gannett plans to layoff 3,000 by december.

Really shitty. I wonder how that works. Sending all the copy from the westside all the way over to the thumb for copy editing. It would seem more streamline to send it to Lansing.

 

Wonderfully heartless bastards...

 

[Edit: Yeah, you're right, first version was too harsh. This one, though, I could see.]

 

That's incredibly offensive, Joe, and an insult to the people being laid off. I hope you delete the post, or that a mod does.

 

People losing their jobs is bad enough, but the illogic behind some of these moves is what truly confounds me and makes me question whether the newspaper industry is suffering a fate that it deserves.

The Kevin Roberts lay-off is a perfect example. I know Kevin. I have worked in the same press box as Kevin. And I can say without a doubt he is the best writer in that sports section. Hell, he's one of the best in the entire market. Not only that, he busts his ass. Did anything anybody asked of him and more. During one of the games in the Phillies playoff run, everyone else in the media is sitting in the press box letting their shitty free meal digest. I look out from my seat and see Kevin walking in the stands, notepad in hand, working on some angle that required actual leg work. The guy is a pro.

Again, I stress, nobody deserves to lose their job. But if you were to make list of a meritocratic pecking order, Kevin would be at the very bottom. And yet, he is gone. It makes no sense. To me, if you are going to be trying to do more with less, wouldn't you be best served to keep the people most equipped to produce? This is not a judgment on anybody else in that section, or any of the others who were laid off. I don't know McCann, but the Radano move is equally confoudning. Although he has been doing the Phillies lately, he has his finger on the pulse of the South Jersey HS sports scene, and his loss is a loss tremendous one locally.

I'm just highlighting Roberts because, from my vantage point, there is absolutely no way to justify it. Nobody in that shop was making significant enough money to make it a monetary thing.

Just unbelievable.

To drive home how fucked up this whole thing is, try this one on for size.

After Kevin was called in and told he was being let go, he was handed two items. One was his walking papers.

The second was a gift card he had earned for being employee of the month in October.

Hope the bed is comfortable, Gannett. You made it.

 

Not only isn't it about quality and skill, which is depressing enough, but these are positions being eliminated. This means there are a hundred or so fewer jobs available in our business today than there were yesterday.

 

I'll be interested in seeing how Wall Street responds to the layoffs in next week's meeting in New York. I've already heard some stock analysts questioning layoffs as the answer - and as much as we'd like to think they just look at the numbers, I know a few who do actually look at the products of the company they are studying.

 

It's not that unwieldy really, especially with computers and networking and all that.

What is unwieldy is non-local people reading local copy.

 

The stock did not soar with these cuts. The law of diminishing returns.

 

I think even Wall Street's getting wise to this cutting game. It's clearly not the answer. Problem is, neither they nor anyone else seems to know what the answer is. Feels like the entire industry has given up and we're all just playing out the string at this point.