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Monday, August 12, 2013
35 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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It appears that district managers are soon to be out and positions changed to distributorships????? Thoughts on this and when it happens.
ReplyDeleteThat's been mooted many times. It's also a circle game. You have in-house distribution, then you farm it out. Then you have in-house . . .
ReplyDelete20 years ago in Phoenix, NY Times and Wall Street Journal delivery were both handled by distributors. As time passed, The Arizona Republic became the distributor for NYT, WSJ and Barrons, IBD, FT and others. Presumably The Republic makes money on these arrangements.
Of course, The Republic serves several hundred thousand subs and has a huge infrastructure. Might be a different story at smaller papers. How many papers dump their product in a parking lot for carriers to pick up and assemble?
Into the mid-90s, The Republic took some area papers to shopping center parking lots. Today they have huge distribution centers, although recently there's been consolidation where a couple DCs closed and operations moved.
This week Brevard started delivering ALL the single copy papers in the county...FT, USA, Orlando Sentinel, WSJ, Times, Post, Barrons. Good revenue stream I'm sure but the carriers are now weighed down with all this without any regard to work/time involved. Delivery times now are 4 plus hours daily and 6 plus on Sunday. That's not counting the time to insert all OS's Saturday's and Sunday's as they come uninserted.
DeleteI can only guess what a clusterF it's going to be for them come Thanksgiving!
More great minds thinking things through before acting.
They've been doing this at my local paper for a few years now. As long as they can find poor families willing to do this for supplemental income they will. Any down routes they just get the dock workers they kept on to cover. They got rid of the single copy drivers they had that knew the routes and had been doing a good job. Welcome to the new world order of Gannett Publishing Services.
DeleteI think newspapers and television have only hastened their demise by consistently telling readers and viewers to go online. For years they have been telling viewers if you would like to find out more about this go to a web site. It's been a free promotion for the internet for the last ten years. I am tired of seeing the Twitter and Facebook comments on the screen while trying to watch a news show. They add nothing to the program or the discussion. The internet has become just one big marketing campaign.
ReplyDeleteOK, seriously, if you think you've figured it out -- that the newspaper industry's problems stem from the Internet and giving away content for free -- well, welcome out from under the rock. Hope your stay there was cozy.
DeleteNewsflash: Everyone knows this is the problem. Ads that bring in dollars in print bring in pennies online, even with the same number of eyeballs.
You think you have it figured out? Fine. What's the solution. Hint: The solution is not "Stop printing stories on the website and drive all of our readers back to print." That might work for about five days, until some laid-off reporter in town (and there are many good ones) starts up the only online news source in the area and captures the digital audience. (And that's assuming you don't have competing newspapers, television, radio, etc. in the market.)
Could newspapers have stopped the slide by never putting content online in the first place? Maybe. Probably not. It's not the content going online that was the problem -- it was the classifieds. But that's moot, unless you have a time machine and a burning passion to save the newspaper industry rather than profit off knowledge over who won the 2002 World Series.
So, what's the better plan? Not the hindsight plan -- the forward thinking plan? Trust me, everyone would love to hear it.
Some relevant facts:
DeleteU.S. newspaper circulation peaked in 1984, and has been steadily sliding since then.
Newspaper advertising revenue, including daily and Sunday, print and online, peaked in 2005 at $49.4 billion.
The Internet played a big role in the advertising losses, but it took a while. As a commercial vehicle, the Internet dates to about 1995, with the initial public offering of Netscape.
As you can see, it took a full 10 years before it started hurting advertising sales. And then its impact was enormous. Since that 2005 peak, total annual newspaper ad revenue has fallen by about 50%.
All fair and true, Jim. My post was a bit of a frustrated rant about people who seem to think everything would have been OK if newspapers had simply remain unchanged over the past decade. Quite frankly, even with the benefit of hindsight -- even if we had that time machine -- I'm not sure the end results would be much different, unless you could go back and shoot Al Gore before he invented the Internet.
DeleteBut, people who feel powerless often need someone to blame, and if that's the top guys who "gave the content away," well, sure, fine.
The industry as a whole should have gone after the big aggregators, such as Google and threatened them with a lawsuit for copyright infringement unless they paid for use of that content. That old excuse of they're driving traffic to the news organizations website is BS, because the aggregator gets the first bite of the advertising apple in that situation. Would it have been the ultimate solution? No, but it would have been a revenue stream and that's what we need.Any revenue.
DeleteThe other 2 issues are that an entire generation is used to free content on line and are loathe to pay for anything but the best- NYT and WSJ. The other is the information overload-news is everywhere. Did you know that Gannett has a company which provides video news feeds in skyscraper elevators? There also are a lot of people who ignore hard news. Sit through a jury selection some day and you will be shocked at the answers given by prospective jurors when asked what they read and where they get their news from. For many it's TV and online, but there is a large group who's answer was "I don't pay attention to the news." THAT is the frightening part.
Get this straight, 4:09, Gannett pays how many millions of dollars each year to executives whose job it is to grow the company? I suspect you on the periphery of this camp, probably one of the many high-paid, titled drones at headquarters. If you and your bosses can't figure out a way, then guess what: You pack it in and sell. To the Bezos, Buffett and John Henry wannabes. And if you can't find them, guess what again: You hire an investment banking firm to round them up. And if this doesn't work for you, your solution was what again?
DeleteWaiting for the ball to drop in Wilmington. Any info on this?
ReplyDeletea former editor's Facebook update
ReplyDelete....
My newspaper career at The Enquirer began in the feverish, Vietnam-dominated 60s, matured in the Watergate 70s (We were heroes!), and persisted - out of nothing more remarkable, probably, than Vonnegut's "Universal Will to Become" - until last year, which even then seemed like end times.
I was lucky. I got a buyout. What better way to get rid of a lot of high-priced talent quickly than a buyout?
The Enquirer layoffs of last week saddened me even more than the half dozen rounds of layoffs I lived through while on staff. When you work there and survive a layoff, you're so busy being relieved for yourself that you don't always feel the depth of sorrow you should for your laid off brothers and sisters.
Cutbacks may be the order of the day, but The Enquirer has also been actively hiring ever since I left. I got an inquiry. Some of the new layoffs seem to smack of an effort to get rid of people who make too much money. Others seem to be targeted at people they just wanted to throw overboard.
There are still talented people plying their trade at The Enquirer, and at times their talent shines through.
But judging by the unholy mish-mash of garbage that slimes into the paper, and the horror stories I hear from those still there, it is a soul-sapping, ill-run, oppressive place to work. Mistakes are evident even to the most casual reader, not because there aren't talented people to correct them, but because the operation has been so gutted that no one has time to correct them. And the "stories you can't get anywhere else" mantra that was blasted at us by Big Brother (or Big Sister) seems often to devolve into some interation of "Local Man/place is Interesting."
If you're going to succumb, go with style. Not this.
Any news about Rochester and Wilmington sites?
DeleteWill they also have layoffs?
We used to have proof readers that would come in on high volume days to check the paper. Most of them have been laid off and now they strictly rely on the hubs to check for errors. They are so understaffed, I guess you know what happens. I don't think I can ever remember, papers with so many mistakes in them, from small to large. Gannett just doesn't care about that anymore. It's not on the priority list, although it just maybe on the readers list, as circulation continues to spiral. Advertisers don't want to pay premium prices for a paper or papers, that now only reach so many readers.
ReplyDeleteDenver traffic reporter not really related to that famous person she says she was named for....http://www.mediabistro.com/tvspy/kusas-amelia-earhart-admits-no-relation-to-missing-aviation-legend_b100202
ReplyDeleteThe question is how long before Gannett outsources all copy editing/proof reading to one location or India?
ReplyDeleteGannett is definitely top heavy as they have gotten rid of the worker bees, and the quality of the news has suffered. The reporters hardly ever leave the newsroom, and if they do the reporting is not in-depth, and if we're lucky they might answer three of the five w's.
I'm surprised that they haven't started to outsource the design work from the GIADC to some sweatshop in India or something
DeleteNo one seems to care about stories in my Delaware-Maryland location. Videos are all that matters. The newspaper is rarely thought about by the big shots. It is all about impressing corporate people who only see our products on the internet. They do not even care that the videos are of such low quality. All that matters is that the little white play button is in the middle of the picture on the top story.
Delete1:26 - They tried that in the past with 2adpro out of India...not sure if they are getting any of the work anymore or not, but it was a disaster from the start.
DeleteThat might be true at your shop. It isn't true at mine. We're doing very good work because we care about our profession, our community and our own sense of pride.
Delete6:33. It would be great if you could come here and train our leadership. They do not seem the same devotion to good work.
DeleteNow that the PGA is over, any news from Rochester?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
DeleteBREAKING NEWS (as they say) ! USA TODAY will raise price to $2 as of the end of September !! no better product, just more cost ! What great leadership at corporate to come up with this one !
ReplyDeleteThis will really alienate readers who already think Money and Sports are useless.
DeleteIf you think the average USAT reader buys the paper for anything but Money and Sports, you're likely one of the journalists who took us down this road to irrelevance.
DeleteThe biggest reason people don't buy papers anymore...not the internet. raise prices to drive people to online. It's not working and they ain't figured it out yet.
ReplyDeleteWhy would Brevard do single copy for others also when they can't even do their own right?
ReplyDeleteWHAT A JOKE!
Just another knee jerk reaction to lost revenue...help the enemy! They, as well I'm sure as other papers, do everything they can think of to sell more papers...EXCEPT for what they need to do.
DeleteThe situation is appaling. To use the spelling of the word as it appeared all day in a headline @ cincinnati.com
ReplyDeleteWould that be a spelling of appealing or a spelling of appalling? A world of difference between missing E and missing L.
DeleteHas any body added the 3 buyouts in St Louis in July and August one IT position and a circulation manager and their supervisor last week?
ReplyDeleteWhy would they?
DeleteSo when will a new publisher be named in Lafayette, La.? Will that be a permanent position for interim David Petty?
ReplyDeleteMorally, Gannett is putrid filth.
ReplyDelete