Gannett Voluntary Buyouts

I used to have to provide info for a brief 1A skybox tout each day. Occasionally, this one newside copy editor would say "You have Florida State winning the game. Can we drop 'State' and just have Florida winning the game?"

Ummm, no.

 

PTSD coming back, Baron.

I remember doing those for "our" teams in the MLB playoffs or on MNF, and they'd want the photo for it before the game started, and the words for it before it was over. When I'd tell them we can't do that, they would try to give a stern look, like we were being unreasonable by not being a team player.

Fuck all those people who I wouldn't trust with a job as basic as scooping dog shit from my yard.

 

One paper I worked for did LARGE coverage of the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl. The editor called an organizational meeting in August to get it started. First question: Which teams are going to be in the Rose Bowl?

 

We had a chief designer tell her staff that every story that started on the cover had to have a photo. So instead of a centerpiece we had a bunch of 3 and 4 column boxes with 32 or 36 pt heads and 2 column photos. We could have had a local kid win the Heisman and it would have gotten the same treatment as Podunk girls winning some random basketball game

 

Newspapers ... worst run business in history. No close second. Story after story. Bottom line: One person makes multi millions per annum; the little guy? No raises for the past 15 years to go with paltry salary and unwritten rule job description of 60-70 hours a week no overtime.

 

We always had a skybox teaser for Friday night football that I'd write before going off to cover a game. Made it as generic as possible. But when we had two teams in Section championships the ME wanted something a little more timely, so that part was held open until the page needed to be shipped, which would have been around halftime or early in the third quarter. The ME suggested I put a result in if it looked like the game was no longer in doubt. Told that to the reporter covering the game from another paper and we both had a good laugh.

 

It's amazing the stupidity of those who advance to upper management, especially in Gannett. They never leave their office, have no understanding how anything works for reporters and editors, and solely focus on hitting whatever "numbers" the drones in Tysons Corner want them to hit, be they circulation or audience or page impressions or whathaveyou.

Advancement at Gannett is all a political game, and if you're a section editor or a reporter and you end up on the wrong side of a political battle (that doesn't involve you), they'll find a way to push you out the door, either by making you so insane that you'll quit (hey, you have two weeks to put together this 16-page Spring Outdoors special section with multiple staff-produced articles, and I really don't care that the next two weeks are filled with the HS sectionals, Spring training, NCAA Tourney, and MLB previews...) or by putting you at the top of the layoff list. I know this from firsthand experience. My career as a full-time journalist is over because I had a lifelong (well, from college on) friendship with an ME that lost a political battle. Because of that friendship, I was deemed an enemy of the news director and driven out the door. I'm not saying this to garner sympathy, it's just how it works at Gannett. I'm sure there are others with similar experiences.

 

To be clear, I was at a Lee paper (at the time), but the ME had a background at a nearby Gannett paper and had lost a power struggle. But she kept pushing all the Gannett ideas (more videos, etc.). Still, I've seen - hell, we all have - too many papers bitten in the ass by early deadlines, like a skybox saying "Podunk High wins state," sent out early, only to have a banner headline on sports "Late FG sinks Podunk" in sports.

Years earlier, one of our schools was playing for the Section title and the marketing folks decided to do a special rack card "Podunk wins." But Podunk didn't win. First thing I did when I got back to the office and defrosted was tell the late paginator to go back to circulation with one specific instruction: Don't use those rack cards!

 

My favorite from when I used to design A-1 for a couple years before going back to writing was the Design Editor wanted an advance copy of the next day's A-1 before I left the night before. Eight out of 10 times it would be scrapped any way when actual news happened.

 

Is it really though?

 

Yeah. We get your point.

Got any new news?

 

Maybe the suits were ahead of their time with teases and skyboxes, judging from Internet headlines these days.

"Who won the big game?" (see sports)

Election night story - production exec comes up to the exec editor and says "I think I want to increase the press run tonight, I think a lot of people are going to want to buy the paper tomorrow. Can we move the deadline up a couple of hours?"
Exec. editor - "But then we won't have any results."
Production guy - "Oh yeah. Right."

I do wonder if the Gannett voluntary buyouts means they've hit their "magic number" of how few employees they can have and still put out a product and now they're just interesting in replacing that strata of employees who have been around a while with even lower paid newbies. Otherwise, why not just do layoffs in order to cut ahead of the revenue decline?