Gannett strikes again

I'm sure the people fired/let go/laid off/dismissed/shown the door/ didn't get hired back/ aren't overly excited about the new storytelling team.

 

Hardly. Exactly the same number of sports reporters as we had before the reorg.

I do have a question for folks.

Yes, the reorgs across the country were tough and none of us wanted to go through this and lose people we care about and contributed to a product we're passionate about. It was especially hard to swallow for us in Fort Collins since we were the alpha site for this a little more than two years ago and it worked really well. It turned our paper from something people hated into a valued asset in our community that was leading the company in ad revenue, digital subscriptions, activation rates, blah blah blah. And then a one-size-fits-all approach was given to every paper in the country, and here we go again. It's been a difficult few months.

Gannett is getting blasted for this with people saying how this is the wrong way to prepare for the future. Is it? Maybe. Maybe not. But if Gannett is doing it wrong, what company is doing it right? I read about layoffs posted on this forum all the time from a lot of media companies. Who's the "good guy" in all of this?

I've been extremely skeptical about coach vs. editor, but I'm also going to try to make the most of my situation and am so thankful to know everyone around me is, too.

 

Spoken like a true Gannettoid

 

It's not about why they're preparing for the future, it's how they've gone about doing it.

Making people reapply for their jobs is demeaning. Using the same bullshit corporatespeak that they've been spouting off for the last 20 years with different terms meaning the exact same thing is insulting. Having certain people like yourself talk about how exciting these times are when other people are dealing with the excitement of losing their livelihood is beyond tone-deaf.

I'll use another movie quote, from the Billy Crystal movie, "Mr. Saturday Night". Yeah, Gannett has to do these things. But they could have been nicer about it.

If they have to lay people off, then lay them off with dignity. Don't make them have to go through a sham process in which the decisions already have been made. Don't insult those who had better options who left by saying that they're afraid of change, as the editor at the Tennessean did.

And enough of the "excitement" bullshit. Be honest. Say that cutbacks are necessary for financial reasons and that you hope readers will stick with you. Don't talk about "Newsrooms of the Future" as the next big thing, because the fucking "Local Information Center" was supposed to be the next big thing a decade ago. And there will be another stupid slogan about "Information Center of the Future" five years from now that'll be another excuse to dump people.

If they have to do these moves, then do them. Don't sugarcoat or bullshit people. Just do it, with dignity and respect. And give them a real severance like the New York Times, rather than the supplemental crap that goes with the unemployment insurance.

 

Everything that Baron said and then some. I'm tired of hearing how this is being done for the readers or that the future is exciting, etc. Neither is true. I commend the leadership of some of these shops for stepping up and trying to say why they are doing it, but in the end I think they just make it worse. Just say it's something that had to be done or that we were forced to do and we're moving on, if you say anything at all. A bunch of fancy colorful titles aren't going to sell papers either.

The Coloradoan editor has been out there and vocal about the changes. To some extent in similar fashion as the Tennessean editor has done, except maybe not as cheery. The Coloradoan has gotten a lot of brush back from readers because they let go of their arts reporter and from what I can see there is no real replacement. The editor has said that they are still going to cover arts and are doing so in a way that readers want or at least have suggested. But from what I can see, a lot of readers were pretty darn happy with the coverage they were getting. Then she says crap like this is helping them address the "uniqueness" of Fort Collins and they've added beats to do just that. The examples she gave were beats that aren't unique to any place. One was fucking transportation.

Stop selling this as some sort of improvement when it is just reshuffling at best and nothing will really change, or it will get worse. Readers aren't that stupid. There is a lot of skepticism from the few readers the paper does have that the lack of editors and so on is going to put an end to what quality was left. The only response is it's going to be more reader-focused than ever. Again, what does that even mean? And it's crap. It's toeing the company line to put a positive spin where there is nothing positive. It doesn't fool anyone.

 

I fully, totally, completely agree. The line about being "excited" to see what kind of future projects their group can work on made me want to stab my eyes out with razorblades. What a fucking jackass.

 

Meh. Not really. More of a blind Coloradoanoid. Our team there is my family and my closest friends and I'll go to bat for them any day. I get what you're saying, but with the tools we get to work with to enhance stories online these days and with the untapped potential with other digital elements we have, if you're not excited, you're either dead or apathetic. I genuinely enjoy finding new ways to enhance digital stories.

And Baron- That's a really great answer. Thanks for that. This has sucked. None of us wanted this. Subscriptions in quite a few markets are up; why change what didn't seem to be broken? That decision was well above our publisher's pay grade. Am I excited my coworkers lost their jobs? <bleep> no. I seriously disagreed with some decisions that came out of this. I trust our paper's leadership, but plenty has me shaking my head.

But what I am excited about is being fortunate enough to be in a position to try and move us forward. The "information center" came before I was at a Gannett site, so this is the first time I've been part of a process like this. Codenames like "Picasso" are popping up everywhere. It doesn't matter what any company calls it. The bottom line is, our industry is struggling and we have to figure out something. Message boards and blogs steal our original reporting all the time and give it away for free, so why subscribe to a newspaper in 2014?

If we're not doing meaningful work in our communities, if we're not telling amazing stories, if we're not looking at the analytics of what people are reading or taking time to be on the streets to get to know our readers on a more personal level, then we are failing. I can get the essential details of a college football gamer by reading Twitter on a Saturday afternoon. What else can we deliver that makes coming to the newspaper worthwhile? We need to figure it out. Not Gannett or Digital First or BH or any individual company, but all of us. What the majority of us are doing isn't working, which means we're failing our readers. I enjoy my job too much to settle for that; to watch paper after paper around this country cut its staff and put talented journalists out on the street. We, as an industry, have to figure out something, and every company is going to try something until we finally get it right. Odds are always going to be against a Thunder Dome or Newsroom of the Future, but we have to do something.

Maybe it's because I'm some bright-eyed, 27-year-old kid, but I refuse to accept failing readers as an option.

 

Matt, it is because you're young and dumb and not wise to the corporate world. I don't envy you or your youth. I do feel sorry for you.

If you were older and wiser, you'd have shut up a long time ago.

 

What Baron and Doc said. Matt, it sounds like you're drinking the corporate Kool-Aid.

 

A. Thanks for the compliment

B. Don't trust any newspaper's leadership

C. What "tools"? Video? Been out their for seven years already. Twitter? Ditto. It's not innovative. It's commonplace.

D. The last big paragraph is a large part of the problem. There have been "solutions" thrown around for years. And they're little more than shit being thrown up against the wall. Nothing researched, nothing that actually says readers want what is being given to them. Just a lot of vague ideas that are little more than busywork.

Enlighten us. What exactly, besides buzzwords, is going to be new, or different this time around? You say telling "amazing stories", "looking at analytics", "getting to know readers on a personal level". The "amazing stories" thing has been going on for 400 years. It's nothing new. "Analytics"? From a company that has decided that every community should follow the same dictates despite their own uniqueness? Getting to know readers"? Here's a hint. Readers are a diverse (ooh, a Gannett favorite buzzword) group, with diverse interests. In other words, they want everything. One person may want JV swimming results, another reader may want more NFL coverage. And yet, Gannett insists on cutting back, more and more, so that they are offering less and less. Which provides less motivation for readers to stick with your product.

E. You're not failing your readers. Corporate is, by failing to provide the tools necessary to really allow some sort of innovation. Having a reporter write a story, update the web, tweet, shoot photos and do video doesn't help the reader when they're trying to do it all at once. Having a photog take the pics and do the video allows the reporter time to find more of those "amazing stories" and "get to know the community". Pretty hard to do those things when they're at a video-editing computer. Yet, they have to, because corporate decides more jobs need to be cut.

 

In my recent Gannett experience it seemed that the most important trait any editor/manager/coach/planner could possess was wholesale buy-in especially regarding digital.

So Matt seems to have a bright future.

 

Matt, your first mistake is trusting management.