Is This What’s Happening at the News Journal?

We all know that the NJ is working on the lastest Gannett revenue extraction scheme — the Newsroom of the Future — that mainly looks like a way to implement a staff reduction while re-orienting their attention to their website, rather than the paper. This article from the Nashville Scene provides some details of what is going on at The Tenneseean (another Gannett property going through the same thing):

Of course, everyone had new roles because the newspaper and its parent company, Gannett, had fired the entire staff and made them reapply for new jobs in the newsroom. Whether they viewed the changes at the paper as corporate re-engineering, or merely a clever way to do layoffs, few of the participants were grateful to be there. Many still seethed that they had been forced to take part in the months-long process of weeding out colleagues and friends that some called “a version of the Hunger Games,” where employees vied for the same jobs in a new structure.

And let’s not get started on the “ideation room” and the demeaning team-building exercise. And after surviving the Hunger Games gauntlet, The Tennessean still saw a number of their best reporters leave for venues that would probably respect their skills more. Because that seems to the core problem of Gannett’s long term plan — respecting the professionals who work on providing the kind of stories that might get them more readers. All the while routinely undermining their own newsrooms:

The firing/rehiring process that got the paper into this situation has created deep distrust of current management. One staffer referred to the entire process as “Kabuki theater.”

“If they were going to go with ‘more’ reporters, why did so many get eliminated in the restructuring?” the staffer said. “It was clear there were favorites and directives. The process was just a fancy way to let go of people.”

And then there’s some crazy polling to determine news stories of the day (unless I don’t get this), which seems that there will be more fluff and less of the stuff that helps you know what your government is doing:

“Change is always something that makes some people uncomfortable, but we have already seen that members of our team [are] excited about their new roles and the opportunity to interact directly with customers in new ways.”

Murray has pushed a metrics-based approach for The Tennessean, analyzing the wants of readers (or “customers,” in her parlance). The paper then attempts to meet those desires.

“At the daily news meeting, [Murray] begins meetings asking, ‘What are people talking about today?’ ” one former staffer told the Scene this summer. “Time was editors would be asking, ‘What do we have that people WILL be talking about tomorrow?’ “

From the comments of this article, we learn that The Tennessean’s editor recently spoke to a group of PR folks hying a new approach where they would not be publishing “sponsored content” in the same space as regular news. So for those of you complaining that the paper just publishes press releases, that seems about ready to be true. So Tom Gordon and Dennis Williams should listen up — they might be able to buy better coverage shortly.

It’s a shame, really. Particularly for some of the good journalists left who are being rapidly devalued in favor of who knows what. I really wish an alternate paper was possible here.