SE in Reno

i guess that answers my constant question of how bad can gannett really be.

 

Damn. I was thinking about putting my name in since I'll be living in Incline Village at Lake Tahoe in a few months or sooner...

Five SEs in the last four years...damn

 

That's kids play compared with Roswell and Martinsville.

 

roswell, martinsville AND reno? huh? has a ring to it.

 

Still - a seven-person staff for a paper in a town that has legal sports gambling is pretty low - you'd think they'd pump up their on-line product for that alone. Plus - Gannett's been talking about selling off stand-alone papers in favor of "clusters" where they can reduce staffing, I mean, "find resource efficiencies" among several papers and I don't think there is another big G anywhere near Reno. (So that might be a plus).
As for salary, don't expect to see Lake Tahoe out your front door, more like East Sparks.

 

I'm not sure what they're doing is that simple. They had a nice cluster in the Pacific Northwest, yet traded Olympia, Bellingham and Boise to Knight Ridder (while keeping Salem). They own much of Upstate New York, yet just sold Utica. They just bought Stamford and Greenwich in Connecticut, but sold Norwich. They sold Rockford but own papers in every continguous state. I have to think they are more mindful of whether a specific market is growing or declining than whether they own nearby properties. I think all things being equal they'd like to cluster, but they aren't going to buy a dog or dump a cash cow just to make a cluster. My guess is that Reno is safe -- it's always been one of the better Gannett papers of that size. Anyway, it's hard to have a true cluster in the West -- everything is so spread out.

 

I think the Reno paper has kind of created its own cluster. They have started weeklies in neighboring towns...like five or six of them in the last two or three years.
Reno is in the top three or five in Gannett in terms of percentage profit. No way Gannett sells Reno. It seems like Reno is always a test market for a lot of new (= stupid) Gannett ideas. They were the first to start the "information center" bs. I recently talked to a buddy who works there and he was telling me that the new EE came from custom publishing (advitoral) in Cincy. The old EE took a demotion and is still there. They also recently cut the daily business section so they could have a daily "neighborhoods" section. Business is now just two pages at the back of the A section.

 

Lean Dean Singleton is clustering just fine in the West. Look at the joke that is LANG in Southern California. And now the predictable results in the Bay Area.

 

Yes, but outside of there and the Seattle area, where can you cluster in the West? Would you consider Gannett's Phoenix and Tucson papers a cluster? You could share some resources, but they are distinctly different cities and you can't produce both papers with one copy desk like you can in true clusters, nor is there much overlap beyond state government and sports.

 

No, those are the two main areas. Phoenix-Tucson would be hard, but in these trying times, it wouldn't surprise me to see it pulled off. Maybe in Denver, from Colorado Springs through Denver to Fort Collins?

 

Colorado could work. What about Salt Lake...north with Ogden and Logan and south with Provo?

 

More changes in Reno:

http://news.rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070510/NEWS18/70510026&oaso=news.rgj.com/breakingnews

No word on what happened to the former publisher, Fred Hamilton. Even the paper's employees weren't told.