gannett plans to layoff 3,000 by december.

Lafayette (La.) paper is now printing only one section (16 pages) on Mondays and Tuesdays. Classified ads will be online only for those two days. The rest of the week, Classifieds will appear in Sports, as will Comics, crossword puzzles and Sodoku.

Sad thing is that the readers aren't fooled. This paper has been one of the more profitable ones in the Gannett chain and recently upped its rate to $.75.

A friend of mine likes to call these changes "self-inflicted wounds." Yet, somehow, the paper that's making a ton of money is blaming the "national economy's impact on the local economy" as reason for the change.

 

What has the response been at some of these papers who have switched to two sections, or who have removed classifieds, etc.? I can't imagine it can be good.

 

Well, from The Daily Advertiser's web site, here are the responses from the letter from the publisher to Advertiser readers:

 

The sad thing is there are a lot of corporate newspaper types looking at the Advertiser's self-inflected wounds and saying "that's our model."

 

Stuff like this makes me thankful I was laid off. Sheesh!!

 

Hey! Gannett blog is saying another round of cuts next month, and possibly equal to or greater than the cuts in December. Good times.

 

Previous page, 3/4 of the way down, post by Jim Rockford.

 

10-12 percent of the jobs. Yay. Three weeks away.

 

And the suits wonder why the business is done. We're killing the product by killing the people. No shit nobody is going to read the horseshit papers we're putting out with lack of staffs. Some business leader told me yesterday our business section has been total shit this past year. He canceled the paper. It used to be a great business section. Now it has no business editor. Cutting pages ... of course sports fans will go elsewhere. We're not giving them shit anymore in the paper.
So, Gannett, it's obvious you want an all online edition because you will need so few people to put out an online edition. Do everybody a favor and go that way now, so the people who are going to get cut in the next year anyway can get on with their lives.

And that thread about the good evaluation turned into a bad one should make every decentn person in the United States media profession puke. My god.

 

That's actually a pretty good and accurate post, Fred.

 

I've seen the Gannet Online product. USA Today is okay, but the local sites rarely get me to click.

 

That's because many of the local sites are essentially running entire front pages of AP stories. Not only is that boring as hell, it's being done by many sites and it is no way to survive.