Here it is. Thanks to loyal reader zipperhead for passing this along:
Letter to employees.
November 20, 2008
TO: Staff
FROM: Randy Hammer
RE: Consolidation of production departments
The Asheville Citizen-Times and The Greenville News are consolidating their production departments.
Asheville will begin printing its newspaper in Greenville in January. The Sardis Road production facility, where the Citizen-Times and its other products are printed, will close.
About 60 full-time and part-time positions in Asheville’s pressroom and mailroom will be eliminated. Employees in the Asheville operation will be offered opportunities to apply for a limited number of openings in Greenville. The pressroom and mailroom in Greenville are adding staff to accommodate the addition of Asheville’s products. Asheville employees who do not go to work in Greenville will receive a severance package.
Shannon Bullard in our Human Resources department will provide each affected employee a packet that includes terms of the severance and related benefits, a self-nomination form for transfer to Greenville, and job descriptions of the Greenville openings.
If you are interested in applying for the Greenville openings, please notify Shannon Bullard in our Human Resources department. Mike Gatherwright, the vice president of operations in Greenville, will visit the Sardis Road facility on Monday to conduct interviews.
Although a consolidation of the Asheville and Greenville production departments has been discussed for a number of years, I realize this is difficult news. Many employees will not be able to commute or move to Greenville. The decision to proceed with the plan has been forced by the difficult economic environment we face. Similar printing arrangements are being made across the country – both in and outside our company – where the geography makes sense.
The decision to print in Greenville is separate from the 10 percent staff reduction that was announced last month. Employees affected by that decision will be notified in early December.
Phil Fernandez, Gayle Smith, Jackie Stenseth, Vicki Harrison, Stacey Wasielewski, Lori Tomlin and Frank Shipman will begin meeting with their staffs immediately to work out the logistical details of printing in Greenville. If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to share them with me or your department head.
8 Comments
To paraphrase the Wizard of Westwood : Preparing for failure is preparing to fail. Gannett’s business model is clearly designed at this point to just stave off failure a little longer, rather than to actually retool for success. The AC-T is, itself a profitable venture, despite the trends in the industry as a whole. That’s because it fills a niche service that 24 hour cable channels and the internet really can’t provide: professional, in-depth local news coverage. But, instead of taking advantage of what local papers do well, Gannett has decided to make short-sighted, short-term cost cuts so they can roll the savings onto the balance sheet to disguise the money sucking black hole that is USA Today and most of the rest of their national ventures (ventures that cannot possibly be profitable, because the core service they provide is inferior to and more expensive than the new media alternatives).
The great weakness of newspapers in the current media environment is that they are SLOOOOOOW. Their great advantage is the depth of coverage they are capable of offering. Gannett’s response seems to be to minimize that advantage while maximizing the disadvantage. Consolidation increases deadline pressures (inevitably producing a negative impact on the quality and depth of coverage) while simultaneously making news delivery slower and less responsive than it already is. All to save the cost of paying a few dozen people less than 9 bucks an hour… It makes you wonder whether anyone at Gannett has any idea how a newspaper works.
The production facility will now be a distribution center.
That letter was way sugar coated. Greenville pays way less, and the facility is not exactly quality.
Randy Hammer should be at the top of the list for those to be cut in the next 10%. He is almost universally disliked at the AC-T and has been totally ineffective since his arrival here.
Newspapers are dying because they are boring.
Advertisers don’t give a hoot about what medium works for them – they just want one that puts their ad in front of the right people.
They are fleeing newspapers because that medium doesn’t work for them anymore.
When was the last time you heard anyone talk about what they read in the paper?.
People still want information and they will move toward the medium that provides it in the best format for them.
For me, newspapers are just too boring.
I’ve been reading articles for years about the struggles of major newspapers, but this hits too close to home. I work in TV, and viewership isn’t what it used to be. I am fearful of the next 2 or 3 years. Thanks for the update!
~Tim
Hell, if there is snow flurries in the air my parents carrier will not drive up the hill to delivery my folks paper. I can’t imagine some flat landers driving big rigs up the mountain from Greenville. LOL
Not to mention loading the paper onto trucks, getting it here, unloading it, re-loading it into the drop zone trucks, unloading them, loading into carriers cars…
Dumb. What are they going to do on a snowy day when they can’t get the paper up the mountain to Asheville? How will it affect deadlines for those far outlying counties that carriers will now have to drive farther to deliver to?