Thursday, July 26, 2012

July 23-29 | Your News & Comments: Part 4

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41 comments:

  1. Enquirer publisher Buchanan held an employee meeting yesterday to spread more BS about the paywall to come. In the constipated schoolmarm style that so endears her (and her editor) to audiences, she asked anyone who thinks the paywall is a "paywall" to raise a hand. Damned if anyone did. Moments later the mask slipped when, showing her typical attention to detail, she accidentally called it a "paywall" herself. Laughter swept the room, but don't it call it laughter, call it loyalty.

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  2. Robert Andrews please resign, you are in NO way capable to fufill your responsibilitys.

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  3. from 9:37am part 3 "Content started to deteriorate after newspapers had already started losing advertisers and readers- not the other way around."

    You are mistaken. I can only guess you are a champion of digital or a follower.

    I have been a s/c carrier for many years now in Gannettland and I know first hand readers started not buying the paper when content started leaving. Then it was one price raise. Then it was another content drop and at the same time another price raise. THAT'S what started the people to stop buying the paper.

    You can believe what everybody tells you to believe in. That's OK. Your right to. I have seen it in person.

    If newspapers die the US as we know it will not be long after!

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  4. Net NewsCheck features a market profile every Thursday. Today's profile is from Greenville SC, where the Gannett-owned daily went to a "hard paywall" two years ago and now trails the local TV news channels.

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  5. Buchanan and Washburn belong to a lost age when newspapers didn't have to be good to sell copies and ads. Readers and advertisers faced far fewer choices in the near-monopoly markets that created managers like these. Freed of the need to be competitive, Gannett had the luxury of promoting all kinds of clowns who were otherwise clueless but who possessed a specific skill set -- self-glorification, sucking up to bosses and local powers that be, behaving despicably toward their staff, expanding a suffocating hierarchy of managers. The world has changed, but outdated tyrants like these remain in their sumptuous offices. By stubbornly sticking with them in a radically changed environment, Gannett shows why it hasn't adapted, and why it's incapable of adapting.

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  6. Gannett's innovations are to cut quality, raise prices and steal ideas from real innovators, albeit years too late.

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  7. "Newspaper websites will succeed if they do JOURNALISM, not the crap that you can get on any website. Focus ALL content on where our tax dollars go; pursue waste and corruption; do reporting that puts corrupt politicians in jail. Is it any wonder that the Great Recession occurred when newspapers were pursuing HITS on the web and not NEWS!!!"

    It's sad, the degree to which that is just not going to work, yet that's the kind of thinking most people in newsrooms are stuck on.

    Or, hey, maybe I'm wrong. Some newspaper should do away with features departments, and sports, and new business openings and local high schools and see how that goes.

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  8. 9:47 AM nails it as people like Buchanan are not Gannett's future, they're part of its intolerable past, one that has held this company back from being far better than it is today.

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  9. Buy outs in Detroit being reported by HuffPo .

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  10. My local Gannett rag just posted an online gallery of Olympics photos. Almost all of them are from AP; only a couple are from US Supressed Wire, lol!

    Take THAT, Mr. APSE President!

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  11. You nailed it on the head, 9:47, and the best executives, managers and employees who have been employed by Gannett for over 20 years are starting to walk out the door on their own accord....and they're way better off for it. Gannett will implode with the management they currently have in place.

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  12. Why does Gannett believe it takes fewer people to produce a story for digital than it does for print?

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  13. 10:43 I reported those buyout offers here on Monday.

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  14. Amusing that the copy editors at this unnamed Gannett paper now spend their evenings proofing and cleaning up the stuff done by the design center paginators. I've noticed in a couple of other Gannett papers that the copy editors don't spend much time proofing the work of the Des Moines design center.

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  15. Gannett doesn't want to be in the Newspaper business anymore. They should have never gotten into in the first place. They should sell the local papers instead of bleeding them dry.

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  16. Extraordinary! People are being laid off, raises are nominal if they are even being awarded, but the design studio here has erected large, expensive beach umbrellas over work stations.

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  17. It's hilarious to hear that a snob like Buchanan is trying to show leadership and attempting to energize people now that she's been forced to. For the past decade she's behaved brutally toward those same people and refused to speak to them even when they were next to her in an elevator.

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  18. Cincinnati Enquirer = Worst newspaper EVER

    Margaret Buchanan = Worst newspaper publisher EVER

    Carolyn Washburn = Worst newspaper editor-in-chief EVER

    What a triple crown of awfulness.

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    Replies
    1. You forgot to include Randolph "Adolph" Essex, Washburn's pick for senior local editor. He's the ice king who gives orders and never takes no for an answer. Rules by fear and nothing else.

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  19. 12:41 is right.
    The Enquirer was once a respected newspaper, and the flagship of a company with great potential.
    The Chiquita debacle was a huge blow.
    But that disgrace was nothing compared to the perfect storm of ineptitude described above.
    Washburn and Buchanan illustrate all that's wrong with Gannett.

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  20. Promote The Tennessean in Kroger/Wal-Mart - $800-$1,500/week (Nashville). http://nashville.craigslist.org/mar/3163047654.html

    That's more than they pay most "reporters" these days, isn't it? Aside from being most likely total BS. :)

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  21. Is US Presswire doing anything like this at the Olympics?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAIgiOORxLY&feature=youtu.be

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  22. When did Ed Cassidy slip back into Gannett at DealChicken? Didn't Hunke drop him from usat? Cant understand why anyone would want to come back here.

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  24. More ads out there trying to lease office space in the crystal palace. Pretty soon Martore will be working from a ttent on the front lawn.

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  25. Gannett papers are RAGS, what a joke and you call your selfs reporters

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  26. There are no buy outs at all in Detroit you silly geeses. They are voluntary retirement programs.

    Geesh. You wannabe reporter get-it-right-folks are awful at distorting the facts.

    Life at GCI couldn't be better for those who know how to do their job and prove their relevance.

    Ciao haters!

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  27. Wow. Thought that was sarcasm. Get to the end, you find out it's just delusion!

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  28. What some people won't do for a paycheck

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  29. No way Banikarim would ever let Cassidy back in the building. He called Banikarim on her bullshit and her self inflated delusional ego can't handle any one smarter, more creative or better liked than her - which pretty much sums up everyone left in marketing.

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  30. 4:30 -- You're making stuff up. Knock it off.

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  31. Good for Gracia. GCI ought to sell the crystal palace and move into a nondescript office park. We need to live within our revenue at the top too.

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  32. From an earlier post regarding hard to find single copies in Phoenix a question would be asked as to why retailers allocate space to papers selling a small fraction of what they did a few years back. If I was an advertiser and started noticing no papers in racks in the early morning I'd be questioning circ numbers that drive ad dollars and rates.

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  34. Amazing that Margaret Buchanan is still the President in Cincinnati one of Gannett's biggest newspapers. She came across as an arrogant showboat even 15 years ago when she was and ad sales manager trainee in Rockford IL at the Register Star newspaper. Big on packaging. Light on content and context even then. Her mentor was Gary Watson, who's been dearly departed from Gannett for years. How she's still atop the food chain is mind-boggling. She's in way over her head.

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  35. Well said 11.56, the same applies to the local papers in the UK owned by Gannett, sell us PLEASE!!!!!

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  36. 11:13 I remove comments that include the word troll.

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  37. 7:11 - That sounds like you're talking about Laura Hollingsworth. Oh wait, all Gannett managers must be like that.

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  38. Buchanan certainly deserves the criticism leveled at her. I've seen it first hand in her treatment of people, including a blow up she had over former editor Tom Callinan's organization of a hastily called staff meeting. Honestly, no one should ever be treated like that. She is rude, offensive and spends way too much time dabbling in the Information Center. A poisonous woman who replaced who filed the editor's job with an equally egocentric, poisonous leader who is always right and never open to suggestions.

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  39. Indianapolis Star building up for sale.

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  40. To 8:37am, He is fulfilling his responsibility, shutdown Atlanta.

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