gannett plans to layoff 3,000 by december.

Wilmington is my home town. I cannot tell you adequately how much people there hate their local paper. They WANT it to die, because they see it as a piece of shit already. After this, that feeling will only intensify.

 

Newspapers have gone from being proud of having the best reporters and established reporters to now getting some kick out of having the most inexperienced citizen "journalist" writers and bloggers. It's like they want to start the trend of no real reporters.
You know what is going to ultimately happen at Gannett newsrags don't you?
A bunch of 8 dollar an hour writers and editors who won't know what to do with them. These citizen writers will be fired in bunches and quit in bunches when they get screamed at the first time by these clueless editors. It'll be basically like McDonalds in terms of the revolving door of employees.
Gannett is saying we don't care about quality AT ALL.

 

One anonymous poster on Gannett Blog said there have been 92 cut at Asbury Park Press, which was one of the best papers in New Jersey pre-Gannett. It is a shell of a paper.

 

Do any of you disagree with me that Gannett obviously wants no full time reporters only freelancers and citizen journalists?? Why doesn't Gannett just speed the process and replace all reporters with the part time reporters?

 

I disagree with you. It wants fewer salaries.

With the web and all, anyone could be the local news "source" with freelancers and unpaid bloggers. If you want to be the go-to site, you've got to do better than that.

 

I was telling a freshly laid-off colleague something like that today. The only way the waves of massive layoffs make any sort of business sense is as part of a systematic shedding of staff over a period of time until there are nothing but skeleton staffs of assigning editors and a couple of essential beats at most papers. Basically, similar to a magazine staff but smaller.

They don't want to do all the layoffs at once because it would be too traumatic, for the existing employees, the papers themselves and to the investors. They dole them out piecemeal with the goal of spreading the blow out over a long period of time. Eventually, almost all of us will be gone. It's just a matter of when, I think.

 

But doesn't that make the "product" irrelevant? Who will want to buy and read that? Or check it out online?

 

Sad day all the way around. My heart and prayers are with those cut.
Gannett in the Philadelphia area had "dead weight" because the News-Journal and the Courier Post, although seperate, covered the same thing in regards to the Philly pro teams. That's how they can justify making the cuts. I'm also not including a couple of other smaller Gannett ventures around the Philly area that covered home games.
I think Gannett and others see that the way to survive is to stay local. That means leaving the bigger national stories to AP, no matter how poorly they are written.
I believe a lot of "big time" columnists will be seen at the local high school football game next fall.

 

my heart goes out to all those that lost their jobs. I have several friends at Gannett and I don't have a clue as how to contact them. What do you say during a time like this? How do you ask someone if they still have a job?

 

AP does not work in a market like Philly. Lets say Philly team loses an away game. You get a gamer mostly about the home team, usually no note or sidebar. Philly fan opens the local paper and then goes and buys the Daily News. The local paper has alienated another reader.

 

I worked at Asbury from 1987? to 2005? (something like that) and I would venture to say that there are more people that I worked with there now working at the star ledger (I saw the list after the recent cuts) and the bergen record then there are remaining at the Press.