Gannett is building the model of the profitable newspaper

A new bold initiative is about to unfold in Detroit. Overnight, profitability will be restored to the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News and the joint operating agency that serves them, the experiment in non-daily home delivery could be common practice in the next two years.

Desperate times create desperate measures. The new model even cuts down on newspapers’ carbon footprint.

There is a widely reported plan that the Detroit dailies will restrict home delivery to Thursday and Sunday and perhaps one other day of the week. While papers on the other days of the week presumably would be available for single-copy purchase in busy downtown and suburban shopping centers, the rough draft of this plan is that the subscribers to  the Thursday and Sunday  newspapers would get full access to the news online.  

Gannett owns the Free Press, which is reported by the Gannett Blog to be preparing to eliminate 300 jobs. MediaNews Group, (Singleton) which in part is financed by Gannett, owns the News. 

Let’s face it, newspapers should not be printed and delivered each day. What a waste of energy.

Northern California Home Sales Hit a 20-Year Low

The housing bubble has burst in Northern California.

September homes sales in Northern California sunk to their lowest level in two decades as mortgages became harder to get, a real estate research firm said Thursday.
A total of 5,014 new and resale homes and condos were sold last month in nine San Francisco Bay area counties — a 40 percent decrease from the same period a year ago, according to DataQuick Information Systems.

Sad Future for this Journalist — He Finally Sees the Future

Is it Time to Quit This Disappointing Paper? Or Is it Time to Quit The Entire Industry?

“Oh, and the pay is lousy. I made more money waiting tables.”

Mick Gregory

This is another chapter in a series of sad stories from disenchanted journalists as they look at their careers and it dawns on them, “This ain’t going to get any better, is it?”

Mr. Grimm, a Gannett editor recruiter gets these. Some of the letters, I suspect, are coming from reporters who have hopes of getting out of their personal hell hole and joining Gannett. Then they really don’t get it do they? Any Gannetters want to give the shmuck some advice?

Q. I graduated with a bachelor’s in journalism in May at 30. I had worked odd jobs and even owned two pet stores before getting married and deciding to go college.

I was editor of my college newspaper, where I was featured on Romenesko a few times. I won both the Hearst Award and a Scripps-Howard scholarship, the latter naming me one of the top-10 college journalists in the country. I graduated top of my class with all the kudos you would expect.

My future seemed bright, and the stories I wrote during this period, the ones which earned me respect, were in the form of lengthy, deeply narrative, literary journalism. I saw myself becoming the next Charlie LeDuff of New York Times fame, embedding myself into the lives of others and then telling their stories with passion and care.

Then I entered the “professional” world of journalism.

I’ve been at a daily with a circulation of 30,000 for three months, and I’m going through the toughest time of my life. My beat is enormous because the paper employs six journalists to cover nearly a third of a state, and we are expected not to have any overtime. So, I cram 60 hours worth of work into 40 hours. I’ve never been a hard-news junkie, so cops, courts, city councils and so on are new to me and bland. With my workload, it is hard to educate myself on what I now realize is typically the focus of a daily.

This week, I’ve barely eaten, and all my free head space is filled with dread and doubt. My wife is worried about me. I have student loans looming. I must earn a living, I hate this job. I feel overwhelmed at every turn, and worst of all, I worry I have painted myself into a corner by striving so hard to be good at something no one will hire me to do.

I’m thinking about going back to school to change careers.