Gannett’s latest Great Leap Forward will go “digital first,” heavily emphasizing metrics to guide coverage, Ryan Chittum reports in Columbia Journalism Review.
It will have significantly smaller newsrooms with a few more reporters and a lot fewer editors, in part because it is centralizing production work like copyediting and page design in regional hubs. All newsroom jobs have been redefined and current staff must apply for new jobs. And, of course, there are the buzzwords and the chirpy editors’ notes to readers. Assignment editors become “content coaches.” Managing editors are now “content strategists.” A diminished newsroom is a “bold new structure.”
The impact on the Free Press remains to be seen. No major changes have been announced, and Gannett's ability to order adjustments in Detroit is affected by the paper's joint operating agreement with the Detroit News and the presence in the newsroom of a union, the Newspaper Guild.
But two former Free Press editors lead the charge elsewhere in Gannett.
Chittum writes:
Gannett, its latest “newsroom of the future” is being piloted at six papers: the Nashville Tennessean, The Indianapolis Star, the Pensacola News Journal, the Asbury Park Press, the Greenville News in South Carolina, and the Asheville Citizen-Times in North Carolina.
In Nashville, The Tennessean recently hired from the Free Press web desk Stefanie Murray, who earlier had served as editor in chief of AnnArbor.com, a position it now calls “vice president of content and engagement.”
The Tennessean has 89 staff members, who will have to duke it out for 76 new positions. Nevertheless, Murray told readers, “I’m confident you’ll love the end result: we’re promising a stronger, more interesting Tennessean delivered by a highly engaged group of journalists who care about Nashville.”
The number of reporters will increase from 37 to 43, but editors will decline from 17 to 10, and there will be a big emphasis on “scientific principles” to guide coverage. “We’re going to use research as the guide to make decisions and not the journalist’s gut,” Murray told Poynter.
In Indianapolis, the editor is, apparently, still called an “editor,” and he might have benefited from someone looking over his shoulder on his letter to readers. Star boss Jeff Taylor -- a former Free Press senior managing editor -- refers to some variation of “expanding” or “increasing” staff 10 times before stuffing this at the bottom:
To accomplish this, we will reduce the number of managers and streamline and reposition some jobs in our production process.
The Star, like The Tennessean, will cut about 15 percent of its newsroom. To learn that, though, we must turn to the Indianapolis Business Journal. The IBJ reports that “the cuts include five of the Star’s 11 photographers and the entire staff of the copy desk.” The 124 staff members will have to reapply for 106 new jobs.
Chittum wrotes the latest move comes as Gannett prepares to hive off its newspapers into a separate company, isolated from its more profitable broadcast and digital properties. Serious cost-cutting has become an annual exercise for Gannett and other newspaper companies in the last several years, as advertising revenue has plunged. With no end in sight to the ad declines, with circulation revenue stalling after a bump from paywalls and all-access plans, and with chain papers soon to be without the cross-subsidy from their higher-margin corporate cousins, the cutting seems destined to continue.
