USAT reorg

Appreciate the SJ RT. #hashtagsofftwitter

 

If that org chart were updated today, it would include several layers of management interposed above Monte. Plus some video folks flown out very expensively at the last minute to the Super Bowl to do nothing of value.

After a couple of rounds of buyouts and layoffs, they've lost more good people than dead weight. David DuPree took the buyout. A.J. Perez, an actual investigator, was let go.

A national paper of that size should have some people who are experts in particular niches. But they shed Dick Patrick and Sal Ruibal. Kept designers who design two inside pages a day. Kept editors who have nothing to do.

And then they overworked some people, particularly those who were on the "dotcom" staff a while back. Some "dotcom" people were writing more than the "print" people even while they kept churning out the website.

So the questions this time around would be: Are they going to get it right this time? Are they going to come up with some way to integrate the expensive people they've hired? Are they going to make use of the people in the staff who are talented but not quite doing the right jobs?

I know people swear by Morgan's brilliance. But I know his track record with women is poor, and USAT has some very talented women in that department. And between him and the BNQT folks, who once unleashed the "Would you ..." feature on USAT's Action Sports page, it's hard not to notice that the sports front is bearing a similarity to Bleacher Report. (Yahoo's blogs often veer into that territory already.)

So maybe we'll see some great national sports brand -- it's fair to say USAT had pretty much given that away over the past 15 years through lack of investment in the Web and lack of distinctive journalism. Or maybe we'll see a bunch of snarky blogs and babe-ilicious photo galleries for a target audience built for Axe body spray ads.

It's just a shame that after all these months of secretive executive meeting, the staff is going to have to sit aroud for three more months in limbo, waiting for lives to be changed once again.

 

I questioned during Super Bowl week why USAT would flood Indy with reporters/photogs when one of Gannett's best papers was the host city, two other Gannett metros were 100 miles away, and Detroit was driving in.
Doing less with more seems to be the USAT way.

 

They do have talent in their ASE ranks. Tom O'Toole is very strong on colleges, and I believe he added preps a while back too.

 

Oh yeah -- they're certainly not all bad. And throughout the staff, there are some people who have little to do because of the way the staff is organized, not because they're incompetent or lazy. In fact, only a handful of people there are incompetent. The problem is that a lot of them have fallen into ruts. (Or been pushed into ruts. Beaten down into ruts.)

 

Why is it always OK to say that people aren't very good at their job because they've fallen into a rut, been pushed into a rut or beaten down into a rut?

Isn't it your job to show up, do your job because things aren't going your way? That attitude just sounds like a toddler at Walmart to me.

 

It's not OK, but their system is such that certain people can float.
In the org chart I saw, you had 3 people doing what one could have, should have been doing. In that equation, there is plenty of room to coast. Not ideal for anybody.

 

They teach bosses to motivate people and play to their strengths for a reason.

 

In my loaner period there in the 1980s, there was a lot of people not doing much or not doing their stuff well. And a lot of people who were damn good.

 

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying management has pushed a lot of people, good and bad, into ruts.

 

USAT has always spent an insane amount on money on shit that just makes no sense. I've heard stories about them sending writers to Lausanne and Buenos Aires for eight inches of total copy. The company is run by idiots and the employees are paying the price.

 

Someone in graphics there could make a nice pie chart, though, showing how happy we in the USA are about that!