Friday, January 31, 2014

Jan. 27-Feb. 2 | Your News & Comments: Part 2

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44 comments:

  1. Lafayette, LA here My manager told us if we support this blog we will be fired. Do not tell me what to do on my own time with my own equipment. Yes I am already off. DAM!

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    1. I think DAMN is spelled with an N and the end. Maybe you aren't that good an editor and that's why you would be fired!

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  2. Those who actively harm the reputation of the company are subject to discipline. Sorry. That is part of every company. Gannett clearly sees this blog as detrimental to its image. You participate knowin that. You do so at your own risk.

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    1. Last time I looked, we had a constitution in this country and not just the second amendment. Bring it Gannett, I bet the ACLU and a ton of litigators would lick their chops at the thought of the 7 figure settlement the company would have to cough up.

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    2. The constitution has nothing to do... Oh, never mind.

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    3. 9:42 has never read the Constitution and has no idea what he is talking about.

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  3. Ooooh, so scared big brother is watching. What a joke -- Gannett corporate does more to actively damage the company reputation than any employee ever has.

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  4. Deer Valley plant has installed more camera's. Mostly in press and reelroom area's. This place is now like working in a prison.
    The strange thing is they spend all this money on surveillance equipment but will not give employees a raise. What does this say about Gannett.

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    1. To me (an ex-employee who accepted a buyout in 2012) that they every right to put a camera wherever they wish. It's their building, their equipment, their everything. If you're nervous or angered by them I suggest you move on. But just beware, before you accept a new position somewhere else, better check the hallways and doors. Chances are, you'll see those awful spy cameras. My spouses place of employment has them everywhere. They handle sensitive information. But then again, so do Gannett employees.

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    2. It’s all about ROI, return on investment. The cameras cost X and they save/make Y; if X is less than Y then the check is signed. Raises would cost more than they bring in so they are not considered an option. A press operator is no different to Gannett than the camera that watches him or her, as Gannett is a corporation and it lacks empathy by definition and duty. That said; don’t be fooled by the senior management team looking human. They won’t act human; they sold their empathy many promotions ago. But still, we should lose the sanctimonious outrage, as we all would be sorely tested not to choose to take home a $1 million bonus, rather than spread it around a pressroom.

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    3. Have any of you looked at the Air Watch agreement you click on to install it on your smart phone to get your corporate e-mail through Outlook? It is spy ware, plain and simple. It gives them the capability to delete content from your phone, track usage and location. I have no problem with that on a company issued phone because I kept my personal phone and only use the company phone for business. My bigger concern is downloading it to your personal phone (ie: the one I pay for) and being tracked. While it does ask you to select between company phone, shared phone and "employee provided phone" I don't trust them to put the app on my phone. Probably because I don't trust the people who run this company. And for the corporate cheerleaders who reply that I don't have to work at Gannett, my response is that I pray for that economic recovery and increased job growth every day so I can say good riddens to this sorry place. This is not the Gannett I was proud to work for years ago.

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    4. This is exactly why I refused to install Air Watch on my personal phone. If you need me to receive email 24/7, you'll need to cough up the money for a company phone.

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    5. Why do you think it's called Air Watch.

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    6. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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    7. We have cameras too. They don't work. Otherwise the cameras would have shown the thieves stealing our computers and other equipment!

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  5. Greenville to shut down printing press. 117 jobs lost. Moving printing to North Carolina.
    http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20140130/BUSINESS/301300077/Deal-struck-move-printing-Greenville-Asheville-newspapers

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  6. I would guess it will also change deadline times which may make the certain papers (the print version) less relevant because of news & sports taking place in the evening not being done in time for deadline.

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  7. I'd advise any pressman working at a chain newspaper to seek employment elsewhere. Your job security is nil.

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  8. Papers will be late. That concern is no longer a factor.

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  9. Screaming bold hedline on LoHud/The Journal News right now and it's been up for hours:

    Police suspect herion may have killed Buchanan man, 23

    The lede does correctly spell it "heroin." Well, that's good.

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  10. Too bad The Journal News doesn't invest as much time and energy into proofreading as it does monitoring this blog. Within minutes after the comment above, hours after the typo went up, the hedline was corrected.

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    1. This blog is watched very, very closely by the higher ups. They read every word and they hate it.

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    2. They can read???

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    3. 11:56: They disrespect us. They fire us so they can get more money themselves. C'mon, higher ups! I wouldn't walk across the street to hurt or help you, but if you all had strokes reading something here, it might bring me a faint glimmer of pleasure. Enjoy!

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    4. Almost as funny as "Racist Golf Balls" on Shreveporttimes.com

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    5. Or "Check Chasing Ring Busted" in Shreveport's blotter....should be "cashing". wWong on the website and no one caught it (or maybe no one bothered to proof it) before it went in print.

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  11. I found that the USA Today pages in the Asbury Park Press have been the more interesting and better designed part of the paper. I’m thinking of canceling the press and buying USA Today.
    I can get my local news from the many thriving weeklies in the area.

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    1. Interesting. When they rolled this out I wondered if it might result in fewer USAT subscriptions. My thinking was that people who now subscribe to a national paper and the local would drop their national figuring they were getting enough of the same content in their local paper. This would only be true of USAT subscribers who live in Gannett local markets of course. Maybe it will be the other way around and this will convince people to drop their local papers and go with USAT, weeklies and broadcast.

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  12. Wausau just hired a regional sports editor last year and the person seemed to be doing a fine job. Now there's an ad for his job posted. What happened?

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  13. This was just posted on tucsoncitizen.com:

    Jan. 31, 2014

    Gannett Co. Inc. announced today that tucsoncitizen.com will become a site for the archives of the Tucson Citizen. More than 200,000 articles dating to 1993 will be free and searchable.
    The Tucson Citizen, which ended its print edition in 2009, has been a web site compendium of blogs written by local citizens and provided links to Gannett news content.
    "We are pleased to continue tucsoncitizen.com as an important community resource for Tucsonans who want to research the history and traditions of their city," said Kate Marymont, senior vice president/news for the Community Publishing Division.
    The redesigned tucsoncitizen.com archives will be available in several days.
    Gannett and Lee Enterprises Inc. will continue to be partners in TNI Partners. Lee publishes the Arizona Daily Star.

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    1. Bloggers got no notice.

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    2. Talk about spin. If I didn't know otherwise, I'd almost think this is a good thing.

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    3. Gannett pulls plug on Tucson Citizen, again

      http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/013114_citizen/gannett-pulls-plug-tucson-citizen-again/

      Four and a half years after the press of the Tucson Citizen rolled for the final time, the final employee of what became a blogging site was laid off Friday.

      Newspaper chain Gannett announced that the website would become an archive, letting go sportswriter Anthony Gimino (for the second time) and shutting down the site.

      Gannett closed the Citizen newspaper in May 2009, but kept on a shoestring staff who administered an open-to-all blogging site to keep the U.S. Justice Department off the company's back.

      Mark Evans, a former assistant city editor for the newspaper, served as the site's administrator until leaving to head up Inside Tucson Business last September.

      With a phone call Friday, Gimino was laid off by Gannett for a second time. He was a sportswriter for the print newspaper from 2004-2009, and then began writing for the online version of the Citizen when Gannett received a grant to pay for a part-time reporter. He later moved to a full-time position, helping Evans corral the site's stable of bloggers while continuing to report.

      When Evans departed, Gimino was left to handle the reins alone.

      Neither Gimino nor Evans were surprised by the move to shut down the site — nor were other former employees of the newspaper.

      "I'm disappointed but not surprised," Evans said Friday. "The site's only purpose was to exist."

      The South Park operation under which the Citizen fell, along with the Arizona Daily Star, is a partnership between national newspaper chains Gannett Inc. and Lee Enterprises, with each holding a 50 percent share.

      When the Citizen newspaper was publishing, the partnership was supervised by the Justice Department under a Joint Operating Agreement — an exemption from anti-trust laws allowed by the Newspaper Preservation Act.

      The last editor of the newspaper, Jennifer Boice, said Friday that the decision to keep a website operating was a move to "placate the Justice Department" by providing "an editorial voice." Months of negotiations with federal authorities preceded the January 2009 announcement that the newspaper would be sold or be closed down by Gannett.

      A call to Kate Marymont, Gannett's senior vice president for news, was not returned Friday. Justice Department officials with knowledge of the case were said to be "in a meeting" Friday, and did not respond the phone and email requests for information.

      In a terse statement posted on the Citizen website, Marymont said, ""We are pleased to continue tucsoncitizen.com as an important community resource for Tucsonans who want to research the history and traditions of their city."

      The post, which replaced every page on the Citizen site Friday, said a free archive of stories dating back to 1993 "will be available in several days."

      The Star's report on the final demise of the site run by its corporate partner was even shorter than Gannett's announcement of the closure. The morning daily posted a three-sentence brief on its website — a story on which it did not allow the public to comment.

      The Citizen's press made its final run for the Saturday, May 16, 2009, edition. The paper printed its first page for Saturday, Oct. 15, 1870.

      More at http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/013114_citizen/gannett-pulls-plug-tucson-citizen-again/


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  14. Christopher Dabe has been hired as Managing Producer Sports/HSSN for NOLA.com. He will work with sports and high school sports. He is currently sports editor at Gannett Central Wisconsin Media based in Wausau. He was sports editor in Beaumont Enterprise before that.

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  15. He has a connection with New Orleans. Good for him!

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  16. Simple question: Is USA Today profitable and, if so, is it projected to remain profitable over the next 5-10 years?

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    1. It was once, before Hunke completely fucked it up on a management hiring binge as the economy tanked. Now it is a loss leader and staffed by no nothings. They aren't good journalists, managers or people. It is pathetic.

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    2. Make that know nothing's.

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    3. 6:38 PM - Ugh. Please tell us you didn't add a postscript in order to insert a punctuation error.

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    4. No. He can't spell and realized it, but then he screwed up the correction.

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    5. Hunke was a complete disaster, no question about that. But, he's not the only one spending at a stupid rate on unnecessary staff. We have people here at USAT seem to have little or no role in the organization. We are completely over-staffed in sales support areas like pricing and finance. We had salespeople who carry no quota....and have no day-to-day sales responsibility. We have less and less people selling and more and more people watching sales. It's a mess.

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  17. We have had the project Butterfly USAT pages in my paper for several months now. We are not allowed to sell anything into those pages, they come sacrosanct from above. We're not pure enough to soil their image with our local advertisers.

    And what do they suck up our scarce color positions with? House ads. Filler. Promos for columnists and features which appear in the USAT full edition, but appear late (if at all) in our demi-version. I've seen four different advertisers in the months since this experiment began, but there have been some mighty long stretches of 'everyone be scared of Michael Wolff' filler.

    The dregs of humanity that we are in USCP, we know we're not worthy to sell Important Advertising like the USAT vice presidents club.

    But when the hell are they going to?

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    1. We don't need or want Harry's Budget Furniture Emporium
      clogging-up the pages of USAT's Butterfly. Sell that crap into your local edition. We're trying to extend the USAT brand into USCP markets. As Jessup said in A Few Good Men: "I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way....Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to."

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  18. Extending the brand without increasing revenue is like walking around with an erection hanging out of your pants.

    People will notice, people will talk about you - but without somebody jumping on board, what's the point?

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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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