UPDATE: Another tipster tells us: "My coworkers husband works there and was told he will have to 'interview' for his job next week." She also says staffers are losing accrued vacation time (see response below). We've emailed Gannett and we'll update this post if we hear from them.

UPDATE 2: Michael Fisch, publisher and president of Gannett's Westchester paper, the Journal News, has confirmed the layoffs to us. He writes:

Today we informed 192 news employees and 96 advertising employees in Westchester that we are restructuring these two departments and each employee affected would have to apply for a newly defined position in these two departments. There will be 20 fewer positions in advertising and 50 fewer positions in news after the restructure.

The newly defined positions in these two areas are focused on the skill sets and competencies necessary to be successful in the multiplatform digital environment.

He adds:

Your site says employees will loose their accrued vacation time. This is not true. If an employee is hired in one of the new positions they will retain all the earned benefits they would have had in their prior position. Compensation may or may not change depending on the position they apply for and ultimately are offered.

UPDATE 3: Related, a shitload of job listings have appeared for positions at the Journal News!

To: U.S. Community Publishing Employees
From: Bob Dickey

I want to talk with you about our restructuring efforts, as we continue to battle these difficult economic conditions and the impact on our advertisers. With your help, our various cost savings initiatives are making a difference.

Nevertheless, we will need to implement job reductions to align our resources with the revenue realities we face. Currently each location is finalizing its plan, taking into consideration the local economy, results so far this year and the prospects going forward.

Each plan is different and designed to address the ongoing local needs. All of them, however, involved extremely difficult decisions. Approximately 1400 employees will be impacted by the job reductions across the division. Your publisher or general manager will communicate the local plans, and we expect the vast majority of the reductions will take place by July 9. In a select few cases, the implementation may take longer. There will not be any furloughs for the rest of the year.

I want to stress that the job reductions are not a reflection on these employees or their work. We truly value their many contributions and thank them for their efforts over the years.

Unfortunately, we must take these steps because the advertising environment remains challenged. There have been some promising signs of a recovery, but the reality is the improvements are not broad-based and the economy continues to be fragile.

Even so, we know the economy will improve. To be ready, we need to continue our transformation and maintain a strong financial position. We must publish our newspapers, produce our Web sites and pay down our debt. By taking all these steps today, we will be stronger tomorrow.

Measured against our peers in the media industry, we are healthy and capable of moving forward. We are in this position because we have proactively responded to the financial conditions with actions such as these.

We continue to see good ideas coming from all of you, and we are becoming more innovative everyday. This combination of forward thinking and good fiscal management will, I believe, ultimately result in a return to success for our company.

So, please keep those thoughts and ideas coming. As always, you can email me or call with your comments.

Gannett Blog is written by former Gannett reporter and editor Jim Hopkins, who—despite being paranoid and sometimes writing like a bit of a nut—does have good sources within the company. And he hears that something in the neighborhood of 4,500 layoffs are coming next week. In reply to a question from a reader:

You ask if the layoff rumors are based on a single tip.

Answer: No.

On June 4, a source known to me (I have their name and company affiliation) sent me an e-mail. As best I can recall, the source has been 100% accurate in the past on multiple tips. The source told me that another round of layoffs "will happen on July 8." That is the day people will be notified, they said. Middle-management will be included this time, they said. And no more new furloughs are are being scheduled for the third quarter."

So call in sick next week.
[Gannett Blog]

The editor, not named, said spending "a lot of time" on Facebook on Twitter was inappropriate.

Employees quickly responded in the comments section of Gannett Blog. It turns out USA Today is among multiple other Gannett papers were reporters are being encouraged to spend more time on social networking — just the opposite of the anonymous editor's orders.

Company Vice President Tara Connell, meanwhile, seems to connect with plenty of co-workers using her Facebook account.

As one reporter put it, "Facebook is a modern day Rolodex."

Exactly, and if those infernal tele-phones had never been given out like candy to individual reporters, maybe newspapers would be in better shape today!

[Gannett Blog via Patrick LaForge]

Subject: Goodbye from Alan

This message will come as a surprise.

I worked on the assignment desk and I enjoyed the work I did with all of you. You are some great co-workers. But I am not receiving the support I feel is needed to continue to attempt a quality news product on the weekends.

After receiving my master's from GWU, I spent my life pursuing a career in journalism. Paul Irvin brought me on as a paid tipster in March of 2000. Then Tony Castrilli offered me the part-time weekend desk position in 2005.

In addition to weekends, for the past three years I volunteered to work unfilled weekday shifts and major holidays, often neglecting my ailing mother. But I treasured every shift, and never once called out sick or missed a day of work.

As we discussed in ethics class yesterday, the top-down decision-making approach is a flawed model.

WUSA frequently lacks the discussion that is vital to the success of a vibrant news operation and falls into this model. Many of us are reluctant to say anything, and the suggestion box on the first floor is not enough.

The consultants and out-of-touch corporate management have ruined the newscasts with repetitive Web clutter, endless sidebar packages, and their preoccupation with the Internet.

You won't find a blog anywhere that will generate enough revenue to support a news operation of this size, there are simply too many. We've heard regular speak of "Web Winners," but what ever happened to the "News Winners?" A dying breed?

IT IS TIME EVERYBODY WORK A DAY ON THE ASSIGNMENT DESK TO FIND OUT WHAT IT IS LIKE.

The next time you holler at one of my colleagues on the assignment desk, put yourself in their position. The WUSA assignment editors are conscientious, diehard news people who work extended shifts without union benefits, never had a meal buyout or OT, and hardly get a chance to eat lunch.

The assignment desk is the WUSA switchboard, the help desk for all of WUSA and the rest of humanity. The assignment desk does pretty much everything nobody else does. TOO MUCH. How many of you call just to ask for another employee's phone number you should have already gotten from Renee's list? Please be thoughtful of assignment desk workers, and volunteer to work a shift to see what it is like.

We are doing less news gathering these days and more information posting. Somebody needs to be driving the news machine at all times, actively pursuing news leads. We've lost our focus.

Any corporation that allows employees to blog as an excuse for not reporting to work on time is not an organization with which I want to be associated.

Effective immediately, I am placing myself on permanent furlough from the Gannett Corp. I will be mailing back my card later today.

I am frustrated, as many of you are. Please don't let that discourage you from staying in touch. As I said, you have been great, and I'll miss working with you.

Thanks for the great times.

He's right you know. [Gannett Blog]

On Friday, Dickey was telling dozens of Tucson Citizen staffers they'd be out of jobs in March, unless someone steps forward to buy the paper. That was after making all Gannett staff go one week without pay this quarter.

This week, the newspaper division president is competing in the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, in which he will be paired with professional golfers to help improve his swing. His entry fee is either $12,000 or $25,000, reports Gannett Blog, to say nothing of travel costs, expenses for fellow newspaper division exec Michelle Krans, or costs for honchos from Gannett's Desert Sun, which is sponsoring a pricey hospitality suite.

Obviously, Gannett insists the whole thing is for charity and business development and whatever, not to give ole Bob the chance to play with the likes of golf pros like Bubba Watson, Wes Short and Martin Laird.

This is the same excuse corporate execs have been using for their perks — it's for the good of the company! — since forever, regardless of whether it's true or not. In this case it seems pretty obvious the newspaper chain doesn't need two national executives, including one on the course, plus the Desert Sun people, to butter up advertisers in Palm Springs, California.

The takeaway for newspaper executives: Don't let your employees find out about your fun "business" trips. Not because the scared-for-their-livelihood journalists will dare to write you up in their own papers, but because they might leak word to one of those parasitic, good-for-nothing bloggers.

In 1983, Knight Ridder and AT&T joined to launch videotext service Viewtron. Anybody with a dedicated terminal, phone line, and $12 a month could access news from the Miami Herald and the New York Times, online shopping, banking and food delivery, via a 300-baud modem. Norman Morrison, one of the subsidiary's VPs, said: "We're at the beginning of home information technology. We are dancing naked on the stage of history." Knight Ridder recorded a loss of $16 million on the project in 1984. Viewtron claimed as many as 3,100 subscribers before Knight Ridder folded the service in 1986. An impressive number considering all that equipment cost between $600 and $900. Bet it would've been more popular if it'd had porn.

In 1995, Knight-Ridder, Tribune, Times Mirror, Advance Publications, Cox Enterprises, Gannett, Hearst, Washington Post, and the New York Times each contributed $1 million to create New Century Networks in 1995. None of them actually wanted any part of it. The opening paragraphs of BusinessWeek's 1998 article on the fiasco best captures the mood.

It was created with a name most of its owners disliked, with a logo one partner ''hated,'' in a city everybody rejected, with a mission nobody understood. So it was fitting that when New Century Network was kicked off last April by nine media giants teaming up to conquer electronic competition, even the launch party bombed. In a ballroom at the Newspaper Association of America convention in Chicago, a thousand bottles of champagne emblazoned with ''New Century Network: The Collective Intelligence of America's Newspapers'' awaited the hordes expected to come to toast the watershed new-media joint venture. When fewer than 100 people showed up, Chief Executive Lee de Boer made an abbreviated speech before retreating.

The papers sunk $25 million more into New Century Networks before it folded in 1998, laying off 40. Perhaps it was for the best, says a disgruntled vet: "Even had New Century worked, it still would have been something like Google News and that's not exactly the best business ever." Which is funny because Google claims Google News indirectly generates $100 million a year for the company and doesn't crow about it much. These guys? It would've been more naked dancing on stages and things.

After participating in New Century Networks, the now defunct newspaper publisher Knight-Ridder launched Real Cities in September 1999, intending it to be a network of local portals featuring "news, email, search services, e-commerce, and site-building tools," according to PC World. In an article titled "Knight Ridder and New Media: If You Can't Beat 'Em...," Richard Siklos, then at BusinessWeek, wrote

Analysts applaud Knight Ridder's strategy, but some wonder if its network of local sites will ever gel, and they figure Real Cities will someday have to be merged into a bigger entity.

Knight Ridder ignored the pessimists and committed to investing $25 million in its new online business. "I live in terror that some big thing's going to happen that I don't see coming," Knight Ridder New Media President Bob Ingle told BusinessWeek. What Ingle didn't envision: nothing happening. Users didn't flock to Knight Ridder's localized portals. They start their Internets on AOL or Yahoo in Des Moines and by clicking into the Google search box everywhere else. Knight Ridder was eventually sold to McClatchy for $4.5 billion in 2006. Last week, McClatchy sold Real Cities to Centro, a local-media buying agency, for an undisclosed — read: embarrassingly low — amount. Maybe just enough to cover this year's wages?

Before there was Yahoo Answers, where users post questions for other users, there was a similar service from the New York Times called Abuzz, which the Gray Lady acquired in 1999 for a modest-by-bubble-standards $30 million. In January 2001, the Times shuttered the service and laid off 70 staffers, citing an "unexpected slackening of advertising revenue." That was the service's only failure, says a person familiar with the project:

They shut it down after the bubble burst, even though they could have kept growing it, for just the cost of the servers. The Times was always nervous about quality. It was user-generated content, not high-quality editorial and this was before they got down in the dirt with About.com. If they had just left it alone, it would have been ENORMOUS by now

Even when you can't sell adds on ENORMOUS, it's still good. Google News doesn't serve ads. Maybe Abuzz could have referred traffic to NYTimes.com like Google News does to Google. Google calls that trick $100 million. You know what the newspaper's call revenue gimmicks like that? They can't remember.

Founded in 1997 and still operating today, Classified Ventures operates Cars.com, Homescape, Apartments.com, RentalHomesPlus, and HomeGain. It's owned by McClatchy, Belo, Gannett, Tribune and the Washington Post, and is probably the newspaper industry's most successful online venture. That's not saying much. On December 30, 2007, part-owner McClatchy told the SEC its 25.6 percent stake in Classified Ventures was worth $99.3 million. In a filing last week, McClatchy said its stake was now worth $86.5 million — a 13 percent drop in half a year. Craigslist, eBay's Kijiji, and even Facebook allow their users to list cars, apartments, and other goods for sale for free, threatening the paid-classifieds business online and in print.

Oh, and Yahoo's Newspaper Consortium? Don't get us started. Or do.

(Photo by DRB62)

Dear Mr. Lafferty:

The Courier-Post newsroom is in crisis.

Employees are overworked with no relief in sight, and not being paid for working overtime. Reporters often lack necessities to do their job, like having new notebooks; the photo department sometimes cannot handle assignments because of a lack of equipment. Upper management has taken an increasingly critical tone, often demeaning employees in public. The tension has increased to the point that the men's and women's bathrooms in the newsroom have been deliberately soiled by feces in separate incidents. This appears to be a result of demoralized employees seeking an outlet to vent ever-mounting frustration.

The staff has shrunk significantly since November - at least eight newsroom employees have left - leaving fewer people to handle a workload that continues to increase with the addition of new publications. This comes on top of dealing with the daily newspaper, zoned Communities pages, special sections and online coverage beyond what goes in the newspaper. The executive editor and the managing editor seem oblivious to the impact of this workload on the remaining employees.

The result is a staff that is overworked to the point where it often is physically impossible to complete the required work within the scheduled work week. As a consequence, many non-exempt employees work beyond their allotted hours without being paid overtime. The issue often is addressed by telling the employee to take time off as compensation, but that seldom occurs because the workload does not make it practical.

Employees who have worked overtime in the past must be compensated for their time and they must be advised of the newspaper's overtime policy and assured it will be enforced. If these steps are not taken by Feb. 22, we see no recourse other than to file a complaint with the hour and wage division of the U.S. Department of Labor.

The lack of equipment has made it difficult for people throughout the newsroom to do their job. Beyond notebooks and photo equipment, layout editors frequently have to wait their turn to use the inadequate number of pagination stations. This results in a loss of production time for the newspaper. The two newsroom copy machines are frequently broken, forcing employees to use the copy machine in advertising and often having to wait in line. There have been occasions when the newsroom has run out of copier paper.

Dealing with these challenges has been exacerbated by the increasingly critical tone taken by the executive editor and managing editor toward the staff. The result is a chaotic, mismanaged workplace in which the executive editor and managing editor are inconsistent in their direction to employees. Such an environment stifles initiative, creativity and productivity. Employees often are left frustrated by the lack of a clear, defined approach.

This climate of crisis is embodied by the soiling of the bathrooms. In the first incident, in the men's bathroom, it took 24 hours for the feces to be removed from the floor. A reporter had to send out an electronic message warning employees about the situation. In the second incident, in the women's bathroom, management quickly responded to have the feces removed and the area sanitized. Still, some employees believe the incidents were meant as a symbol of the mounting frustration they face on a daily basis.

We hope this letter brings to your attention this serious situation, and leads to action that will prevent it from escalating.

Sincerely,
Crying out for the Courier

But the Yahoo deal's momentum has already slowed, and despite Yahoo's stated desire to woo newspapers, it has done little to advance the program's underlying technology. The newspapers are obviously looking out for their own interests — and may well serve themselves better.

Then again, the newspapers have tried to cooperate online before and failed. The New Century Network, a similar effort, quickly collapsed in the heyday of the first bubble because of infighting. The future may not bode well for Yahoo's newspaper consortium, but the history of newspaper networks is not encouraging, either. Of course, both alliances could fail if newspaper readership continues to erode.

• After two years of a sustained assault on the Sulzberger family, Morgan Stanley has sold its 7.2 percent stake in New York Times Co. this morning. Unfortunately for the Times—and for Morgan Stanley!—its shares happen to be trading at a 52-week low today. [NYT]
• Gannett Co., USA Today publisher and giant newspaper conglomerate, is reporting its earnings fell by nearly 11 percent in the third quarter, with ad revenue down 5.6 percent. [AP]
  
• The McClatchy Company, owner of The Sacramento Bee and The Miami Herald, saw quarterly profits fall by 5 percent, with ad revenue down by nearly 10 percent. Company executives are blaming the losses on weak economies in Florida and California, where five of the company's 30 newspapers operate. [Reuters]

• First quarter recap: Bad news for Tribune, NYT, Gannett. Google, however, did pretty well! [MediaPost]
  
• Jews plotzing needlessly about Andrea Elliott's Pulitzer. Thank God Seth Lipsky and the Sun are here to speak for this voiceless, powerless minority. [NYS]
  
• Howard Milstein—C.E.O. of Emigrant Bancorp and Sulzberger ally—picked up six million shares of the New York Times Company. Too bad he didn't wait until today! He could have saved some serious cash. [Portfolio]
  
• People, In Touch bring their journalistic prowess to bear on the Virginia Tech story. [NYP]
  
• Publishing tycoon Duane Hagadone—he owns most of the papers in Idaho and Wyoming!—is building some big ugly house in L.A. and the neighbors are pissed. Ha. Stupid L.A. [LAT]