Update: Gannett world — USA Today for sale?

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

Considering our copy desk is currently in Monroe, I would think Nashville would be a huge step up and Des Moines wouldn't be a bad step up either.

But it's a matter of do you want to uproot your life for a company who has been "layoff happy" the last few years?

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

Yeah, there is something to be said for that. You can actually live in a decent city like Nashville or wherever instead of podunk. I am really curious as to how this whole concept is going to work. Is it going to be sort of like a call center?

I mean, I typically do 4-8 sports pages per shift. I suppose I could do more if there were "duplicate" pages: same content for multiple papers.

I really don't like the look of the Gannett MLB/NBA/NFL pages I see in a paper up the road, though. And it certainly limits what a paper can do locally/regionally. If you have, say, a pro franchise an hour down the road and you like to put their games on the cover, can you do that? Or does the national format prevent it? For example, the Gannett daily up the road was stuck with a pre-packaged NBA page on Christmas, so apparently their hands were down in terms of playing up the Heat-Lakers showdown in this case. If you're in Wisconsin, can you play up the Packers or are you stuck with the cookie-cutter national page?

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

We've asked those questions and have got a lot of shoulder-shrugs in return. I don't think anybody really knows what's going to happen. I think they are going to go to a lot more duplicate pages, like the MLB/NFL/NBA pages you mentioned. I think we'll probably see a universal national agate page, which means local agate will have to be pigeonholed into some other part of the section. I think the idea will be to do as many duplicate pages as possible, so that way the workload is eased on the back end.

We've heard there's, what, five design centers and 80 something newspapers to produce through those five centers? So, that's roughly 12-16 newspapers per regional design center. We've been told that a copy editor at the regional design center could be asked to do anywhere from 5-8 different newspapers a week. Obviously they are going to try to keep it somewhat organized, meaning each design center will likely be broken into three or four teams which will each handle a cluster of papers. That's how it is in our copy center now, and I'd imagine they will just try to replicate that on a bigger stage.

Long story short, it will fail and fail miserably, because you're going to take all the design aspect away from individual newspapers. As it is now we can't do any real "special" pages because those require a lot of back-and-forth between copy desk and editors and that's pretty hard to do via e-mail/messenger systems. Now, imagine trying to do that with people who are even further away and have even more of a disconnect with the community you serve.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

The design and the wire editing will be done at the design centers. The local editing will be done at the individual papers.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

This has the makings of a clusterfuck.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

Well, Gannett is never going to come out and ask its current employees "Who wants to move to Nashville?" because it would freak everyone out. They'll quietly hire people for their hubs and for every new person hired that will be another person let go when they finally drop the ax.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

That has summed up Gannett as a whole for the past 30 years or so.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

StaggerLee:

How do you guys handle local preps/small colleges/minor league teams in your readership? Do they reserve a page or so that you do locally? Or do you ship it all to someplace else on deadline and have them paginate it?

Example: My chain has four papers in our state, but each are quite a ways apart geographically. There is NO overlap in terms of circulation. We share stories, everything from features to gamers to columns. But it's always up to the editor/desk at each paper what they run. So all four are separate and distinct. Other than football season and state tournaments, we don't do much with preps outside our readership area. And, of course, our newsholes are all different as advertising varies for each paper.

I'm just wondering how that would work with even four distinct papers, much less 10 or 20. Sure you could paginate and print them all in Gotham City, but you'd still be doing the same number of pages. How do you guys do it?

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

My understanding is Gannett HQ already did ask its current employees whose papers are moving to Asbury Park and Nashville to go to the hub. The positions were posted internally two weeks before they went out to the public, and current Gannetteers are supposed to get preference.

That's how it worked during the Jersey desk consolidation 18 months ago. Even then, there were quite a few people who didn't want to commute or relocate to work at the Asbury Park Press.

The overall look of the four Jersey papers currently being laid out at Asbury is similar, but they have different stories on the cover and inside local page(s). I believe the agate page is about the same, with a certain number of columns set aside for high school roundups.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

As of right now, we don't really have any shared pages, other than the NFL page and during baseball season we'll have the MLB page. It's all speculation at this point, because the higher-ups don't ever communicate, but we're thinking as we get to a bigger design center, we're going to see a lot of shared pages.

But right now, each paper (there are five in our state) has its own "team" of copy editors. We submit the budget, submit the stories, and they paginate the pages. I think I've mentioned it on another thread, but we end up doing a lot of the work on our end, because they end up short-handed every night or there are still some pages they aren't capable of doing (agate page, special Game Day pages). But to kind of answer your question, we still decide what goes where in our paper.

Now, what will happen in a year when we're no longer producing our pages out of that small center and we've moved on to a bigger center producing three times as many papers? I don't know. It's all speculation, but we're thinking they're going to have more "national" pages that are uniform and set in stone. In other words, just because you're in a Saints area doesn't mean the NFL page will have Saints stuff. We'll have to figure out a way to get that Saints' stuff elsewhere in the paper, because you really lose one page of potential local copy for every national page they add to your section.

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

We have a winner!!!!!!

 

Re: Giant and mostly bad news in Gannett world

Gee, I can't imagine where I read that first?