In a new interview, news chief Marymont discusses everything about Design Studios -- expect for this

Three years after expressing concerns in an open letter about Gannett's plans for five page production design hubs, the Society for News Design has swung back with a new interview with the chief of Corporate's News Department, Kate Marymont.

Marymont

In 2010, SND worried cost cutting would crush creativity, a concern Marymont addressed at the time in a Q&A with the professional association.

In the latest interview conducted by email, Marymont offered a detailed update on how the transition worked and lessons learned. But there was one question of especially high interest to employees that she still wouldn't answer:

SND: In your original interview with SND, you said: "We don’t know how many jobs might be eliminated. We are just beginning this project and a first step is to survey and analyze the work done at each site." Now that we are three years into the process, how many jobs were eliminated in the transition to the studio system?

Marymont: Gannett’s policy is that we don’t provide details on personnel or staffing matters. However, we certainly found savings as we introduced efficient ways to produce commodity information and refine workflows. We took some of those savings to build a management team at each studio to recruit and continue to train great staffs. We also are investing hours in building digital skills at the studios.

What the record shows
In fact, Gannett does detail staffing information, although generally when those figures are favorable to the company's image -- a tactic common across Corporate America.

For example, when the design hubs were announced, The Courier-Journal said in a story that it would add 75-100 jobs at its hub in Louisville, Ky. The Des Moines Register expected to hire 35 to 60; and The Tennessean planned up to 70 jobs in Nashville.

But in their hiring accounts, the papers and Corporate did not say how many jobs would be eliminated at the papers served by the hubs.

Gannett has detailed staffing elsewhere, sometimes at the most microscopic level, as when newspaper division President Bob Dickey told Wall Street the paper in Lafayette, Ind., had added two newsroom jobs in 2012. Those were among 60 other local news hires with plans for as many as 240 total, he said.

On another occasion, Corporate told Wall Street Gannett employed more than 300 local sports reporters and 50-plus sports columnists. Also, executives regularly mention the company employs 5,000 journalists companywide out of a global employment of about 30,000.

Louisville | Digital 'trailblazer' named top editor

[Updated at 6:31 p.m. ET.]  A new video at the top of the story shows Budde speaking to employees in the newsroom.

The Courier-Journal in Louisville just named Neil Budde, a former editor and reporter there, as the Kentucky paper's new top editor.

Budde (left) and Ivory

Budde, 57, replaces Bennie Ivory, who retired in July after 16 years leading the newsroom.

Budde has decades of experience in both print and online journalism, rising to be publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online after the site gained nearly 700,000 paid subscriptions, making it the largest paid subscription news site on the Internet, according to the C-J. Later, he was general manager and editor in chief of Yahoo News.

Budde left Dow Jones in 2002 to start a consulting business.

As executive editor, Budde will oversee the C-J’s print and digital news-gathering operations, the editorial page, as well as Gannett’s Louisville Design Studio, which designs and edits nearly two-dozen of the company's 80 other community dailies.

The C-J is one of Gannett's most-honored and biggest-circulating titles. It holds 10 Pulitzer Prizes, including two won after Gannett bought the paper from the Bingham family in 1986.

Weekday circulation is 131,208, and Sunday is 224,420, according to the March 31 AAM report. (Circulation database lookup.)

Palm Springs | Top editor Burton arrested for DUI

Greg Burton, executive editor of The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif., was arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor driving under the influence of alcohol on Monday night, the newspaper says, citing a Riverside County Sheriff’s Department report.

Burton

The four-paragraph story, under a staff-only byline, says Burton, 50, was pulled over at 9:24 p.m. for a traffic stop at Fred Waring and Adonis drives in nearby Palm Desert.

Burton, executive editor since 2011, told the paper yesterday: “It’s a privilege to live and work in this community – and that comes with a responsibility to do what’s right. For me now, with this case, it’s a matter of making sure justice runs its true course.”

He was released by the Sheriff's Department and is scheduled to appear in court on Nov. 13, according to the Sun.

The paper didn't publish Burton's arrest mug shot, in contrast to other stories on its site, such as this one. However, Palm Desert Patch obtained and published the photo with its story.

Burton's arrest recalls the December 2010 DUI arrest of Ted Power, then publisher of the Reno Gazette-Journal. Unlike the Sun, the Reno paper also published his booking photo. The following month, Power left the paper to direct the newspaper page production hub in Des Moines.

[Photo: Sheriff's Department via Palm Desert Patch]

16 ways to consolidate Gannett into oblivion

In an e-mail, a reader writes the following:

The future job losses are easy to predict across Gannett. Connect all of the following and you can see what your continued employment prospects might be.

1. Classified employees will be laid off and class call centers will be created at one or two central sites.
2. All delivery functions will be outsourced to rack companies and contractors. Gannett Publishing Services will be able to cut employees and the associated costs and pass them to vendors.
3. Digital functions will be performed at central studios, just like the Design Centers. The company has learned that it can't build digital teams at each site and is finally realizing there is no one to create content when four-people-per-site are devoted to pure web functions. Folks who have made the successful jump to digital will find themselves either moving to hubs (like copy editors two years ago) or leaving employment.
4. With a modem, finance/accounting can be done from anywhere. Racks are gradually being removed and one person can now count all of the quarters in one morning (this will go to contractors anyway). Accounting and human resources are already heavily consolidated; they will be consolidated more. Sarbanes-Oxley be damned: There will be no accounting needs at sites. Also, numbers calculated at hubs can't be washed courtesy of the local publisher and controller.
5. Offices are largely unnecessary. Salespeople can do everything remotely -- reporters too. There is no longer walk-in traffic at the offices; the people who used to "drop off" things at a newspaper don't exist. Obits are done by the funeral homes, weddings have gone to social media, celebrations are now paid content (no one is paying), yard sales go to shoppers or CraigsList. Once classified leaves the building, you won't need a building.
6. No building means no local IT. Vendors can be contracted to trouble-shoot all equipment, because it will be all-mobile hardware -- easier to replace than fix.
7. With no circulation, production, accounting, classified, building/grounds and IT oversight required, publishers won't be needed. We see the trend of the general manager-ad director and GM-editor. That will become the norm.
8. When the publisher becomes the ad director, the ad director is done. When the publisher is the editor, the editor is done. With everything viewable on SalesForce.com, ad managers at hubs can monitor all performance. There won't be a need for on-site ad management.
9. Local governments have had it with the legals publishing rates. This content-advertising is headed to government websites. The local laws are going to change. Legals are the only remaining monopoly-like revenue source for local sites. Loss of this revenue stream will be disastrous (yet, I'm not aware that the company even has this on their threat list).
10. Deal Chicken is essentially dead. Gannett Client Solutions barely works. Is anyone still selling Yahoo? Do any of your advertising clients really understand digital marketing solutions and reputation protection? Enough to hand you a check for the service? There are no new or unique digital initiatives with any promise of producing dollars.
11. Photographers are no longer necessary. Stringers can do it all. All you need is a photo editor to assign them and a clerk to shepherd their photos. Reporters can take all of the needed photos and the Design Centers can jazz them up via presentation. There is no need for photography that has an artistic quality, mostly because the readers don't appreciate it in print and it ends up being poorly displayed on the website. Mugshots will rule.
12. Videos either need to get a lot better fast or be scaled back. Someone will figure out that the public has no patience to watch a video made by a reporter with a Sprint iPhone 4, but it's not worth spending the time and cash to make better videos. Some of these embarrassing efforts will occasionally go viral and drive some web attention, which will be mistaken as success.
13. Any press that can be closed, will be closed. If there's a printer within 100 miles that can print your newspaper, they'll be paid to do it, then haul it to the contractor-distributor.
14. Marketing? There is no more local site marketing. At sites where it does exist, it, too, can be outsourced and corporate managed.
15. Weeklies are little more than glorified TMCs. Their production effort is seldom worth the revenue. Advertisers only spend with them because the core product costs too much. Their expenses are hidden in the core product. If and when they have to stand on their own, their profit margins will collapse. About TMCs: Everyone hates them -- they are little more than First Amendment-protected litter bundles. Insert customers are gradually realizing this.
16. Calendar listings will be outsourced, as will court listings, real estate transactions and local business briefs (the Rotary and chamber can write them).

Okay, I've depressed myself into a coma in writing this down.

My hope is that everyone else out here in Gannett Land already knows all of this and is making decisions about their future career options accordingly.

I've heard of about 50 ad designer layoffs today

And I'm tracking them in this read-only spreadsheet.

Worldwide, Gannett has about 31,000 employees.

[Updated at 5:49 p.m. ET April 25.] We've now counted 25 jobs at seven sites.

Please check the sheet, then post figures for your site in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write jimhopkins[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the rail, upper right.

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.

USAT | Reno's Love to lead new global news desk

USA Today Editor in Chief David Callaway has sent the following memo today. It is also signed by Kate Marymont, the senior news executive over the 81 U.S. community papers, and Rob Mennie, the top news executive over the 23-station broadcasting division.

Folks,

We’re thrilled today to announce the appointment of Beryl Love as executive editor of our new Gannett global news desk. Beryl, who is executive editor of the Reno Gazette-Journal, is one of our Gannett newspaper group’s most popular and talented editors. He’s the perfect leader to create a new, coordinated news desk to serve our sprawling print, broadcast and digital news operations.

Love

Many of you have heard about “the desk” project. But we promise once it gets going this summer you will have never seen anything like it. It’s not just a breaking news desk. It’s not just an assignment desk. It’s not even a new version of Gannett News Service. It’s a 24/7 news engine that coordinates and shares the best of all our news coverage across our 104 media outlets, as well as providing unique, high-impact digital, broadcast and print content that will add value to all of our offerings.

It will be staffed with some of the best innovative minds, graphical designers, videographers, layout editors, and engineers from all our news operations, as well as some of the best and brightest in the industry not yet with Gannett. Located in the center of the USA Today newsroom, it will be our first truly companywide news center, leveraging the coolest work of our 5,000 journalists and serving individual news units, from Reno to Rochester, from Denver to Detroit.

Dave Callaway, Kate Marymont and Rob Mennie will manage the creation of the operation as a team, reporting to Larry Kramer, Bob Dickey, and Dave Lougee, and ultimately to Gracia Martore.

Beryl will start in McLean, Va., in early May, after a suitable transition from his successful assignment in Reno. Please join us in wishing Beryl a hearty congratulations.

Cheers.

Dave, Kate and Rob

Earlier: Gannett News Service becomes ContentOne under Tara Connell, March 2009. ContentOne becomes News Network, May 2011. USA Today announces formation of national news desk, March 2012.

Hubs | Two big staff changes at Nashville studio

Jeff Glick and Javier Torres, who ran the nearly two-year-old Design Studio in Nashville producing The Tennessean and other Southeast dailies, were axed "in a move designed to cut costs from the group," Nashville Scene is now reporting.

Perhaps the most damning and entirely plausible paragraph in Scene's story is this:

"Glick and others were given a near impossible task: Produce the papers without enough people or resources, without the control necessary to be efficient, and without the clear backing of Corporate in squabbles with local editors. Sources [say] Glick was a vocal advocate to his bosses about the problems with the system. And when the studio's budget -- comprised almost entirely of payroll and machines -- was cut an estimated 10% for 2013, the higher-salaried managers were gone."

[Updated at 9:37 a.m. ET on Jan. 17.] A well-placed source says the 10% figure is probably accurate. This raises an obvious questions: Are other design hubs facing a similar cut, or is Nashville an exception? And what other budgets have been cut for 2013?

Earlier: Society for News Design worries about hubs, and News Department chief Marymont responds. Plus: memo details new division-wide typography rules.

Related: Blogger Apple wants to help Glick and Torres find new jobs.

In Sandy's path, thousands of Gannett employees

Gannett traces its origins to the Northeast and especially to New York State, which explains why so many of the company's businesses and employees are now vulnerable across eight states as massive Hurricane Sandy roars toward landfall today.

Hurricane's projected path

In Delaware, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Vermont and the Virginia area, the company owns 18 newspapers, including USA Today, plus five TV stations and assorted speciality publications. And, of course, Corporate's main office is in the Washington suburb of McLean, Va.

The company doesn't break out employment by subsidiary. But USAT and Corporate alone likely have 2,000 workers at McLean. Several thousand more work in the other seven states plus D.C. Worldwide, GCI employs about 31,000.

Potentially deadly storm surge flooding is already occurring along a broad swath of the East Coast, from New England to North Carolina, according to the Weather Channel. Especially worrisome, flooding is forecast to reach its peak during high tide tonight along the Jersey shore.

Underscoring the dangers, GCI's eastern newspaper design and pagination hub is at the Asbury Park Press, just two miles from the shore in Neptune, N.J. It serves more than a dozen dailies.

For a sense of the magnitude of Sandy as a news story, look at the homepage for The News Journal in Delaware's Wilmington. In print this morning, the paper devoted seven pages to the hurricane.

Breakdown by location

• Delaware: The News Journal
• Maine: WLBZ and WCSH in Bangor and Portland
• Maryland: The Daily Times at Salisbury
• New Jersey: Asbury Park Press, Courier News in Somerville, Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, Home News Tribune in East Brunswick, Daily Record in Parsippany and the Daily Journal in Vineland
• North Carolina: Asheville Citizen-Times and WFMY in Greensboro
• New York: Press & Sun Bulletin in Binghamton, Star-Gazette in Elmira, The Ithaca Journal, Poughkeepsie Journal, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, The Journal News in Westchester County, and WGRZ in Buffalo
• Vermont: Burlington Free Press
• Virginia: Corporate's headquarters; USAT's main office; The News-Leader in Staunton, Va.; Gannett Government Media; Gannett Healthcare Group in Falls Church; WUSA in D.C.

[Graphic: New York Times]

Memo: Power outage shuts down La. sites

Yesterday's outage was at the building housing The Times of Shreveport, and affected (I believe) at least four other Louisiana sites. Power was restored after about an hour, according to one of my readers. Here's the memo:

To: All Gannett Louisiana users

DESCRIPTION
The Shreveport building has lost power and the generator the powers the data center during outages failed to start. We have determined that there is a battery issue with the generator and building services is working on it.

Meanwhile, the datacenter containing the editorial and classified systems for the state is now completely down. At this point we don’t have an ETA for when we will have either generator or main power restored.

We will keep everyone informed as we know more about the situation.

EFFECT AT YOUR LOCATION
All systems used by the entire GANLA region are currently not operational while we wait for power to be restored.

SUPPORT
Visit the Gannett Midwest IT Servicedesk home page or contact Gannett Midwest IT Helpdesk @ (XXX-XXX-XXXX) for questions. Use Service Desk Web Self Service to search for knowledge and manage your open support tickets.

Hubs | How Montgomery got Pensacola's comics

In a column today, Executive Editor Wanda Lloyd explains how The Montgomery Advertiser's readers found themselves staring at a page full of unfamiliar comics on Monday:

It took me about an hour to backtrack and realize that our new process with designers in Nashville, Tenn., and copy editors in Montgomery somehow left a window for an error that led to a page of comics intended for another newspaper — the News-Journal in Pensacola — instead of our normal page.

Memo: Gannett establishing national news desk

USA Today Executive Editor Susan Weiss forwarded the following memo to staff yesterday. It came a day before many U.S. journalists were to participate in a Web conference on the future of wire news. My question: Does this spell the beginning of the end for Gannett's use of wires including the Associated Press? Here's the note:

Over the past few weeks you have heard Gracia Martore talk about playing offense and proactively building Gannett’s future.

During town-hall meetings at every site, you have heard the leadership team talk about Gannett’s powerful combination of hometown advantage and strong brand advantage. Our hometown advantage comes from deep connections in communities coast to coast. Our brand advantage is built on iconic brands like USA Today, The Des Moines Register and WUSA.

Across Gannett, more than 5,000 journalists make up a powerful news organization. Each reporter, producer, photographer, developer and editor is a member of that news network.

To showcase and leverage the journalism of that network, we are creating a national digital-first news team based in McLean to serve every site in USCP, Broadcast and USA Today. As a working title, we’re calling it The Desk.

Its assignments:

• Produce an engaging multimedia national report 24/7. This report will appear on every web site across USCP and Broadcast to supplement local coverage. It will draw from USA Today’s enterprise and seek the best local journalism from all Gannett newsrooms.
• Work with Design Studios to produce national news content in our daily newspapers. This is designed to free up local time for local journalism. (Because this is specific to USCP, there’s more detail about this in a separate document attached to this message.)
• Facilitate coverage of national events so that we have the best possible content – stories, photos, videos, etc. – created and curated efficiently for all of our platforms. It will coordinate planned events as well as big breaking stories.

So what does The Desk mean for you?

For community journalists it means more time to concentrate on local coverage with impact and depth. It also provides the chance for superior local content to be shared across all of Gannett in a powerful new way.

For USA Today and the new national desk it means access to the best all of Gannett has to offer on a 24/7 basis.

A group from Broadcasting, USA Today, USCP, Digital and Military Times together defined the role of this centralized news team, which will be housed within the USA Today newsroom. Journalists from across divisions will be enlisted to help the Steering Committee build the right structure to best serve readers and viewers across Gannett.

A critical first step is to identify a director. We will post this position on careerbuilder.com this week.

Marymont

The director will report to the cross-divisional Steering Committee comprised of Rob Mennie, Broadcast; Kate Marymont, USCP; Mitch Gelman, Digital; and Susan Weiss, USA Today.

The centralized news team does not change the role of the Washington-based regional reporters who serve USCP sites.

The Video Production Center at WXIA will be the video arm of The Desk, working with the producers on The Desk to provide the best, most relevant on-demand and live video programming.

This operation will be rolled out in phases. First to be created will be the portion that produces print pages for USCP newspapers, with launch scheduled by May. The 24/7 national digital report will launch in June by using Odyssey templates and will be upgraded with the relaunch of sites starting with USA Today this fall.

This is an exciting venture that gives us the opportunity to better leverage our hometown and brand advantages.

We’ll share lots more information as we continue to build. . . . . Kate, Mitch, Rob and Susan.

And I will be available today – and the rest of the week—to answer any questions. And I welcome your suggestions/reactions.

Thanks,
Susan

Des Moines to abandon century-old headquarters

The Des Moines Register is planning to leave its downtown office complex, becoming the latest Gannett property to put its real estate up for sale as space needs decline with an overall reduction in the company's size.

Undated postcard shows 1918 tower

"Ever since the Register opened its new printing plant south of the airport in 2001," business columnist David Elbert wrote this morning, "it hasn’t made sense for an increasingly high-tech 21st century media company to operate from an early 20th century building. Particularly when space requirements are less than half the more than 200,000 square feet of space in the Register’s long-time headquarters at 715 Locust St."

Publisher Laura Hollingsworth says she hopes to keep the daily's news operations downtown, presumably because that keeps editors and reporters closer to the government offices that generate news.

The Register also is home to a growing number of regional GCI operating units, including one of the five new design and production hubs that will build pages for most of the 80 U.S. community newspapers.

"Now is a good time to have a location problem,'' Elbert says. "As everyone knows, a ton of commercial space is currently available at affordable lease rates in the metro area."

The Register's circulation
Monday through Friday, 105,151; Saturday, 114,689; Sunday, 216,648.

[Postcard: Allposters.com]

Indy | Guild sees new pact with up to 4% raises, but calls deal the ‘definition of a compromise’

In an announcement less sugar-coated than you might expect, the Newspaper Guild chapter representing 125 Indianapolis Star workers said the tentative agreement reached today would award raises of 2% to 4%, with the highest going to some of the lowest-paid employees.

“But it was only a small step toward restoring the 10% pay cuts the Guild took two years ago,’’ negotiators said on the chapter’s website.

What’s more, the chapter failed to keep the Star from eliminating 6-8 jobs when page production is moved to the design and production hub in Louisville, Ky.

“Despite making it a focal point of the Guild’s ‘Save the Star’ campaign, the Guild’s team found that outsourcing the page design work was an area where the Star was unyielding,” they said. “We made a strong case -- in leafletting efforts, a street protest, a media campaign and at the bargaining table -- that this could damage the local news product. But it became clear that this was an edict from Gannett, the Star’s parent company, and that the quality of the product was a secondary consideration to saving money.”

The agreement is subject to ratification by the chapter’s full membership next month. All but 13 of the 125 workers covered are in the newsroom.

Despite calling it the "definition of a compromise," negotiators nonetheless said they'd gained some ground:

“Our industry is still in job and pay cutting mode. And newspaper unions around the country are still facing cuts such as the ones we took two years ago. That we could squeeze out even these modest raises was a testimony the efforts of our workers and our friends in the community and the breadth of our public campaign.”

Earlier: Star employees get $1K bonuses, including union leaders who won't keep them to protest criteria

Mail | This reader seeks Design Studio job advice

Anonymous@6:21 p.m. writes: 

I am a designer at a Gannett newspaper and I am thinking about joining a News Design Studio center after my paper goes to the hub. The problem I am having is there has been no information about how CCI is working so far and what the workflow in CCI is like for designers. It seems as if everyone who is at a design center has been told to not say anything about them. In order for me to make a decision I would like as much information as possible. Can someone who works at a center please let us know how things are working out? Thanks.

Earlier: Gannett Bloggers discuss a recent CCI outage.

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.

Discuss reports of last night's CCI NewsGate outage

In a comment, Anonymous@12:04 a.m. wrote: "Speakin' of rocking new technology, was the NewsGate outage Tuesday evening a national issue or just a local one at my site? How again is NG going to make our papers better? Anyone?"

Responding at 9:45 this morning, Tommy Edison wrote: "NewsGate was running like crap yesterday and had to be taken down for 'emergency repairs' around 7:25 p.m. Eastern last night. Please tell me which one of the five overpaid failures gets a bonus for that decision. Typing a word and waiting, waiting, waiting for it to appear on the screen is so 1988."

Note: CCI NewsGate is the estimated $15 million front-end system Corporate installed beginning in 2010 to help unite all word processing across U.S. newspapers. It's part of the establishment of five central hubs that will design and build pages for most of the 80 community papers.

Greenville | The WTF error we're all talking about

At least three heavily trafficked websites -- The Huffington Post, Jim Romenesko and Charles Apple -- are reporting The Greenville News accidentally (?) published an Associated Press story today that included the word "fuck" where the third paragraph should have been. The mistake has spurred a lot of tweets, too.

One theory, floated in a reader comment on Romenesko, is that the snafu occurred because the News pages are designed and built at the Louisville, Ky.-based News Design Studio hub -- presumably the last bulwark against such mistakes.

The bigger question, of course, is how it got into the story in the first place.

Louisville is one of five such hubs being established to handle page production for virtually all the 81 U.S. community dailies.

This is the second time in a week that the South Carolina paper has carried a prominent error. Last week, the News published a quasi-advertorial on its homepage with the misspelled word, "Ulitimate."

Tech 101 | Take my CCI NewsGate -- please!

Youngman

The editor of The Arizona Republic's Mesa edition lands some pretty good one-liners in a column yesterday about the paper's recent experience with CCI NewsGate, the new multimillion-dollar software publishing system rolling out across Gannett's U.S. newspapers. John D'Anna said the Republic made the switch this week. And?

• "You know it's worth it because now twice as many stories disappear twice as fast." Bada-bing!
• "The system is so complicated that we now have to be nice to the interns because they're the only ones who understand it." Bada-bing!
• "Instead of clicking on a little icon to create a story, there's now a 13-step 'process.' Forget just one step and you're hosed." Bada-bing!
• "The system is called NewsGate -- and not to be cynical or anything -- but you would think people who bought it would know that nothing good ever ends in the suffix 'gate.'" Bada-bing!

For months now, Gannett Bloggers have said the software is still very buggy, and seems cumbersome compared to the array of different software it's replacing.

In an efficiency move, GCI spent at least $15 million on NewsGate so newspapers could seamlessly share stories online and in print. It's crucial to operations of the five News Design Studios building pages for virtually all the 82 newspapers.

[Photo: Henny Youngman, the master of one-liners]

Indy | Union launches 'Save the Star' campaign

The Indianapolis Newspaper Guild has just launched a website urging readers to contact Publisher Karen Crotchfelt and protest cutbacks at The Indianapolis Star, austerity moves the union says threaten the paper's viability. The labor group is publishing office phone numbers and e-mail addresses for Editor Dennis Ryerson and for Crotchfelt.

"Tell her the Star’s profits need to stay in Indianapolis,'' the union says. "Tell her it’s time to reinvest in the Star by adding more journalists, not cutting them, and to pay them competitive wages. Tell her you want more local news, not less."

The chapter says it represents more than 120 employees.

The site, which appears to have launched yesterday, warns readers: "Pressure is building to run messages produced by private businesses and advertisers in news positions. If the line blurs further, readers will start questioning what’s real news and what’s an ad."

The site also warns about plans to outsource page design and production to one of the five News Design Studio hubs:

"Gannett wants to move some of the Star’s newspaper production jobs -- people who proofread the stories, write the headlines and design the look of the news pages -- from Indianapolis to Kentucky. Gannett wants people in another state who know nothing about Indianapolis to design the Star’s news pages. This is sure to hurt the quality of the Star. This could also give the paper more of a franchised feel -- less local."

To be sure, this isn't the first time the Indianapolis chapter has tangled with management. In September, Gannett agreed to pay a financial settlement to eight former Star employees represented by the Newspaper Guild in return for their dropping a lawsuit against the company, challenging their layoffs in July 2009."

But in trying to draw public pressure, this latest move sharpens the rhetoric even more. Could a boycott effort be next?

Related: The Indianapolis chapter's Facebook page.

Earlier: Settlement reported in union strike against Newsquest.

Layoffs | GCI Calif. news partnership cuts 120 jobs; eleven newspapers consolidated under two names

Taking regional publishing up a notch, the San Francisco Bay Area News Group is consolidating its 11 daily papers under just two nameplates, reducing overall employment by 8%, or 120 jobs.

The papers are mostly owned by Denver-based MediaNews Group, but minority owners include Gannett through the companies' California Newspapers Partnership.

MediaNews developments such as those disclosed Tuesday are of particular interest to Gannett Blog readers because the company's experience could influence GCI's direction.

For example, MediaNews instituted regional copy and design desks in Northern California well before GCI announced plans a year ago to establish five page production hubs to serve virtually all its 82 U.S. newspapers.

GCI has also been experimenting with more regional approaches to publishing, including single publishers and regional news over multiple publications, in Wisconsin, Central New York and, most recently, in New Jersey. This, too, has resulted in job losses. For example, in New Jersey, three dailies said they were reducing newsroom employment nearly in half last January.

Community news loss
Tuesday, MediaNews said it was making the changes to emphasize its regional approach to news coverage and free up resources to funnel into its digital initiatives, according to a report in one of the papers, the Oakland Tribune, across the bay from San Francisco. The move to streamline the group's operations will help reduce expenses as print advertising revenue continues to fall.

Left unsaid, however, is the fact that in a regional news approach, less attention is paid to town-specific coverage, further weakening competitiveness with online start-ups like AOL's Patch network.

MediaNews is the second-biggest newspaper publisher by circulation. GCI is No. 1, with USA Today included.

MediaNews and GCI also are partners in the Detroit joint operating agency, which publishes the GCI-owned Detroit Free Press and MediaNews' Detroit News. The two companies are also affiliated in publishing operations in Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.

Partnership ownership details
GCI owns a 20% interest in California Newspapers Partnership, which includes 19 daily California newspapers, and a 41% interest in Texas-New Mexico Newspapers Partnership, which includes six daily newspapers in Texas and New Mexico and four newspapers in Pennsylvania, according to GCI's annual 10-K report to federal securities regulators.

The third investor in the California partnership is Stephens Media Group of Las Vegas.

The 10-K doesn't identify the California newspapers by name. On its Facebook page, however, the California partnership lists many of the newspapers included in yesterday's BANG announcement.