Gannett layoffs

Hearing that a bunch of folks were let go this week in the Binghamton/Elmira/Ithaca cluster in New York. Apparently, the sports department in Ithaca is down to one person.

 

Three years ago, in response to an ad for the paper, I said this:

And now they're down to one? Why even bother? Just fold the place already.

 

I posted this on the Gannett blog and I will here: Just sell the papers. You're to the point where someone could build up these papers back into something. Right now these papers have skeleton staffs. You can't cut much more. Ah, but I'm afraid they will.

 

Who want want these Gannett properties? They have been gutted. Limited staffs, no presses, rented buildings, burned bridges in local communities. Anyone who would buy some of those papers would have to rebuild them from the ground up. Not in this economic climate.

 

That's exactly why you buy them. You get them away from the property doing all the cutting. You put them in the hands of an Aaron Kushner-type person. I'm not saying one person buys all the properties. Maybe someone with Cincinnati ties buys the Enquirer. Like someone said in another thread, Gannett could sell its Middle Tennessee properties to an area buyer.

Right now, Gannett's going down the Knight-Ridder road. (The big difference is K-R at least had bulk in its papers when they were sold off. The rate Gannett's going, these will be 12-16 page broadsheets by the time the cutting's done.)

 

Sadly, this is not the first time I have heard of this sort of thing. I know an SE at a Heartland (now Civitas) shop who had to paginate news pages in addition to his regular work on Saturdays and Sundays.

 

Wilmington is where I grew up. One of my brothers still lives there. It is a town with plenty of money (and advertisers). It is also a town where the people I still know universally despise the newspaper on the grounds there's nothing in it to read. It cries out for local ownership, and that might be the next step. In fact, the News-Journal did have local ownership when I was a kid -- the DuPont family. This affected coverage in more than a few areas, but you didn't worry about it going broke.

 

Thankfully we're not even messing with the whole Sulia insanity, which in my view is the surest way to alienate your followers. Particularly those who use their smartphones for Twitter.

Amazed that newspapers allow their employees to insert a middle man into the process -- one that can cannibalize the papers' audience while paying the employee but offering nothing to that person's employer. It's the Internet equivalent of a beat writer cutting a radio deal to call up the station and break all his news over the air first, then writing the story for his day job.

 

Except Twitter already is a "middle man" that can "cannibalize a papers' audience." I despise Sulia, but the only philosophical difference between it and Twitter is that Sulia actually offers SOMEBODY a tangible reward in exchange for their content. A friend of mine is an NFL beat writer and his paper recently handed down a "No Sulia" edict, but writers are free to -- expected to, in fact -- Tweet as much as they like. Even though Sulia has the same effect on a newspaper as Twitter.

 

They will keep cutting. What's scary is that Gannett isn't even trying to hide that another round is coming before Christmas.

 

You are so correct Mizzou. And the cuts may come prior to Thanksgiving Day.

 

Hope they take their time in doing so. A few blown deadlines will shake things up beautifully.