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Wednesday, September 14, 2011
26 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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In other Newspaper Industry news:
ReplyDeleteThe Philadelphia Inquirer Cuts Jobs
After Tablet Launch
The local Newspaper Guild says it was told 20 job cuts would include three photographers, along with library, computer, advertising and graphics jobs.
Article seen at: dailyjobcuts.com
under the September 14, 2011 Date
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-brutal-rant-from-an-ex-yahoo-exec-about-the-yahoo-product-organization-2011-9
ReplyDeleteThe readers and posters here should be taking the time to fine tune and send out their resumes.
ReplyDeleteIf all the whiners and no it alls here would get the gumption to find new jobs and leave,Gannett would fall more quickly.
Why bother complaining about top management failures,gross neglect ,and deceit just get away.Is Gannett the only place to work ? God almighty just leave !!
What I find most shocking - and for Gannett most humiliating - about the circulation numbers just released is that 5 of the top 10 Gannett "losers" in circulation are all among those awful little Ohio papers. Part of the big disastrous Purchase of 2000.
ReplyDeleteAnd ALL of the Ohio papers are in the top 21 in circulation declines. Yet the miseable leadership there stays in place at the papers. Why?
I thought there couldn;t be much worse than the Wisconsin papers in terms of poor decision-making, but the obvious disgust with their papers that the subscribers in Ohio obviously are showing for these Gannett newspapers proves me wrong.
The Ohio papers take the "Titanic Award" for sinking ships
10 a.m. Regarding the cost of the Ohio and Wisconsin papers, on June 8, 2000, Gannett said in a news release:
ReplyDelete"Gannett announced today that it will acquire 21 daily newspapers, along with numerous weeklies and niche publications, from Thomson Newspapers, Inc. in a series of transactions for an aggregate purchase price of $1.125 billion. Gannett will acquire Thomson's strategic marketing groups in Wisconsin (eight dailies), Central Ohio (eight dailies), and Southwest Ohio (two dailies), and single daily newspaper groups in Lafayette, La.; Salisbury, Md.; and St. George, Utah."
Jim – FYI, Cox Ohio presented a first right of refusal for Thomson’s Southwest Ohio SMG at the last minute, ultimately terminating that portion of the deal with Gannett. Clearly, Gannett did not see this coming as it had already started giving edicts to people within that group before the deal even closed. Unfortunately for Cox, Gannett over-valued that group’s worth (not a surprise), forcing it to pay a premium to get it.
ReplyDeleteA fascinating interview about the future of newspapers:
ReplyDeleteDean Singleton: You know, MediaNews today has perhaps 40 percent fewer employees than it had five years ago. And the number of employees it takes to do what we need to do will continue to decrease, because the revenue stream has decreased and the revenue generated online on a per-eyeball basis is not the same as the revenue generated in print. So the move to be more and more efficient in what we do will continue. I don’t think there’s any newspaper company in America that won’t have fewer people a year from now than they have today, and fewer still in two to three years. We will continue to outsource more and more functions in order to bring the cost of doing business down. We’ll continue to operate with smaller infrastructures, less management, more feet on the street. The number of people all of us have working for us will over time continue to decrease. That’s the way the business model is going.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/09/a-call-for-consolidation-dean-singleton-on-john-paton-collective-action-and-the-next-waves-of-newspaper-cutbacks/
How many of you feel appreciated by your bosses? Check out this quote from Jill Abramson of the New York Times:
ReplyDeleteThinking about The Times broadly, have you identified a particular weakness?
I think we have gotten more creative in the ways that we retain our talent, but we have had departures from various corners of the organization. Luckily, we have been able to hire some excellent people, so it isn’t like I feel there is an area that is bald. But I think it is a mistake for The New York Times to ever rest on its laurels. It is a very competitive landscape, and our competitors are constantly knocking on the doors of our best people. I don’t think it is an organizational weakness, but sometimes I just feel we took our eyes off making someone know how important and appreciated they are, and therefore left them vulnerable to being picked off.
I'm not surprised that Lansing is No. 15 for losing circulation. The current newsroom top management lack the skills needed to run a middle-school paper. They've turned a fairly interesting publication with some good writers into an appalling snoozer. Even without the Internet, that publication would be bleeding readers.
ReplyDelete10:00 and 10:41: Of the five small Ohio dailies listed among the top 15 circulation losers, two of them were not part of the 2000 package. Both the News-Messenger, Fremont, and the News Herald, Port Clinton, were acquired by Gannett in 1975 or '76. Regardless, both papers were among the other small Ohio dailies to fall victim to totally incompetent management, both at the local level and at NNCO headquarters in Newark. Prior to his retirement in 2004 or thereabouts, both Fremont and Port
ReplyDeleteClinton were run by a publisher who had a strong newsroom background, who was a part of the community and fully aware of what it took to put out a solid product. The incompetents that followed him didn't and still don't have a clue. Sad, real sad.
Regarding Jill Abramson's quote....
ReplyDeleteThat all sounds good and makes for interesting reading, but I have a feeling the reality of how she feels is quite different.
Hey, Asbury Park Pressers: Are you missing Hollis Towns as get to be Mr. Bigshot at the APME meeting in Denver?
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing that there's anyone left to cut at the Philly Inquirer.
ReplyDeleteWho is going to print all the new papers?
ReplyDeleteNot related to anything on the blog lately, but here's a nice item about a Freep reporter who jumped in and may have saved the life of someone in an overturned SUV last night on his way home from work -
ReplyDeletehttp://www.stiffjab.net/post/10207961308/detroit-free-press-reporter-steve-neavling-sounds-like
@12:05 - not to mention the genius move a few years back to publish all the state workers' salaries, a move people tried to warn them would result in huge numbers of cancellations by said workers. The smartest guys in the room went ahead with it anyway.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteOnce again 8:05 you are wrong.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2011/09/14/fort-collins-newspaper-editor-leaving.html?ana=yfcpc
ReplyDelete8:25, what did 8:05 post? I don't see a comment with 8:05?
ReplyDelete@ 6:31 PM – To extend your logic, should newspapers stop investigative reporting on govt too?
ReplyDeleteFrankly, plenty of newspapers provide access to what you protested about then, and now. Why? Because taxpayers want to know where their money goes - and they should, which explains why these sections are highly read by all. Even by public employees as they bought more single copies when we did it because they wanted to know what their peers and bosses made.
A city finance manager convinced me years ago that it was right when they complained that the amount we published for them was too high. In questioning why, we learned they sold a month of vacation. Funny thing was they’d only been there just over a year and few, even in govt, knew that people could.
Follow up stories on that unknown, costly policy quickly followed.
I wouldn't call publishing a database as a spreadsheet with a throw-away story "investigative journalism." Plus, it showed a total ignorance of the audience. The public employee earning tables might be de rigueur out East, as someone told me. In the Midwest, not so much. It was seen by many (if not most) locals as a horrible invasion of privacy. And what's more, I don't recall any big stories that came of it here. Just a lot of anger and cancelled subscriptions. You can see the end result of such decision making in the circulation tables posted by Jim here.
ReplyDeleteAmazing, are there people like 2:29 arguing that publishing the salaries of public employees -- I feel embarrassed that I have to make clear that those are taxpayer-funded jobs -- is a bad idea?
ReplyDeleteI'm willing to bet a ton there were very few cancelled subscriptions over that. A horrible invasion of privacy??? WTF? You work on the public payroll.
If papers are scared to print this stuff, and I think Lansing was, too, after it botched how it handled it, then how in the world will we stand up for real investigative journalism that pisses people off?
What came out of the USAT Sports meeting yesterday with Tom Beusse?
ReplyDelete@2:29 AM -- There was no intent to suggest publishing public employee pay as investigative journalism as it’s not even close. Catching a finance director as we did isn’t either.
ReplyDeleteThe larger question to @6:31 is just how far would they go in limiting coverage to save subscribers. If they yield on such innocuous, widely available info on public pay (other sources, even govt provides it online), then would they refrain from digging deeper into more important issues that might “offend” public employees or other like constituencies? Sounds like they might; one hopes not.
Again, years of experience in providing this info in the Midwest suggest @6:31 well overstates the issue and apparently, you believe it too. The “end result” as you write isn’t due to publishing pay info, it’s a result of this: newspapers giving content online for free that was once found only in print for a price; shrinking print newsholes; more reliance on canned copy versus locally generated content; less news at higher subscription/single copy costs; and, other like acts explain it far more.
12:00 AM
@3:14 - and you are another person who would have had absolutely no understanding of your audience, had you been in my city.
ReplyDeleteIt's been five years or so, and the people whose salaries were published are still pissed off. And thousands did cancel subscriptions.
Public information? Maybe. There's a ton of public information out there that doesn't rise to the level of news. And the salary of each and every civil servant in the state isn't news.
We clearly disagree on what is news and what is not. I hear the self-congratulatory remarks like yours about how this is somehow investigative journalism, when in fact it was simply a database available to anyone that resulted in no impact (other than damaging the newspaper that printed it) and changed nothing. If that's what you consider to be investigative journalism, then here's another fine example of what's wrong with the news business lately.