The Gutting of Gannett

Fillet knives are coming out in news rooms (er… Yokel Information Centers…) across Gannettdom as operations are scaled back. Here are some choice quotes from the wires:

     Washington Post: “The company confirmed yesterday that the job cuts come in response to the earnings.” Of course they were not in response to moronic management…

     Pacific Business News: “Gannett papers across the country have been quietly shedding jobs for more than a year as publishers struggled to make budget numbers but this is the first time the company has made an announcement on company-wide job cuts.” Our paper never mentioned any layoffs last year or this year. This time, thanks to the way the story is spreading like wildfire, they had to…    

     Nashville Scene: “Here in Nashville, that means that about 50 positions will be cut, according to Bob Faricy, the guy who returned our call to Tennessean publisher Ellen Leifeld.
     “Faricy says that 40 of the jobs set for axing are already vacant and just won’t be filled. The other ten, unfortunately, are currently held by actual humans who will soon find themselves unemployed. Exactly who will be taken to the woodshed has not yet been finalized, but Faricy says that the layoffs should come from both the business and editorial departments.
     “The cost cutting has already gotten rather uncomfortable for folks at 1100 Broadway. There’s a rumor (see comments) floating around that the air conditioning went kaput during last week’s heat spell because the guy who usually fixes it had taken a company buyout. When the mercury started climbing, Tennessean bosses brought out fans, electing not to fix the AC until the fall, when repair prices are cheaper.”
 
     Jackson Free Press: “Wall Street responds: Gannett shares rose $1.56, or 8 percent, to $20.82 on the New York Stock Exchange. Many other newspaper shares rose as well on Thursday.
     “Gannett is rewarded here by focusing on ’shareholder value’ and cutting payroll at a time when readership continues to sink because there’s less-and-less relevant content for readers. Wall Street responds “hooray!”
     “As long as ’shareholder value’ is in the driver’s seat for Gannett, they’ll keep losing.”
     Addendum: Make that, as long as Craig Dubow is in the driver’s seat…

For the latest news on this, check http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/

The year of the ax

Of note in Gannett Blog:
Rick Jensen, the publisher of the Daily Times (a Salisbury, Maryland Gannett newspaper) e-mailed his staff Wednesday a memo that said “Across Gannett’s Community Publishing division, about 1,000 positions will be eliminated — about 3% of the workforce,” and the memo says. “Of the 1,000 positions, about 600 employees will be laid off.”
     It was a little more than a year ago that Gannett had a summertime purge of positions nationwide. Expect the sales of Tums to rise where Gannett is the hometown paper.

Georgia on my mind…

The news reports you’ve been seeing/reading/hearing about the Russian incursion into Georgia may have it all wrong.  What if Georgia is the aggressor, not Russia? If this was true, would reporting the opposite and setting up the U.S. for some type of saber rattling buoy the candidacy of one presidential candidate who is more hawkish and has more experience — Sen. John McCain?
     Hear me out on this…
     Did you see President Bush greet old Putey-Poot at the Olympics as if they were college buddies, even though the action in Georgia was under way? Wouldn’t President Bush have known about it at the time? And if he’s currently mad, why didn’t he give Putin a cold shoulder or a kick in the kneecap back there in Beijing? The friendliness didn’t make any sense…
     A regular reader of 5UTR raised these questions to me. The U.S. media is simply not reporting the truth, the reader says. The reader notes the areas Russia has entered were already split from Georgia. In a report today, the Guardian reports, “Putin scoffed at western ‘cynicism’, drew parallels between Saakashvili and Saddam Hussein and accused the Georgians of perpetrating atrocities that should be prosecuted as war crimes. ‘They had to hang Saddam Hussein for destroying several Shia villages,’ he said. ‘But the current Georgian rulers who in one hour simply wiped 10 Ossetian villages from the face of the earth, the Georgian rulers which used tanks to run over children and the elderly, who threw civilians into cellars and burnt them – they are players that have to be protected.’”
     In today’s Christian Science Monitor, you find clarity on this issue: “‘This conflict has very deep and complicated roots,’ says analyst Alexei Malashenko at the Carnegie Center in Moscow. ‘It was Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili who started it, hoping to redraw the whole situation with one sweeping action. But if it goes on for much longer, it is likely that there will be no winners, and Russia will suffer very badly, too.’
     “The war, which began with a lightning Georgian offensive Friday aimed at ending secessionist South Ossetia’s 16-year-old de facto independence, prompted a Russian military intervention which, by Monday, had put Russian forces in full control of the region.”
     Beware of lame ducks bearing “gifts”…