Mike Reed Sets Goals for New Gannett

I cut and pasted the 'you may be eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit,' email I was sent from corporate and just put 'not be eligible for this.'

 

LOLOLOLOLOLOL

 

USA Today parent Gannett posts wider-than-expected loss but revenue beats estimates

 

Sounds like a fun accounting trick

 

Lost $0.92/share - more than 20% of the share price! Amazing work, management team!

 

Sounds like there should be management coaches, too.

 

That's a great goal, LOL. It's actually worthy of a huge raise in pay. These companies that force their low paid employees, who routinely work 60-70 hours and get paid for 40, to write down "goals" are so silly. No person smart enough to be a journalist would take such an exercise seriously. It's just another laughable exercise proving working for a newspaper is really the lowest form of employment in America today (in terms of a job in which one needs a degree).

 

Another newspaper property sale, nearly $1 million to Gannett debt reduction. Pocono Record building sold to local business owners

 

The selling of property is quite amusing. Lot of CEO's have kept their vacation homes, yachts and overseas trips fueled by the sale of iconic newspaper buildings.

 

Just trying to delay the inevitable a little longer

 

It's 2021, do we really need newspaper buildings? What can't reporters/editors/producers/sales reps do from an office that they can't do from home or a coffee shop? Especially sports reporters, who probably don't spend much, if any, time in an office.

 

If you're arguing, "It's 2021, we don't need to be squatting on $1M real estate right downtown," then the answer is yes. However, I think it's stupid for a news organization to have *zero* footprint in a city, for a variety of reasons.

One, yes, you do occasionally need to see a subscriber in person, for whatever reason, and as someone who has worked for papers with no office in a community it covers, the readers DO notice and they WILL give you shit about it.

Two, if you can't afford to rent a building on the outskirts of town, you probably can't afford to do fuck-else to put out a quality product.

And three, some decent reporters -do- have life situations that preclude themselves from being able to work as efficiently at home. I've switched to the PR side of things, but my "office" is the front sun room of our house, and as much as I love my wife, it can be hard to focus when she's on a conference call in the other room or wandering out into the kitchen for lunch. I can't imagine doing my old job as a reporter this way, when I'd be calling a lot more people, and working much later at night.

(I'm also going to overlook the more standard, "Sometimes if you have a good newsroom, it can generate good story ideas and camaraderie." Because frankly, all of the budget cuts and downsizing over the past 20 years has eliminated 90 percent of that anyway. My second-to-last journalism job was an editorial assistant, and most days, our head count on a shift would max out at 4 or 5. On Fridays, it was 1 for most of the business hours of the day.)