More CNHI

and to think, everybody thought a bunch of retired teachers would have done a good job running newspapers.

 

ugh...

 

Fourth-quarter furloughs announced at our shop yesterday. Five more days, making 70 "days off without pay" (DOWOPs, seriously, that's what CNHI calls them!) since 2Q of '09. ...

Also, they announced a couple of weeks ago that our pagination is scheduled to be outsourced to a hub at another company paper by the end of the year. They say they're going to try to do it without layoffs, reallocating personnel, but didn't sound convincing. Can any other CNHI folks say how the hub system has gone so far elsewhere?

 

Without layoffs? Right. What flavor Kool-Aid is that?

 

A flavor that doesn't taste good.

 

Must be that ATM flavor.

 

To my knowledge there were no layoffs in the New England hub. Don't think anyone quit either. Not sure how close geographically your hub is, they may be hoping to shed some bodies that don't want to travel, then its not a "layoff."

The production has been better/smoother than I expected.

 

I've accepted the fact that pagination hubs are the new normal. Quite a few chains doing them, not just CNHI. Remains to be seen if, or how, that saves money. Maybe on equipment. But if you lay off a paginator in Podunk and hire one in Nashville to do the same thing, have you gained anything?

The silver lining for the paginators might be you don't have to live in Podunk. But the cost of living might be higher.

 

Pretty sure the hubs have fewer designers and more work spread among them.

 

I'm assuming these furloughs will continue until the end of time.

 

I can see that if they are standardizing pages: like 10 papers all get the same "nation" page or Major League Baseball page with same ad stack and such. (even that raises some real issues.) Still, leaves me curious as to a lot of the nuts and bolts of the operation. I'd love to be a fly on the wall to see how certain things are handled.

 

I got called by one of Gannett's design hubs. Guy wanted to hire me that day, over the phone. No in-person interview, no look at the operations center, no way to check it out. Too many red flags went up, and I bailed. The money wasn't neither good nor bad, but I got the feeling they had to make a bunch of hires that day for whatever reason. Like someone dropped the ball and missed a management deadline or something.