News Journal Deathspiral News
Gannett confirms more furloughs.
Despite all of your truly remarkable efforts to reverse the trend, our revenue numbers continue their downward slide and we have been faced with more difficult decisions.
One of those choices was between more layoffs or another round of furloughs. We chose, for most employees, a furlough program consisting of at least one week of unpaid leave to be taken in April, May or June.
I wonder how that Pete DuPont fundraising drive for Celia Cohen is going?
Tags: Media Watchdog
The decline of traditional newspapers appears to happening at an increasing rate. I wish the best for these NJ employees that will go on furloughs.
These are tough times and it’s all Geithner’s fault.
I get it Nemski. I’ve been trashing Obama/Geithner, right?
My barb wasn’t solely directed at you.
Still no move to flatten the management structure, though. In the ’90s, when every other business was removing layers of management, TNJ was adding a layer of assistant managing editors between the managing editor and the line editors (city desk, business, sports etc.). Those people are still in place. In fact, no managers were hit in the last round of layoffs.
The danger (opportunity?) at this point is that someone will buy the company and dismantle it for piecemeal sales. The TV stations would still fetch a decent price, one would think.
Per wikipedia:
Gannett Company owns over 90 daily newspapers, nearly 1,000 weekly newspapers, 23 television stations, and more. These operations are in 41 U.S. states and six countries.
At some point – as the stock continues to tank – the parts clearly become more valuable than the whole.
If they do, Delaware Liberal should buy TNJ!!!
Tom Carper just felt a cold chill down his spine.
that would be great. id invest
Tom Carper just felt a cold chill down his spine.
Anybody else see the obvious problem with this statement?
Spine???
the ability to feel?
Can ‘bulo write a pro rasslin’ column?
Seriously, this really sucks. People don’t go into print journalism to make a lot of money. They do it to carry on a noble and essential tradition, one without which democracy cannot succeed. The business has proven inept, not the profession, yet the professionals get screwed.
“In fact, no managers were hit in the last round of layoffs.”
Geezer – that’s incorrect. One assistant city editor lost his job.
Personally, I get chuckles out of the fact that TNJ has two “assistant managing editors” but no “managing editor.”
Only if ‘bulo can also write headlines, take photos, edit stories, cover a hard-news beat and post seven updates to the crappy website, all in 40 hours a week.
“At some point – as the stock continues to tank – the parts clearly become more valuable than the whole.”
Alas, there’s the rub. With its regionalization initiatives – which it appears to be pursuing with even more gusto of late – Gannett is slowly stripping away the infrastructure that is required to produce a local newspaper.
Subscription calls to TNJ are now handled by a call center in Kentucky. The HR operations for some of New Jersey’s papers are now run out of Wilmington. All photos you see in the paper are now “toned” and color-corrected by a regional toning center that also handles photos for dozens of other Gannett papers. And there’s talk (see Gannett Blog’s excellent coverage from last week) of combining copy editing functions for some midwest papers at a central site.
Who’d want to buy a paper when you’d have to pay even more to reconstruct the internal mechanisms to put the paper on the street?
anon: Thanks for the correction. Of course, an ACE is the lowest level of management, so I guess those folks are nearly as vulnerable as the worker bees.
Yeah, I was really expecting to see one of the higher-level managers take a hit. The photo department lost two photographers, but still kept two photo editors. Go figure.