex commercial says, "size matters." The bigger you are, the more success you will have. Profitable doesn't matter as much as size. Small profitable papers aren't worth the bother and so are vulnerable to reductions or closing. USA Today, on the other hand, thrives.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 12:49 PM
So, I'm hearing gutting at Asheville. Possible gutting at Palm Springs (need more info) and across the board layoffs at Arizona. Any more? What happened with that meeting in Tuscson?
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 12:53 PM
As the woman in the Comex commercial says, "size matters." The bigger you are, the more success you will have. Profitable doesn't matter as much as size. Small profitable papers aren't worth the bother and so are vulnerable to reductions or closing. USA Today, on the other hand, thrives.
5/12/2011 12:49 PM
What in the world are you talking about....there are no thriving papers anywhere and never will be again.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 12:55 PM
Thriving papers?; Wall Street Journal, 12 or 13 British titles (national papers only counted). German, French papers,etc.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 12:59 PM
Comments originally on this post were lost during a recent outage; here are some more of the ones that I've recovered:
ReplyDeleteThere are no absolutes, but it does occur to me that there are papers surviving if not thriving in this climate because they have no debt. That seems to be the secret of making it through this recession largely unscathed. The British papers manage their affairs largely on circulation, and that seems to be the model USA Today is adopting with the Internet. But papers with hefty debt loads are being slaughtered, witness Lee, MNI and GCI.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 1:06 PM
You know one topic of conversation I'd like to see here is what people think is going to happen to some of these Gannett papers. Will the company keep hacking and slashing and just shut them down one by one? Or will it peel some off and try to unload them at fire sale prices? And if they were to do that, would anyone line to purchase them?
I remain of the opinion that many of the papers owned by Gannett would be profitable and viable if they were not stuck operating under the company's overall trajectory of collapse.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 2:14 PM
2:14 I agree with you the problem I see with that is Gannett will squeeze the life out of the papers until there is nothing more to squeeze, by that time no one will want to purchase the paper. No matter what the price!
Craig will be able to sleep better at night knowing he has a huge bank account and thousands of ex-gannetters are unemployed.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 2:37 PM
2:14 I certainly agree with you and think that GCI is in a position it would accept offers. The trouble is that they probably would want to put a price of at least 10 times annual earnings on any of the properties, and at those prices, it would require a wealthy multi-millionaire or divorcee seeking a retirement toy. Don't scoff that this is impossible when you remember divorcee Wendy McCaw bought her local paper with her divorce proceeds. McCaw raises the other issue because who knows if a new owner will be any better than what you have got. It's a little grasping at straws.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 2:38 PM
How many newspapers still have their own press? No one would buy one without a press.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 2:47 PM
2:14 I certainly agree with you and think that GCI is in a position it would accept offers. The trouble is that they probably would want to put a price of at least 10 times annual earnings on any of the properties, and at those prices, it would require a wealthy multi-millionaire or divorcee seeking a retirement toy. Don't scoff that this is impossible when you remember divorcee Wendy McCaw bought her local paper with her divorce proceeds. McCaw raises the other issue because who knows if a new owner will be any better than what you have got. It's a little grasping at straws.
5/12/2011 2:38 PM
In reality newspapers have lost all of their value. The expense side is just to huge in this day and age. Sure a wealthy individual could buy one in their own market, but they would have to 100% completely fund the operation, as most are just barely profitable (those are the only ones that could be sold) and just barely profitable means - soon to be loosing money. Wealthy individuals that like to subsidize things for fun or personal satisfaction fund charities, buy sports franchises or build hospital wings......buying a newspaper really? REALLY?
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 3:08 PM
@2:47 - The Bergen Record has its own press, but that's still family-owned.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 3:09 PM
Comments originally on this post were lost during a recent outage; here are the last ones that I've recovered:
ReplyDeleteI don't think that consolidation is necessarily a bad thing. Anyone who has ever been at a company that acquired another one has probably had to absorb all of the new customers with the same sized staff. And, after the initial gulp, it can be done.
However, I don't believe that Gannett plans and implements their consolidations effectively or efficiently.
A few years ago, I sat through a series of Gannett webinars on Invoicing Best Practices. The ideas were good, and everyone was encouraged to go out and implement them. The problem with this is the that piece-of-crap system, Genesys, couldn't easily accommodate the best practices.
So, rather than spend the time, effort and (dare I say it?) dollars on a system that actually worked, all the sites were being forced to convert to Genesys and lose utilities that they may have once had in the system they had to discard.
How do you go forward when your business system pulls you backward? How do you retain customers when your system isn't nimble and responsive?
When we went to eInvoicing in Genesys, our site was forced to adopt an ugly, non-user-friendly format because someone who didn't know anything about invoicing forced it on us. Input was not sought from the people who could have provided valuable information. Someone said "Our invoice looks good. Let's use it for all of the sites." No one took the time or effort to question whether the form still served the customer.
It is this lack of attention to the details that will doom Gannett. There are too many businesses who manage to get this stuff right, and people do notice.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 3:12 PM
Anon@1139: The New York Times Co. got out of broadcasting over the last 2 years. It sold all its TV stations -- one of them has 40% and 50% shares for local news -- plus prestigious New York radio station WQXR. Even with that the Times Co. is still on life support.
Posted by Chucky to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 3:15 PM
The Boston Globe was purchased by the NY Times in 1993 for $1.1 Billion and is now being potentially sold for $200 Million ($900 million loss on investment and that is just in the sale price, they have sunk millions into that property since 1993, they might have well just made a bonfire out of 1.1 billion dollar bills). So that is a major newspaper in a major metropolitan city, trust me most newspapers are worthless.
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 3:16 PM
Hey Jim. Confirmed as of yesterday at the Asbury Park Press. Wage freezes. Supposed small amount of money for workers that excel.
if i were looking to buy a newspaper, i would specifically look at those that DID not have thier own press ... why get saddled with the old infrastructure/people/envoronmental issues/etc. there are too many commercial printers available to do the manufacturing ...
Posted by Anonymous to Gannett Blog at 5/12/2011 3:27 PM
You can pick up a used press real cheap. That's not the problem. The problem is getting the pressmen to come back and run it. Once you slip into retirement or another job, it's difficult to go back to what you once did. So do you know how to weave a press? Remember used presses don't often come with users manuals.