Changes at The Oklahoman?

I'll bite. Exactly what do you get from GateHouse?

 

McClatchy is in the process of moving printing of the Fresno Bee to the mother ship in Sacramento, a three-hour drive. Gonna be hell on Friday nights in the fall or when Fresno State has late games.

 

A new distance record! According to Google it is 167 miles from the offices of the Sacramento Bee to the offices of the Fresno Bee. McClatchy moves ahead of Newhouse in the competition because it is only 147 miles from Mobile to New Orleans. My guess is that the record will soon be broken.

 

You know, I scoff when a guy like Fredrick goes on his companies-just-want-to-kill-print rants, but what else could these decisions be about?

Moving your presses two hours away achieves what, exactly? Besides short-term savings.

 

It's not going to be hell. The print edition simply will ignore the Fresno State basketball games. This Oklahoman thing has me realizing this is a monumental step toward the end of the print product. For a great sports section like that to not run any results of the local teams when they play night games is scary. Big newspapers are just daring readers to cancel subscriptions. Why in the hell should anybody subscribe to the Oklahoman when no night Sooner games or Cowboy games or Thunder games will ever get in the actual newspaper. The crap early stories the beat writers produce will only serve to make the beat writers quit. Colleges dont have pre-game media access in college football. College basketball generally has the media off limits on game day before the game. What the hell is the poor beat writer going to produce BEFORE the game? Nothing. This move by the Oklahoman tells me all newspapers will be dead within a year and a half. Internet only is coming faster than we thought.

 

Thank you for citing Fredrick. I would love to be a consultant and tell it like it is to these assholes who ruined the newspaper industry. I said it'll be 15 months maximum before Gannett kills all print. I think Gannett will be first. I think they'll probably have a one-day a week print newspaper, the Sunday edition. In the final print model that ultimately kills the industry, the Sunday paper will be loaded with ads as it is still in most cities. The Sunday newspaper will also be full of houseads pubbing whatever is on the newspaper Website.

As far as the impending death of the print product, I still cannot believe newspapers are trying unsuccessfully to be something they were never designed to be: TV stations and radio stations. What the fuck are sports sections doing? Almost all of them have HORRIBLE elements of talk radio (blogs and blogcasts with sports staffers playing the role of talk radio hosts) and TV (ridiculous panel-like discussions with staff members on film or even short film essays). And nobody is clicking on these unsponsored videos. WHo the hell is making these decisions. Newspapers stopped being newspapers and are a hodgepodge of crap. See you in the unemployment line soon.

 

Homogeneous design. Pages slapped together as quickly as possible without thought.

 

The obsession with serif (?) fonts is annoying, especially when they own 90 percent of the papers nearby and every time you go into a store and look at the newspaper rack (remember those?) everything looks the same.

 

First, the editing isn't as locally precise. For example, it's unlikely a GateHouse sports copy editor in Austin knows much about the high school football teams in another state and may not catch a misidentified player, incorrect conference, etc. This can be offset to a certain extent if there's an editor from the home paper giving copy a thorough first read before it goes to the editing hub, but how many papers have that luxury these days? Perhaps a paper the size of the Oklahoman does; some larger papers that have eliminated their desks have retained a copy editor or two to serve as a liaison with the editing/design hub, but again, it's a luxury.

Second (and obviously I don't see every GateHouse paper, but I'm going by what I've seen and heard), page design is often downright strange. For example, I've yet to see a headline that's size- and story-play appropriate. Huge headlines on downpage stories of secondary importance. Small headlines on lead stories and centerpieces.

Third, headline and cutline quality: I'd rewrite just about every headline I've seen on GateHouse pages, and too many of the cutlines are regurgitations of what wire-service photographers provide without much rewriting or additional information (instead of saying, "The Cubs' Kris Bryant looks on from the dugout," pull some information from the story and tell me why the photo is relevant).

Fourth, early deadlines. For example, I know of an East Coast paper that has outsourced production of its baseball pages to Gatehouse, which operates on its own timetable. The first version of these pages is produced almost two hours before the home paper's first-edition deadline. The first edition at least used to get night games from the Eastern time zone in the paper; now, only day games make it, and there's a ton of filler. And there have been many reader complaints.

I make these observations with all due respect to those who work in the Austin editing hub, which is known to be underpaid and understaffed. No doubt many of those folks could do much better work under different circumstances. I'm probably prejudiced against the place because so many of my hardworking brethren have lost their jobs and quality has suffered, all in the name of saving a few bucks.

 

So, are these actual editors that are working in these design hub jobs? I was under the impression that places that operate like this were hiring pretty much anyone off the street at a low wage, even minimum wage. I've actually never heard of paginators or copy editors working these positions as they were all eliminated with the downsizing. Some of your examples I've noticed with papers that have done this -- the horrible headlines, the out of place size of headlines and stories being played up or played down. I would attribute all that to an inexperienced person who is building the pages but I have no knowledge of how these hubs actually work, hence my question about Gatehouse. I appreciate your answer though. Pretty similar to what I expected but I'm always up to hear what someone else knows about any particular situation such as this.

 

I'll buy that.

 

It's assembly line journalism at its worst. Probably pretty repetitive work, too, I imagine, and that's not good.