More Gannett cuts

Real Life, Real News was soooo 2004.

Mainstreaming, they still do it, although I would think that would be the greatest protest. Don't mainstream. Or, make up that someone is a mainstreamed source. It's not like you would be making up a source. You just would be making up their color.

 

Nothing this company does surprises me anymore.

Gannett could lay off every single community newspaper employee, throughout the entire chain, with all of the managers running around like a chicken with its head cut off, and corporate would find a way to spin it as this great thing.

After an exec made the mandatory "we're sorry to have laid off everyone that's left" speech in an email.

I really wonder if anyone in the communities these newspapers are in have any idea of how close they are to losing those papers for good. What they notice right now are stories and scores not showing up in their very thin daily papers (and being told about earlier and earlier deadlines when they call to complain).

 

I get the feeling the only reason Gannett and other big chains don't just shut down all their papers is they are afraid some local-minded venture capitalists might buy a press for 10 cents on the dollar, hire experienced, out-of-work journalists, avoid massive debt, and show how a newspaper should be run.

 

Actually it was 2005 where I worked.

I remember sitting around a staff meeting trying to brainstorm ideas and we came up with starting our very own fantasy football league (pretty original, huh?). Had like 12 teams in it and each week a guy would interview an "owner" on who he/she was starting that week and why. Kept standings, stats and so forth and ran in every Sunday edition (Back then we actually had MORE space than we needed on Sundays, so no "real news" got left out.) It was the biggest waste of half a page I have ever seen in my life.

Never mind it was only FANTASY football. We quoted community sources, and thus got gold stars from the suits.

 

The sad thing is I worked in another chain that, to me, functioned just like a Gannett. Publisher had been in Gannett. ME had been in Gannett. Their fingerprints were everywhere.

I realized the cancer had long ago metastasized.

 

Kind of like MG's "Convergence" catch-all. The suits from Tampa would visit us in the hinterlands and spout "Convergence" as if springs would spout forth water at just the sound of it. That was so pathetic.

I had an interview at a Gannett paper when I was cut from my last gig. I'm so glad that didn't work out.

 

Here's an odd twist to Indy Star's deal: Somebody had to know this was going down, but they still recently greenlighted flying in two candidates -- one from each coast -- for a zone sports writing job. Didn't hire either, of course. Then, night before the hammer drops, they hire a designer but wisely don't announce it to the staff.

 

I can't keep track of which initiative ran when. There were so many of them. And they were all total jokes.

Years back, I remember seeing the Vermont Gannett paper have this whole huge package on how the state was 5 percent minority, but the state legislature was only 3.4 percent minority, or some number like that. They had mainbar, sidebar, graphics, pics, an editorial, you name it.

Yet, if you did the math, and because Vermont is such a small state, the legislature would have needed to add maybe two minorities, then they would have been 5.2 percent minority, or something like that. Yet, that was no where in any of the stories. You could tell they were only doing it to satisfy some suit in Virginia.

 

At Indy: It could well be that the publisher didn't know the cuts were coming, or wanted to sneak in her own hire and get rid of someone she inherited.

 

http://networkedblogs.com/jQWDX?ref=nf

Applause for Jeff Pearlman.

 

I applaud his sentiment, although this is a truly dumb comment on a couple of levels: The geniuses at Gannett brought the damned nut graph to the world of journalism—a paragraph, high up in the story, that tells the reader why he’s about to read what he’s about to read.

 

And it's dumb because?