A reader asks: 'What about the Butterfly Project?'

Contrary to recent speculation here on Gannett Blog, the so-called Butterfly Project is not another early retirement buyout program to reduce payroll spending.

Instead, it's an editorial content initiative that's been under discussion since approximately last summer, according to a reader who has been briefed on the plans. If it gets a final OK -- and I suspect it will -- Butterfly will mean the U.S. community dailies will use even more USA Today stories, photographs, video and other content than they already do now.

Pressed to its logical conclusion, the project could mean Gannett might eliminate most if not all content from the Associated Press and other outside wire services. At a minimum, it will concentrate even more editorial authority at Corporate's headquarters in McLean, Va., at the expense of the company's historic deference to local control.

The head of Corporate's News Department, Kate Marymont, outlined Butterfly during a presentation to publishers on April 3. Their meeting in McLean came a week after she and USAT Editor in Chief David Callaway announced a key management appointment for the nascent global News Desk. That operation, based in USAT's newsroom, will collect, edit and redistribute editorial content from all of Gannett's U.S. media sites, including broadcasting.

Led by new Executive Editor Beryl Love, most recently the senior news executive at the Reno Gazette-Journal, the desk is to be up and running sometime this summer. Love starts next month.

Echoes of ContentOne
The community dailies have been using USAT content virtually since the paper was launched in 1982. In more recent years, that content has been produced by USAT editors in the form of a single nation-world news page using USAT's typeface and published as a page by most if not all the dailies in place of what had been prepared at the community level. Butterfly will extend that even more.

Butterfly and the News Desk are successors to ContentOne, which was in turn a successor to the original Gannett News Service. Together, they are part of a broader effort by Corporate to maximize efficiencies in how editorial matter is produced and distributed in order to wring out costs.

While those have been underway for many years, they were significantly ramped up with the institution of the Design Studio hubs launched at five sites starting in the summer of 2010. They design and produce all newspaper pages for virtually all the 81 U.S. community dailies, not including USAT. They have been one of the most ambitious such consolidation projects across the industry.

To be sure, Butterfly and the News Desk aren't guaranteed winners. In late 2008, then-CEO Craig Dubow told a group of Wall Street analysts that ContentOne would "upend" the industry's traditional thinking about content distribution.

Dubow said it would "allow us to develop and gather information much more efficiently by eliminating duplication and allowing our local entities to focus on what's important -- a deep, rich local report. It is the logical next step from our local Information Center initiatives, creating a national head to the local content gathering bodies."

But well less than three years later, ContentOne was scuttled with the abrupt retirement of the vice president in charge, Tara Connell. What remained in May 2011 was then folded into USAT, where its future remained cloudy until Love's promotion last month.