I’m getting tips that the lay-offs at the Asheville Citizen-Times continued today in shocking fashion, with four department heads shown the door. Jim Burns, Cynthia Spencer, Stacey Wasieleski and Tim Alexander all received pink slips, according to my sources.
Jim Burns has overseen the newspaper’s printing facility for years. Cynthia Spencer has been human resources manager for a decade. Stacey Wasieleski has served as head of the newspaper’s IT department for a few years, and Tim Alexander worked as head of the circulation department. He’s the only newspaper employee I don’t personally know.
The high-profile lay-offs come a few weeks after the newspaper laid off six employees as part of a Gannett-wide cut of 3 percent of its employees. And in recent months, the newspaper has also fired ad production staff as it has outsourced that work to India.
But firing the heads of four major newspaper departments is surprising. There has been talk for several years about consolidating operations with the Citizen-Times’ sister newspaper, the Greenville News in Greenville, S.C., so this could be an indication of that. A few years ago, the Citizen-Times merged its subscription call center with Greenville — in effect, cutting the Asheville jobs and moving them all to Greenville.
Got more information? Send an e-mail to sweetashvegas@hotmail.com
For more background about the ongoing restructuring at Gannett and all the newspapers it owns, including the Citizen-Times, go to Gannett Blog.
21 Comments
Thanks Q! It was good to work with you as well. I’m currently looking in Texas. Not having much luck in Atlanta but it’s not totally off the table. We’ll see. Take care,
Cyn
Lena, good to hear from you … Cynthia, if that’s you, I sure hope you got one heck of a chunk of the company’s change and that you had that job ready in Atlanta. I wish you the very best of luck, it was truly a pleasure to work with you … Q
Q: Ken Boler works for the Savannah Morning News.
Q! It’s been way too long 🙂 I hope you’re well. I now do marketing for a local civil engineering firm (McGill Associates) … abandoned journalism altogether!
On covering the region:
I personally think the newspaper, as an entity, still works. I think social networking and such is an entirely different beast … I think as an industry we are now living through a self-fulfilling prophecy – we whined and cried and bitched about how the sky was falling, the sky was falling, until everyone on Wall Street said, the sky has fallen, the sky has fallen, and people on the street said yeah, the newspaper is right – it does suck. Look at all the focus groups (remember them?????? boy, they sure were fun … right along with the brown bag lunches) trying to find out what we want to read … I can tell you what people read: obits, crime, breaking news, the occasional gotcha piece. All this community crap, feel-good journalism is just an excuse not to put the resources into go-after-it news. That takes manpower, bureaus, reporters in Raleigh … Ok, out of here. Got an interview.
Adding really fast: There is a place for inclusive news, community stuff, don’t get me wrong (though I just said so above) but we panicked so much, changed so wildly and in such a willy-nilly way, people have bought into the newspaper-as-a-failure thought … folks, newspapers still make money, and they will make money in the future for the few left when we’ve all jumped out of the boat.
Why, howdy Jeff Green! I’d heard you’d landed at Iwanna … we need to do an AC-T alumni roster for the time period in which the newspaper imploded (that’s worthy of an argument in itself) … where are they now? type thing … anyone know what Susan Ihnne is doing?
I’ll start:
– Deb Reeves, RAM under Kerry, now regional advertising director for CNI (for you Asheville-centric folks, that’s the company that owns most all the weeklies in the western counties, plus one in Spruce Pine)
– Kerry is apparently a regional publisher or something for a group of newspapers in Kentucky.
– Luann Labedz, publisher of Creative Loafing in Atlanta … I think Ken, late of classifieds and temporarily the ad director when Kerry got canned, followed her there …
– Rita Larkin, associate editor of WNC Magazine
– Yours truly, bee keeper, vegetable and shiitake grower, marginal freelancer
– Melissa Williams, APD voice
– Jason Sandford, multimedia guy for Mountain X
I know I’m missing a lot … Lena, whatcha doing? Deborah?
Cynthia was great to work with…I’m sure she’ll end up all the better for this.
Helena in the backshop was also a great friend to me when I started at the paper.
Meanwhile, a lot of CT’ers have their resumes out all over town…I guess they don’t want to wait for the infamous (inevitable?)cardboard box.
Jeff, great to see you out at Goombay. Thanks for the note!
Quintin, you make an excellent point. What’s news to people is what’s news in their community. So, how can a media company help serve those itty bitty, non-Asheville communities across the mountains? Is it all about social networking on the Internets?
Something for you to take a look at when you get a chance — my weekly round-up of news across WNC. It’s a nod to all the non-Asheville news that community newspaper are covering across our region. Here’s an example:
http://www.mountainx.com/news/2008/wncnewsroundup090608
Oh, I wasn’t being critical of Mountain X … I don’t ever see it out here, so I’m not in a position to judge one way or the other what y’all are doing or not doing.
(I still think you need to put your name on the posts. I quote:
"Everybody in town knows who writes this blog." That’s my exact point about the AC-T, too. You folks in Asheville think too much about Asheville … it ain’t that big, it ain’t that important, and it ain’t the center of the universe. There’s people happening across your blog who don’t know you, and there’s people reading the AC-T who couldn’t give a rat’s hiney about the latest doings of Asheville City Council. That’s not local news in Cherokee or Franklin or Bryson City, that’s just Asheville’s news, and it is frankly boring. If the newspaper hadn’t bored all of its advertisers and readers to death over the years, the revenue numbers might look a little different right now)
If anyone wants to try a start up we would be happy to print it for you. We can probably help with distribution and sales as well. Give us a call over at Iwanna.
Good grief, Potter, I’ve been gone for a year-and-a-half, you could have at least noticed … You hurt my feelings. I at least noted your likely unemployment when Taylor lost! (For the record, I’m running an itty bitty farm in Swain County and freelancing for itty bitty money during the winter months) …
Now Quintin, I’m not anonymous. Everybody in town knows who writes this blog. I’ve written about myself, and been written about, pretty thoroughly. You and John Boyle need to disabuse yourselves of the notion that i’m somehow "anonymous."
To wit, http://www.mountainx.com/news/2007/local_media_veteran_jason_sanford_aka_blogger_ashvegas_to_join_mountain_xpr
http://www.mountainx.com/news/2007/091207bloggers
When I talk about competition, I’m not necessarily speaking only of Mountain Xpress, but there is potential there. Everybody competes on the Web. And looking at the situation from the Citizen-Times point of view, the daily newspaper certainly viewed (and views) Mountain Xpress as competition. That’s why the editors of the newspaper frog-marched me out the door as soon as they heard I was joining Mountain X.
And dear Q, I’m not saying Mountain X is better than anyone — there’s a whole lot we could do better, just like everyone else. We’re working on it.
But yes, there’s loads of opportunity for anyone with some start-up cash, some scrappiness and some talent to move in and do great journalism.
It seems that media companies are finally starting to take the hits that have hurt other sectors of the economy. As a former AC-Ter as well, I still have my Gannett 401K and the stock has gone from about $80 a share in the good years to under $15 a share — which sucks. Jason you may be right about a merger of the two papers — which also sucks. More and more companies are operating that way — remember when Sinclair tried to do centralized weather at WLOS? I think the Hendersonville Times-News recently made a similar move when a lot of their workload was absorbed by the Spartanburg Herald Journal — both papers are New York Times owned. And finally — what the heck happened to Quinton? I didn’t know she had left.
I heard there is a popcorn party being thrown by one of the four that got the ax in the lobby of the ACT right now.
Better have someone else taste it first.
Now Jason, since when did you start being anonymous boy? What happened to all that newspaper training since you went to the alt press?
The AC-T shouldn’t have ever been in a position you could consider it competition, and it wouldn’t be if it was again positioned as a true regional newspaper. Y’all ain’t that and a bag of chips, too, sorry …
You are right that it opens the door, though. It is wide open in the western counties, at least, but y’all won’t come out here either, admit it. The AC-T has long given up, starting with the zip-code journalism failure under Benge and the closing of the bureaus. That, my friends, signaled the beginning of the end. We were just too young and stupid to recognize it.
Though I seem to remember us bureau people protesting …
And no, Smoky Mtn News doesn’t have this area locked down. Not aggressive enough, not skilled enough and doesn’t think big enough, no offense to the nice people there.
In a dream world I’d take all the AC-T talent now bobbing around like flotsam (not the OC members who just got canned, sorry folks) and start an aggressive, edgy small daily with an active online presence. Then we’d kick butt, make money and have fun.
Yeah, right.
Yes, Lena. It’s got to be difficult for those folks. I probably knew Cynthia best, and I will miss her.
Quintin, great to hear from you! I echo your sentiment. I’ll have to think over what you’ve said, and respond a little more thoughtfully. But one thing you make me think of, on the positive side, is that a shrinking Citizen-Times means more and more opportunity for competitors to move in and be great.
One of the four, in her position as HR director, actually handled the prior round of layoffs.
I can guarantee you John Boyle won’t touch this in a column, at least not in any meaningful way. It would be job suicide.
I have mixed feelings about this, as a former Gannettoid. I personally liked several of the ones shown the door – but, as a group, the newspaper’s leadership was resistant to change and getting paid way too much to attend meetings and "vision" the future. I sat on the OC for a while as kind of a baby OC member, and frankly much of what went on was silly and did nothing to make the AC-T a better newspaper.
It would have been funny except for the amount of money those folks were pulling down when compared with the newspaper’s average workers.
I hate to see the AC-T getting smaller and smaller. I’ve always felt that eventually it will cover only O’Henry Avenue. Happened on Otis Street? Forget it … live in another county? You really ought to forget it.
With ever-diminishing resources and a determined retreat from the region, the AC-T is well on its way to becoming an itty bitty community paper with itty bitty resources and itty bitty news coverage.
It has never been a great newspaper … never met the fantastic potential that was there in terms of news and available talent, but it was – and is – our only true regional source of news. Kiss what little bit of that is left goodbye if Greenville takes control.
Newspapers used to be so damned fun. These are sad times.
Unfrickin believable. None of them deserved that, though I hear some were offered other positions within Gannett. Even so, is that really any consolation to people like Jim and Cynthia, who’ve been there for YEARS? … Unreal. And scary for those still there …
I bet the four were the people who actually worked and probably stood up to the suits that fired the six before them. How many years of experience and expertise were fired across Gannett in order to save some money? Who is still left in charge and do any of them have a clue what is going on? Too bad they are not writing about their own issues. Maybe John Boyle will get to have a column about this one.
What the eff is going on at the AC-T? How many more people will be cut? And how is cutting bodies going to improve news coverage? I would imagine folks who work there must feel like they’re in the middle of a maelstrom. It’s ri-GD-diculous!