Mike Reed Sets Goals for New Gannett

How are their sports verticals doing?

 

I wonder how much they've cut the travel for beat writers, telling them to "write off tv" or some shit. There was a while I had to go through the EIC to get travel approved for a beat writer who drove 65% of our online traffic. It was fucking ridiculous, like everything at Gannett.

 

Likely to be horizontal soon.

 

The fucking balls on these people ... Gannett had a mandatory 30-minute online training session on mental health in the workplace, how to recognize the warning signs and how to deal with it, including such Hallmark card buzz phrases such as "it starts with respect" and "you are not alone."

Everyone got a stern email warning them it had to be completed by May 10.

The primary cause of mental health issues in a Gannett workplace is Gannett.

It's like a factory that forced its workers to be exposed to asbestos having a mandatory training session on the warning signs for cancer. But you won't be alone.

 

"You will not be alone... on the unemployment line."

 

It’s stunts like this that make me wish the GannettBlog was still around. They would have had a field day with this.

 

I do hope the time spent watching the video was paid time. But a good lesson in life should be work should help you SOLVE your life problems, not CAUSE them (stress, financial turmoil, career worries). The job itself is stressful enough - the company's woes make it incredibly more so. Wonder if they are worried about/ or have had a few workplace incidents.

 

I’m surprised people haven’t snapped in newsrooms/live shots. The TV cameraman in Virginia is the only one I remember. I never want to see it happen, but you figure the way the bosses treat the help in this business…

 

Admittedly, the people who care the least about the product and the people impacted by stories probably have no problems.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Chubbuck

 

I can think of two incidents, neither even approaching the Chubbock story. I saw one and heard about one.

The one I saw, a guy in the newsroom was told to do something he never did as part of his job. And it was needed immediately. He protested, saying he was just going on his break. He asked why the usual guy didn't do it. He was told the usual guy was on a break. He stood up, threw an ink pen across the room and hit the clock. He said "EFF THIS PLACE" and walked out, never to be seen again.

The one I heard about is a legendary SoCal newspaper story. A veteran sports writer who had covered everything, was in the office. The sports editor approached and told him he was being reassigned to agate. The guy popped the SE right in the nose, dropped him in his tracks.

 

Thankfully, just about every newsroom “fight” is all bark and no bite. Even when one or both parties loudly proclaims “We’re taking this outside!”

That happened to me once. My boss at a small daily newspaper in northern Michigan threw another job on my overloaded plate so he could leave early for some P.R. type event and I flat out refused in front of everyone. Voices were raised and pretty soon he yelled, “You and me are going to step outside!”

Of course, once we did so we both realized how stupid it all was, so we hung out in the back parking lot for a few minutes, agreed that the assignment could wait a day or two and ended up laughing about the whole situation.

I still maintain I could have kicked his ass if it came to that!