Richmond | Daily reportedly put on remote control

First, the general manager-editor of the Palladium-Item retired six weeks ago. Now, according to one of my readers, two of the senior-most advertising sales managers were let go in the past week.

How will the 10,128-circulation paper in Richmond, Ind., be led? Remotely, from sites in Indiana's Lafayette and Muncie, according to my reader.

Memo: GCI eliminating dozens more finance jobs

In another jobs consolidation, CFO Paul Saleh has warned finance department employees across the country that their work will be shifted to the two Shared Service Centers, in Indianapolis and Binghamton, N.Y. At least one of the centers was established, I believe, in the summer of 2008.

Saleh

Saleh's memo, dated May 9, lists nine tasks that will be moved over the next 18 months -- from posting cash receipts to customer accounts to handling property and sales tax returns. He doesn't say how many jobs are at stake. I obtained a copy of the memo from a reader last night.

Two newspapers have been testing the move: those in Indiana's Muncie and Richmond. More than a dozen others will follow in June: papers in Cincinnati; Salisbury, Md., Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and the Media Network of Central Ohio group.

The memo does not say whether the consolidation includes other divisions, such as Broadcasting. These job eliminations will come amid a broader consolidation of work that has contributed to more than 20,000 cuts through layoffs and attrition since Craig Dubow became CEO in July 2005.

As with all such communication from Corporate, Saleh -- named CFO in November -- manages to avoid the use of the word "layoff" to warn of the obvious consequences. He writes:

"Further centralization will most likely result in the loss of some positions at our field locations. Local management at each site along with SSC management and division finance VPs will work through a process for determining position reductions. To help determine remaining staffing needs, functions remaining at the local unit will be identified along with the skills, knowledge and experience required to do them."

His memo continues: "The termination dates for employees losing their positions will be determined by the implementation timetable. Employees not being retained will qualify for the transitional pay program (TPP) as long as they are on active payroll on their termination date. This next phase of the Shared Service Centers is an important part of Gannett’s strategic transformation, and I appreciate all of your help and support during this time."

Shortly after Saleh was hired, Corporate disclosed that he received a $150,000 signing bonus simply for coming to GCI, on top of his $600,000 in annual base pay. He also is eligible for a traditional annual bonus.

Related: So far this quarter, Gannett has cut 36 jobs at six worksites, according to the reader estimates in this spreadsheet. Plus: read the full Saleh memo on Google Documents -- or see it below:

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]

Richmond: Press shuts in Jan.; printing to Indy

The Palladium-Item will be printed at The Indianapolis Star after the smaller paper in Richmond, Ind., shutters its press in mid-January, costing about 60 jobs, a reader says in an e-mail. The two sites are 73 miles apart. The move also affects USA Today's printing, and any commercial work still done at Richmond. The Richmond paper is only the latest to consolidate printing at a sister operation.

Ind.: Muncie's Metzger assumes second pub post

In the latest consolidation of publisher jobs, Publisher Juli Metzger (left) of The Star Press in Muncie, Ind., will also be publisher of the Palladium-Item in Richmond. The two cities are 41 miles apart.

Metzger replaces longtime Gannett executive Bob Robbins, who is retiring, effective Nov. 30, after less than a year at Richmond.

[Photo: Gannett]

Stunning trout, meth labs -- and no saggy pants

Datelines is an occasional roundup of news topping Gannett websites.

Elmira, N.Y.: The annual trout sampling on Catharine Creek is a shocker. Louisville, Ky.: Police found more than 200 used meth labs -- the county's largest-ever such discovery. Richmond, Ind.: The school board voted unanimously to prohibit students from wearing excessively baggy or tight clothes. St. George, Utah: The state bar association is preparing free wills and other legal documents for police and firefighters.

[Image: this morning's Courier-Journal, Newseum]