Gannett strikes again

Matt-
I admire your spirit, but come back here in six months and tell the board you are not way burnt out at that time.

 

Matt,

Don't listen to most of these bitter assholes. If you have that much passion for the work you do, you'll be fine.

 

Sure he does now. He'll be fine. And when he's, 37 or 47 he'll be out on his ass and "bitter" like all of us "assholes."

I have no problem with him doing his job and doing it well. Again, like I said before, he shoulda shut the fuck up a long time ago.

 

Tell that to the 20,000 bitter assholes who have been laid off by Gannett in the last seven years.

 

First they kill you with meetings. Pointless meetings.
He's already seeing some of that.
No bitterness here. Life is good.

 

I spent 11 years at the Arizona Republic and Cincinnati Enquirer in various positions, most recently as the SE in Cincy. I have worked with amazing people and made great friends. I've been out for several months now, right before the sh*t storm starting hitting and I've seen so many friends and former co-workers either leave, not be asked back or moved to the side over the last months that you grow numb when you hear about someone else gone.

Gannett really underestimated the amount of staff that decided to not play their game of reapplying for job. They could have easily done this staff reduction in a different way that wouldn't have offended the vast majority of the staff. We are all big girls and boys, we know the industry isn't what it was and that we are in a constant cycle of layoffs, furloughs and buyouts. Don't spin this to us as something that will be exciting for the newsroom and better for our readers. Our readers don't buy it anymore. You can only go to that well every so often. These are business decisions to help the bottom line and no amount of PR can spin staff reductions, subscription increases, format changes and additional USAT pages into something positive.

This whole thing was driven by Picasso, a corporate initiative built around audience and community building. It would have been bad enough if they just left it at as corporate junket for 20-30 people to travel around the country eating and drinking on Gannett's time for weeks on end, but they took these 'principles' and took it a step further to build their newsrooms around it.

While these principles are perfectly fine, many properties had been using them for years. In Arizona, audience analysis was front and center in what we did everyday. In Cincinnati, they used examples of what we were doing for their training. To have corporate folks come to give us training on what we already knew just didn't give a fancy name to was insulting. Especially considering the amount of money this cost. Our training in Cincy happened a week before a round of layoffs. Seeing the 10 corporate trainers spend close to a week eating and drinking on the company dime while knowing several of your co-workers were going to be laid off in a couple days was rough.

I know Matt is excited about a lot of new tools, as he should be. But a lot of that is stuff others have been doing for years. Arizona had a lot of those longform tools and timelines 5 years ago. In Cincy there was a Bengals podcast three years ago. Live event Reds podcast is entering it's second season. In a lot of ways all this is just catching up to the present.

In Arizona the leaders of the newsroom of the future are the sames ones that have been leading the paper for the last 10 years. Not sure what is different with them except fancier job titles.

I could go on and on. That said there are some great people at Gannett. Even some great leaders that do good work everyday. I really hope they figure it out and I'll pull for them from the sidelines.

 

Job cuts just THIS year:

Microsoft: 18,000
Hewlett-Packard: 16,000
Cisco Systems: 6,000
United Continental Holdings: 5,500
Coldwater Creek: 5,500
JP Morgan Chase: 5,500
Intel: 5,300
Bank of America: 4,200


Lots of Baron bitterness all around if you look beyond our industry.

 

What percentage of employees did Gannett lay off vs. what percentage of employees did those companies lay off? That's the more telling figure.

 

What profit does Gannett make vs. the profit those other companies make?

There is downsizing just to make MORE money, and there is downsizing simply to survive. I don't look quite as harshly at the latter.

 

Microsoft had 128,000 employees, so they had a 15 percent reduction. They also had added over 28,000 jobs in the year before.

http://www.statista.com/statistics/273475/number-of-employees-at-the-microsoft-corporation-since-2005/

Hewlett-Packard cut 16,000 of 250,000, or 4 percent.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/22/us-hp-results-idUSBREA4L12T20140522

Meanwhile, Gannett has cut their 20,000 out of 52,000, or roughly 40 percent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/11/business/media/11carr.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

But hey, their suits got nice bonuses.

 

My point, exactly. Thank you.