Mike Reed Sets Goals for New Gannett

Hahaha, I’m imagining them gathering around a yellowing plastic Macintosh from 1997, the cranking whirring to life, and someone muttering “Where’s InDesign?” before someone gravely says, “My God. This predates InDesign.”

 

Should be. Gannett has been "quiet quitting" on its customers - doing the bare minimum - for decades.

 

If they had ANY scruples they would have waited and done it Tuesday. Coward move to do it on a Friday, putting their sports departments in a bad spot with high school football playoffs going on.
You want to be disruptive, do it on a day that will get noticed, not on a day that gives you a three day weekend.

 

Makes sense.

 

If you don’t cover high school football playoffs, that gets noticed.

 

But then they’d miss out on the free pizza.

 

I think they chose Friday because it was the last day for the people who took the buyout.

 

Barely.

 

I just wanted to come in here and vent about how bad my local Gannett paper is.

It's in an NFL city and in the Monday e-edition, there's one (1) story on the game. Granted, this team was really good last year and has a lot of buzz in the city. Their No. 1 beat writer and columnist? Nowhere to be found in an 8-page section. Instead, the other two stories on the front were about a college team, including a Q&A with an auxiliary basketball staffer.

Listen. I get the ownership group is completely inept. But the people running the sports shop are no better.

 

Do readers care about high school football playoffs even if the local teams are not playing? We had a thread once on how reader much interest there was in high school sports. The consensus was that people were interested in Hometown High but not high school sports generally. Once the local teams were eliminated the page views for high school playoff stories dropped to basically zero.

 

The people who care about high school football care a lot about it. They will notice.

The people who don't, don't care at all.

 

Most content deadlines, for print and e-editions are the same, and could be so early that the 1 p.m. games aren't completed in time.
The deadlines for my four markets range from 10 a.m. to 2:45 p.m.
To give you an idea of how much thought and effort were put into this, Gannett allows 1 story on the cover to be held in a pro or Division I college market. My market with the 2:45 p.m. deadline has neither, but I have a mid-major D-1 program that has a 12:30 p.m. content deadline, but I have no chance of holding for anything.
That's a long-winded answer to tell you the local leadership may not have any say in this.