Battle Creek | The Enquirer sells its building . . .

. . . and the buyer is a church.

Among several changes, the Rev. Ivan Lee of the New Harvest Christian Center says he plans to build a gym in what had been the press room, according to this Battle Creek Enquirer story.

The sale of the Michigan paper's building comes as Gannett sells real estate across the company amid shrinking operations.

The Enquirer sale "finally closes that chapter when we right-sized," said the paper's executive editor and general manager, Michael McCullough.

After 60 years at the old site, the Enquirer is now leasing space elsewhere in the area. Three years ago, the paper shuttered its press and moved printing to the Lansing State Journal.

Battle Creek's Monday-Saturday circulation is 15,275; Sunday, 22,506.

Here's the good news about using the revised logo

Corporate's new requirement that newspapers prominently brand themselves as Gannett property on front pages should not cost precious newshole.

For those who don't know, newshole is the amount of space alloted for everything that's not advertising: stories, photographs and other editorial stuff.

The guidelines require that the phrase, "A Gannett Company," must now be printed near the name of the newspaper, known in the industry as the "flag." The examples given (see above and below) show that most if not all papers should be able to include the phrase within existing space. In some cases, it may replace text that now provides, for example, the paper's website address.

Why is this important? If "A Gannett Company" required an additional line of space across a standard five-column-wide page, that would reduce by a combined five lines the space available for stories and other editorial matter. Multiply that by 365 days, and it really adds up -- especially during a time of shrinking newsholes.

No doubt, there will be exceptions. And in the case of USA Today, it appears the mandated Gannett Company text will for the first time in years cost the company one of its signature Page One claims: "No. 1 in the USA."

Related: dozens of Gannett front pages in the Newseum's database

Battle Creek | Paper's 'amazing job' on oil spill

The massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has overshadowed a spill in another Gannett community: Battle Creek, Mich., where a Gannett Blog reader today praises the Battle Creek Enquirer's work.

More than 800,000 gallons poured into a creek and flowed into the Kalamazoo River in southern Michigan on Monday, coating birds and fish. The spill started from a 30-inch pipeline built in 1969 that carries about 8 million gallons daily.

"I know you occasionally point out good work coming from Gannett papers," my reader says. "The oil spill in southern Michigan that's become a national story is a major local story for the Battle Creek Enquirer. . . . The Enquirer is honestly doing an amazing job covering this story from every angle."

Know about Gannett work that should be highlighted? (And not just from the editorial side!) Please post your replies in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write jimhopkins[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the rail, upper right.

[Image: recent screenshot of the paper's homepage]

How thousands of employees were reduced to ???

During the big newspaper workforce reduction in December, two Gannett dailies each cut fewer than 75 jobs. But the consequences for one were far greater, a fact we understood right away because of a crucial piece of data that's no longer readily available -- total employment at each site.

The Des Moines Register cut 70 jobs, while Michigan's Battle Creek Enquirer cut 50. Those Register cuts were out of a workforce of 800 people, however. The Battle Creek paper employed just 105 it shuttered production, and moved printing to the Lansing State Journal.

You'll see a lot of ??? in lieu of workforce totals in our new list of paper-by-paper job reductions. That's because Corporate has now removed nearly all the workforce figures that were once listed on each paper's official profile page -- along with the publisher's name, a street address, and other vital information. (The workforce figures appear untouched on the TV station profile pages.)

Fact is, many of the newspaper employment figures were incorrect, because they weren't updated after the August layoffs. Maybe Corporate decided it was too much work to update pages after each round of cuts. Reflecting the reality of the situation, someone simply erased thousands of jobs from public view. Now n building our new list, I'll do my best to restore those numbers.

Please post your replies in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write gannettblog[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the green rail, upper right.

[Image: screenshot of Enquirer homepage]

Fort Collins becomes eighth site to shutter press

That new total in the past five months alone is approaching nearly 10% of Gannett's 85 U.S. newspapers. With today's confirmed shutdown at the Fort Collins Coloradoan, I count at least eight production plants closed via consolidation with sister sites.

The Coloradoan's Pat Ferrier reports in a story, now on the paper's site: "The move will end more than a century of newspaper printing in the city and comes at a time when newspapers nationwide are being challenged by the economic recession and the ongoing migration of advertising to the Internet."

The Coloradoan would be among the few Gannett sites contracting with a non-GCI plant. The other seven, all shifting to nearby Gannett print sites: Asheville, N.C.; Battle Creek, Mich.; Clarksville, Tenn.; Hattiesburg, Miss.; Mountain Home, Ark.; Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Richmond, Ind.

What am I missing? Post your replies in the comments section, below. E-mail confidentially to gannettblog[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the green sidebar, upper right.

Imagining a prosperous (but shrunken) Gannett

[It's 2014: Are Corporate and USA Today still in McLean, Va.?]

Gannett is aiming for a high-profile home run by deploying its nascent ContentOne news service to cover President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration -- just in time to rally investors when the company releases fourth-quarter earnings in the weeks ahead.

The new service will be a major test of the cross-divisional leadership skills of two rising stars: Chief Digital Officer Chris Saridakis (left), and Kate Marymont (below), the recently named newspaper division news vice president. Corporate has said nothing about the project for public consumption since CEO Craig Dubow pitched the idea to media stock analysts at the UBS conference last month, telling them: "ContentOne is an entity that will completely change the way we share content across the company."

The few details that have surfaced so far suggest ContentOne is a reconstituted Gannett News Service: a 21st-century web wire, if you will. More broadly, however, the service is another key piece in a puzzle showing what Gannett might look like in five years or less: A 100% digital news and information provider, no longer printing newspapers or running today's version of broadcast TV. Let's call the future company by a name already in use: Gannett Digital.

With ContentOne and USA Today as its editorial backbone, I imagine Gannett Digital producing and distributing information for a national audience mostly anchored in more than 100 U.S. communities where its legacy brands -- newspapers and TV stations -- now employ perhaps 35,000 U.S. workers. (How many will be working in five years or less? Keep reading.)

ContentOne is part of a wider bid to boost revenue and cut costs, by imposing more uniformity in content and technology on the company's disparate portfolio of websites. It's also the latest incarnation of the long-neglected 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning GNS. The new web wire is apparently being run in some fashion by Gannett's official publicist, Tara Connell, a former top USA Today editor.

Like the youth-oriented Metromix entertainment sites and the "moms" franchise, ContentOne aims to roll up all of Gannett's online readers into a mammoth advertising "buy." How big? Corporate is gunning for more than 50 million unique visitors in the Obama trial that began last Tuesday -- double the most recent reported average uniques. National ads would presumably be more price-competitive and easier to sell, because Gannett's community papers mostly adopted identical G04 website templates last year.

Consolidation hits newsrooms
ContentOne is the next step in Gannett's drive to reduce overhead by consolidating work to eliminate duplication. That effort has focused on areas including ad production, printing and finance. Now, Corporate is extending the strategy to newsrooms, in a move with implications for the recent emphasis on "local-local" coverage.

For example, suppose Gannett eliminated all the printed features sections, and substituted the new, edgier Metromix sites recently rolled out companywide. Management could shrink features staffing to a skeleton crew. Surviving staff would focus solely on cranking out updates, plus Metromix briefs and calendar items aimed at the audience where they already live: mobile devices and the Internet.

If that worked, Gannett could apply the same model to other subjects as it keeps herding readers to the websites -- and shutters more printed news sections and TV newscasts. In their place: A network of websites, RSS feeds and other distribution channels carrying subject-specific products with long shelf lives.

"At its most innovative," CEO Dubow (left) told the UBS conference last month, "ContentOne will allow us for the first time companywide to view our content as a product, instead of a way to fill our products -- newspapers, websites and TV news broadcasts. We will become content creators for our advertising partners, pricing and selling our content for use by them."

Dubow took over as CEO in July 2005; he had been chief executive of the 23-station broadcasting division for four years, after joining the division in 1981 as an advertising salesman.

He told UBS analysts that the news service "also will 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."

In a way, ContentOne delivers Gannett's Holy Grail -- but digitally: It marries the 85 community newspapers with USA Today. This lower-cost, shelf-stable strategy is revealed in a leaked memo about ContentOne's Obama plan, which includes a special "micro'' website anchoring news and entertainment coverage.

Obama blog, and new platform?
The memo says: "ContentOne inaugural site will power online coverage before, during and after the Jan. 20 inauguration. It will be one product with local branding, traffic and ad sales. On it, will be the best of USA Today's national coverage, local site local coverage, (plus) WUSA-TV's live video feed through Mogulus."

It continues: "There also will be a cross-network VOD sampling via Mogulus and Washington-specific entertainment listings through Metromix that will serve your local customers who may be going to DC for the celebration. The site also will allow for and encourage local coverage. We are planning a three-week window for this site -- two weeks before the inauguration through one week after -- with live coverage emphasis on Jan. 19, 20 and 21, when interest will peak."

The Obama microsites are woven into each local site; consider The Arizona Republic's.

Indeed, I wonder if USA Today's new White House blog, The Oval, was launched as part of ContentOne's debut. (Also interesting: The Oval's URL incorporates the word "communities," as does the newer Faith & Reason blog. Both appear to use a software platform that's not TypePad, which most of the paper's other blogs still use. What's the communities aspects about?)

ContentOne also could lead to centralized editing and webpage construction, because it's a sort of web-based pagination system. Teams of editors and page builders could be employed inexpensively at the existing regional hubs in Wilmington, Del.; Fort Myers, Fla.; Des Moines, and Indianapolis. Gannett is already experimenting with regional copy editing and page design in at least one state: Wisconsin, where it owns 10 dailies that also share printing and production.

In this future scenario, local advertising sales could be handled by a small staff on contract. This is now a fully digital company, so there are no presses to ink up, no papers to bundle, nothing to hand-deliver to homes and offices; all those jobs would be gone.

It's already happening. As I post this, Gannett is junking presses at sites including Hattiesburg, Miss.; Asheville, N.C.; Richmond, Ind.; Battle Creek, Mich., and Poughkeepskie, N.Y. Those papers are now being printed at sister print sites. Yet, as papers get trucked further, weather-related delays are inevitable: Only today, the Poughkeepsie Journal apologized to readers; it's now being printed at The Journal News, 64 miles south in White Plains.

Meanwhile, marketing, human resource and finance work is being consolidated at the regional hubs, plus the Springfield, Mo., site. All these moves contributed to Gannett's reducing newspaper employment by more than 2,100 jobs, last month alone.

And the twin towers?
Gannett could sell the seven-year-old complex housing Corporate and USAT in McLean, Va., to a REIT, after the commercial real estate market recovers. The company could then lease back only the space it needs -- maybe a single floor or less -- in what new owners could rename the 7950 Jones Branch Corporate Centre.

This version of Gannett in five years or less is a leaner, more prosperous company. It's anyone's guess what revenues will be. And the U.S. workforce, now about 35,000 employees? Maybe it will tumble to 20,000.

Or maybe just 2,000.

What do you think? Please post your replies in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write gannettblog[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the green sidebar, upper right.

[Photo of Corporate complex: Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects]

Battle Creek: Paper eliminates 50 of 105 jobs

The Battle Creek Enquirer's nearly 50% job loss is pacing all all papers in this layoff round. The paper, which Gannett has owned since 1971, is shutting down its printing press and moving all production to its sister paper in Lansing, Mich. "The reduction affects 18 full-time employees and 32 part-time employees, with four of those cuts taking effect immediately and the rest during the next two months,'' the paper says today in a story.

The presses go silent Jan. 4. How many communities are even aware that Gannett is shutting down printing presses for the last time?

Building a list, checking it twice: Our growing paper-by-paper tally of layoffs and other job cuts. Is yours included?