Gannett Buyouts

Gannett managers know how it worked. They were told to give poor grades to keep the raises down. It's really one of the most despicable things our business has ever done. Flat out lying on evaluation forms instead of telling the truth: "We give 1 percent raises; you are lucky to have a job. Congratulations on your good grades. Those grades have helped to assure you keep your job." I know a person who quit after reading his Gannett evaluation. He got a 3 of 5 for attendance or reliability or some such thing and never missed a day, didn't take a personal day and didn't even use all his vacation. Enough was enough.

 

Good grief! If your attendance is perfect and you show up on time consistently, what would you have to do to turn that 3 into at least a 4? Bring a cot or a sleeping bag into the office and stay there 24/7?

 

I used to hate people calling into find out the scores of games. Either wait until the next day for it to be in the paper (pre-Internet) or wait a few hours fir it to be on the website.

I think I told this story on here before, but one time, pre-Internet, we had a local team in a huge state playoff game. We did multiple features and previews leading up, and always put in a box touting our hotline for updates.

Would’t you know it, but we had at least a dozen calls, wanting the score. It was like, didn’t you see stupid boxes with the hotline number?

 

Not in newspapers anymore. Lasted there 24 years before being laid off.

I think the EE was genuinely surprised that was going on in sports. I talked later with news-side people, and when I brought up working OT off the clock, their jaws dropped.

We had a huge building-wide meeting after that, where it was spelled out that anyone who did that, or any manager telling anyone to do that, would be fired on the spot.

I'm sure it still went on in some cases, but not by me.

 

I'm not gonna go that far. They got stuck the way some organizations do when they can't shake elements of the structure that are no longer functional. It was more silly than anything else.

I did feel a little irked at one number I got, but then realized I got the same score on basically being pliant to what editors wanted as my coworker. And he was much better at doing what he was asked and less mouthy than I was, so that made me feel fine.

 

The way a former manager (not the work OT off the clock guy) told me the approach to Gannett appraisals worked was, every year you started over at zero. So if you by some miracle got a 5 on punctuality/attendance one year, that performance that got a 5 became the next year's 0.

So you had to figure out a way to turn what in theory could be a perfect record for punctuality and attendance, into improvement that netted you a 5 the next year. Impossible? Probably, but that played right into their hands.

Count me in with others who would love to see them just say that you got 5s across the board, but there's no money for raises this year, rather than lie their way to make the numbers fit a false narrative.

 

Not just limited to journalism. I've been a high school teacher for more than a dozen years now. Several years ago, the state legislature pushed a narrative that teachers were overpaid bums who had ironclad tenure and couldn't be fired, and *that* why we weren't turning out classes with 100% of our students going to Harvard and Yale. So the state dictated a very Byzantine, very punitive evaluation system to the schools, and tied your pay increases to it. If you were rated a 1 or a 2 on a 4-point scale, you were *by law* not allowed to see any pay increase that year (a version of that is still in effect).

The original draft of the principals' version of the system rated them as a "1" if "most or all" of their teachers were rated in the highest two categories, and a "4" if most of their teachers were rated "needs improvement" or worse - incentivizing principals to rate their teachers poorly or *they* would suddenly have no job security ... all a ruse to save tax money while also pinning it on the teachers ("see, the majority of you are terrible. Just look at your evaluations, which we rigged to ensure you'd be rated poorly.") After a small outcry, the item tying principal evaluations to rating teachers poorly was eliminated.

That said, while I hear stories of colleagues who grade papers all night, I do almost zero work off the clock these days.