Gannett layoffs

I feel terrible for Ryan, and everyone at the P-C. Gannett has slowly gutted that paper. It's awful to see what's happened to everybody there.

 

Well, that's All Over Now.

 

We're going through this at my place ... When Buffett bought the Roanoke Times, I was moved off the ACC beat I was covering for that very reason. We had two reporters within the company living in town, and I was commuting 90 miles each way -- sometimes three days a week -- to cover the same school. From a business standpoint, I absolutely get it. That's a huge redundancy in coverage, especially when our high schools coverage was lacking. So they put me back on the school in town (still DI, so that doesn't bug me a lot) and we're using the resources that we were throwing at the redundant coverage to blow out coverage of our in-town DI school, along with adding a much needed body to high schools coverage. Selfishly, I was a bit annoyed at the time, but I can totally get why we did it.

 

Wow. I wonder if he quit or was a layoff casualty. That's a pretty scorched-earth Twitter bio either way.

I see the financial appeal of the shared content stuff, but it's the perception that's going to hurt more than anything else. All the TV stations around there, plus papers in Cedar Rapids and the Quad-Cities should be ready to pounce on that.

If the coverage of the sports department's No. 1 area of interest is the exact same, what are you going to do to make readers pick up the IC paper instead of the DMR right next to it? City High football? That may move the needle a little bit, but in a college town with a ton of young people from elsewhere, I don't see that doing the trick. If they are going to do this, why not have an "Iowa City Edition" of the DMR? Hire a half-dozen ad reps, 2-3 news people and 2-3 sports people, and stick a couple of pages of Iowa City news inside the DMR every day?

 

From that report, it sounds like Suchomel was kind enough to give his co-worker a heads-up about what was coming down the line, the co-worker gave that information to a radio station he does side work for, and after they used that information to break the story, the paper responded by firing Suchomel.

That co-worker sounds like a real gem.

 

Got to be careful who you trust.

 

No good deed goes unpunished.

 

I wonder if the co-worker is still employed there. His offense, giving the story to his side-employer, seems to be a worse one than what the SE did.

 

I can understand that, too. If management comes in and takes away what I consider my favorite part of a job with nothing of value to replace it, chances are I'm not going to stick around long, either.

 

Aren't the Register and Press-Citizen owned by the same parent company? If so, then that's basically what you have now: a large, basically state-wide paper and a small town local paper that covers local events and shares some bigger stuff. Thus if John Doe decides to buy the Des Moines paper for $1.50 instead of the Iowa City paper for 75 cents, isn't the revenue ultimately filtering into the same pot, anyway?

I think one of the major changes a lot of us older guys and gals have noticed is in how things get covered. Used to be a pro or major college press box would be jammed with writers from all over the state, many of whom just commuted to cover the event, eat free food and smooze. Seems to be less and less of that now. You might have 8-10 writers instead of 30 at the same event, which is sort of nice because it makes the press row and locker rooms a little less crowded.

The other big change is obviously the television --- and online --- coverage. Used to be going to the stadium/arena was the highlight of my job. Now I avoid it like the plague unless I just have to be there on game day. Rather catch the game on TV and then go out to practice during the week when it's less crowded and cut my interviews then.

 

The Press-Citizen should have negotiated a content share with the better paper in Iowa City - The Daily Iowan.