Mike Reed Sets Goals for New Gannett

For better or worse (but mainly worse) old media companies are run by old people who have zero understanding of the internet or internet culture other than what they are told by people under them who also have no understanding of what works and what doesn't.
Newspapers - and we're not talking NYT, LAT, Globe - are still attached to this notion that they are important and they matter and blah blah blah. For the most part, mid- and small-sized newspapers are irrelevant unless they've made a major push toward market relevancy. Most haven't.
Becoming relevant requires actual effort and work and understanding of your market. If you're not paying attention to the numbers, you don't have this and for all the crap Gannett gets, it's great that they're trying to get this point across to hard-headed old-school journalists who think its still the 1990s.
What Gannett fails to do is get resources to its best content creators and provided them avenues to make better work to continue to push numbers and make profitable content, which allows for passion project stories by others so they can get pats on the back from their fellow blue check marks.
A good media company needs balance of the profitable content makers, the content donkeys and the people who make content on issues people should care about but don't. Gannett doesn't get this but if it figures it out, it might succeed at some point.

 

Legacy Gannett has been trying this for 20-plus years. Gatehouse, formed from the ashes of Liberty, was born in 2003 or 2004. None of those jokers are figuring it out.

Patch made a sincere effort at trying to figure it out, but it never did.

The most read publication in RI now probably isn’t the Providence Journal, it’s The Boston Globe’s Rhode Island digital product.

 

It's almost gotta be clickbait. Big City High played Rich Suburban Prep and you won't believe what happened!

 

Wait for it!

 

The time to do that was 30 years or so ago. Other industries have an R&D budget; for print journalism, the only "research" was ridiculous "community forums" and the only "development" was inane new names/new packaging for the same product.

Then, 15 years ago, when the "suits" realized that maybe people bought the paper only for the ads, it was too late to try to adapt. The time to try to keep a strong position in the market is when you already have a strong position in the market.

I've heard a smart editorial leader, one whom I respect, say something to the effect of, "There was no way for newspapers to have predicted what was going to happen." Maybe not. But there was plenty of opportunity - YEARS of opportunity - to explore how to not be so dependent on newspaper advertising revenue.

 

Yeah, but whom could we have hired to kill Craig Newmark?

 

No.
You have to actually care and create interest outside of the written product. Learn your audience. The amount of high school writers who just use Twitter amazes me. The kids you're covering don't have Twitter. Learn TikTok, Use Instagram. Grow your audience on social, be interesting, be creative and people will read.

 

I don't disagree with you about IG and TikTok but there is still a healthy number of kids on Twitter. They are on all the platforms.

 

Even IG is passé.

 

To be fair, I'd argue the audience for high school sports coverage is parents and grandparents more than the kids.

I'll never forget though one time about 5 years ago at a game someone was posting in-game updates only to Facebook....that one baffled me.

 

The kids care too, but in a very fleeting way. They want the score, to know who’s playing well, and they want it in real time, and that’s pretty much it. They are not all that concerned about the scrapbook.

 

On October 11, Gannett announces, among other austerity measures, a hiring freeze.
On November 9, an email is sent announcing a training seminar for managers on recruiting and hiring.
And I wonder why, with all of the layoffs and buyouts and furloughs, we have an entire department of advisors of recruiting and hiring.