gannett plans to layoff 3,000 by december.

Thank you for that post, joe.

One reason I got out of management when I did was because I saw what I would have to become to survive. Now I am doing what I can to survive until I find a new job and can leave this industry for good.

With the suits running these companies I don't see this business ever recovering.

 

He's not?

 

If you find it, Dan, PM me a link please. Sounds great, and kind of inspiring to trade off ambition for core values.

 

I think it was from his book "Be Nice", chapt. 11 "Attitudes." I remembered it differently, but I think Sports Illustrated ran an excerpt due to it's sports link.
Here's the quote:
"t all other times, I am one of the nicest people you would ever want to meet, and where has it gotten me? Every single person I can think of who has gone farther in life than I have is pronouncedly less nice than I am. Martha Stewart? Please. Gennadi A. Zyuganov? Please. The latter would never even have been able to forge the coalition that nominated him for president of Russia if he weren't as mean as a rock-quarry snake, and when Boris Yeltsin beat him in the election, Zyuganov's critics said it was because he had abandoned the class struggle. As for Yeltsin himself, please."

 

Exactly.
Good for you getting out of management. How anybody can be a butt kisser is beyond me. I would never agree to the type of shit Gannett has instituted on our business. No fair grades on performance evaluation sheets to keep "raises" down and the shit the suits spew at the 10 a.m. meetings .... wow. Integrity is worth something to me. I would rather starve than kiss butt.

 

Oh, please, Gannett is not the only place that keeps raises down with bullshit markings on evals, such as "0"s on safety and whatnot. I won't say it's rampant, but it exists.

 

Joe W. _ What you articulated so well accounted for more than 100 of the best leaving en masse from my former employer two years ago. Even with new careers, the memory of how the process worked will serve as a permanent alienation mechanism from any sense of having given decades to the cause. Now, it's a matter of laughing at the suckers and grumbling about not having dumped the stock. Oh, and when people in public ask if I'm still with the paper, I say, "What paper?" Yeah, the suits did a good job of sending forth goodwill ambassadors!!

 

Not to be a grumpy Gus, but I've really noticed "the roots showing" in coverage in the last few months. It's not a reporter getting a street name wrong or misidentifying a public official's title, it's a basic lack of coverage.
I check the local paper's website daily, and found out only today that the women's basketball coach at a local DIII college died during practice on Monday, I found out on a larger metro's website. Don't know if the local paper missed it or just didn't give it big or long play on the web, but I was surprised. And when big news happens, the amount of coverage just isn't there. Games you figure will be staffed aren't, info you don't expect to have trouble finding, is difficult to find.
It's not just one paper, or one TV station.

 

It's still bullshit and they were visionaries in this area. It's insulting that any 10 a.m. meeting person would agree to go along with it when evaluating their staff.

 

Your posts show a disdain for management but not much integrity, Freddie.

 

I repeat: A lot of you must have had a string of bad managers in your career, based on the dislike for anybody in that role from some of you.

I've actually had some pretty good ones through the years, visionary people who treated those who worked for them well.

 

But "through the years," editors have become much more corporate, a trend noted in the early 1990s in books like Doug Underwood's "When MBAs Rule The Newsroom" and James Squires' "Read All About It." A lot of the people who were running newsrooms when we broke in would have mercilessly mocked many of today's corporatespeaking drones -- who, by the way, tend to be far less tolerant of philosophical disagreements than newspaper editors used to be. There has been a gigantic cultural change in newsrooms over the past 20 years that, IMO, has hurt the product even more than the decline in resources has. Certainly there are some good editors out there, but I would argue that the percentage of them is way down -- and so is the amount of intellectual honesty in news meetings.

http://books.google.com/books?id=qqqV54OkqHUC&dq=%22when+mbas+rule+the+newsroom%22&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result#PPP1,M1