Gannett Blog: Asheville Citizen-Times to suffer even more job cuts

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Gannett Blog has been covering how Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, has been dealing with a newspaper industry in crisis. Job cuts and buyouts have been news of late, and it looks like it’s continuing. The Citizen-Times recently laid off four department heads, just weeks after cutting the jobs of six workers around the building.

Now there’s this:

The company will eliminate the accounting and other jobs as part of the previously disclosed creation of two national shared service centers in Springfield, Mo., and Indianapolis, according to internal documents I’ve just obtained.

The documents were provided by a Gannett Blog reader who requested anonymity. They describe in detail the timetable and scale of the plan to consolidate finance work at newspapers and TV stations in a bid to cut costs as Gannett wrestles with declining revenue and profits. Previously published reports gave only a broad outline of the project.

The plan calls for up to 11 papers and TV stations to be used as pilot sites starting last month, the documents show, with completion of the entire project expected by March 2009. About 55 jobs will be created at each of the two new centers — for a net job loss of 167 positions, the documents show. Gannett now employs about 46,000 in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

“The termination dates for employees losing their positions are determined by the implementation timetable,” one of the documents shows. “As a site begins migrating their activities to the national shared service centers, employees begin losing their positions.”

The documents say the first 11 pilot sites are the papers at Asheville, N.C.; Greenville, S.C.; Springfield, Mo.; Mountain Home, Ark.;Jackson, Miss., and Hattiesburg, Miss. The TV stations are WGRZ in Buffalo, N.Y.; WUSA in Washington, D.C.; WTSP in Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla.; WBIR in Knoxville, Tenn., and KTHV in Little Rock. (Note: That is just 10 sites; the documents list WBIR twice. So, either the 11th site wasn’t identified, or the total pilot sites is actually 10.)

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And if that’s not enough, people are getting vicious in the comments at Gannett Blog. Here’s a sample:

“Asheville lost a lot of positions some in Finance. One yesterday.”

There’s this…

“Asheville is losing good people every week. Some older ones and some younger. Asheville is down to a skeleton staff that knows their jobs very well. If one more person goes, that place will lose revenue at an alarming rate based on the quality of work produced.

“Clients just won’t wait any longer or listen to anymore excuses. They will find a nice glossy magazine somewhere else to advertise in.”

And this….

“You obviously don’t know Asheville. We have lost revenue for years and got rid of all the good people a couple of years ago. Virgil Smith ran it in the ground. It’s been on life support since.”

Then this…

“Anyone who thinks Virgil Smith ran the Asheville Citizen-Times into the ground is delusional or has his or her OWN axe to grind. In terms of truly understanding that a newspaper should serve and reflect its community, Virgil was the best thing the AC-T ever had.

“The critical issue with the AC-T’s financial performance has been and continues to be its mediocre ad department where incompetence rules. Excuses always abound about why the ad sales team can’t sell: “the content wasn’t right for us to sell it”; “the economy’s down so we can’t sell”; “we have too many products to sell”…on and on. The culture of the AC-T ad department is one of whining and passing the buck. Because performance issues in the AC-T ad department never get addressed, who knows — like cockroaches, they may end up being the only ones left.”