I also suggest you check out a nice roundup of Newhouse-related stuff at InsideOut, local reaction at randomphoto, here, and here, as well as conversation at ArborUpdate related to the News' changes (I refuse to buy into the message control and say closing, since it's very unclear yet whether that's really the case). Andrew Heller checks in from Flint, plus video from Grand Rapids.
In today's segment, we discuss what he's looking for as he builds a staff for the new publication, how it will sell ads, and the relationship with MLive.
CARTY: Do you have a range of content producers you will employ? Can you say, "I'd be surprised if we had 50 people," or "I'd be surprised if we didn't have 10"? Do you have an idea in your head?
DEARING: I have an idea, but I'm just not quite ready yet. I would think within the next week or so that we expect to have an organization of roughly X number of people and that roughly X percentage of them are going to be journalists, content people. We're just not quite at the point yet where I can say something now that I know I can live with 2 weeks from now, and not sound like I pulled the rug out or said something that wasn't true. We're just not right there yet.
CARTY: Do you have a structure in mind, and is it a traditional newspaper structure with copy editors and a sports editor, etc."
DEARING: I have a structure and it will not look anything like a traditional newsroom. All the jobs will have parallel to to traditional jobs, but we won't call them what we call them now. I'm calling reporters digital journalists. Now, will I have a digital journalist who covers cops? The answer is yes, and that person will send text messages and Tweet and blog and do constant updates, and do video, and look for ways to geomap crime incidents and all of that. But there will be a person who covers cops and sits in court and covers trials, and goes and reads the police blotter and talks to cops and finds out what's going on. That will be there. But the way that person brings that information to people will be what's not traditional, that's why we're calling them digital journalists.
Each of the four areas - news, sports, entertainment and community - will have a person who leads that area. We won't call the news person the city editor, but that person will be responsible for news in a lot of traditional areas we think of as news - cops, K-12, health, science - traditional news topics. We've been clear in saying that we will not have a copy desk, that we will outsource that to one of our sister papers, and that the actual copy desk function and page production for the print product will be done elsewhere. What we'll have instead are producer/copy editors who read content. We don't want words online that are misspelled or typos. A lot of that happens now on the Web because nobody's looking at stuff before it goes on line. If we're a professional news organization, somebody has to look at it, and edit it, and use proper grammar. This is a pretty literate market. Their role will be more than how it gets posted and links, that kind of thing.
CARTY: What are you looking for as you evaluate candidates?
DEARING: Certainly people are going to have an advantage if they've already begun to adapt within the Ann Arbor News structure now. If they've seen they've needed to move in that direction - people who are already on Twitter, people who are on Facebook, people who are doing video. People who see we're moving to a digital age and have already begun to look in that area. I need a couple of people who are just a helluva reporter, people who you know if you give them a story, they will get to the bottom of it, and they will report the hell out of it. And they will not let that bone go until they have the story. If someone has those skills and doesn't know how to log on to a computer, we'll teach them. We've got to have a couple of people who are reporters to their bone and can do any story. That's part of it. But I'd also like some people who come from more of a blogging background, who can help bring a culture so that people who don't can kind of see, oh, that's how it's done, that's that orientation, I can do that.
This is going to be an evolving organization. We need people who are a little comfortable with change, with unpredictability. People who, when we say, 'Now that we've really got this thing going, we actually need you to do this,' will say, oh, yeah, I'm adaptable, I'm flexible. It would help to have a pretty good work ethic. Everyone in this organization is going to have to work pretty hard for it to be a success. A history of good work ethic isn't going to hurt somebody who applies with us.
CARTY: Among the blogging community in Ann Arbor and the Michigan sports world, there's a level of skepticism, if not hostility, toward MLive, for various reasons. How closely affiliated with MLive and Newhouse Internet strategy in general will this site be?
DEARING: I definitely want to set the right tone here in terms of MLive. We're going to work with MLive to some degree. I don't know exactly how that's going to look, what we're going to do. This organization is being built outside the MLive structure and outside the Advance Internet structure, and we will not look or operate anything like MLive or Advance Internet. Now, that said, they are still the major source of information in Michigan and we'll need to work with them in certain ways, and we're still exploring. At the staff meeting today, there were a lot of questions about that, and a lot of non-answers, because until today, we couldn't talk to MLive. We haven't even been able to talk to them about what we want to do, and now that we can talk to them, we have a lot of things to figure out.
I'll give you an example, if you look at everything we've got to accomplish, I don't think we're going to build a new prep tool, we're going to use the MLive prep tool. I think we're going to participate in that, and cooperate with that, and keep it up to information, the way the existing papers do.
On the other hand, I think U of M sports, that's our franchise, we've got to do that. We're going to do that with our staff, on our site, in the way we think best serves. We're going to shoot for a level of excellence in that that can't be met or touched anywhere else - and we want to engage bloggers and people out there in the sports world and work with that. If they're successful, we're successful, and we want what we're doing to be something that engages everybody.
CARTY: Will your Michigan sports content be exclusive to AnnArbor.com?
DEARING: No, I should be clear, it's our responsibility - we will have a new page for Michigan sports of our own creation - however, there are seven other papers in Michigan that look to us for Michigan sports coverage, there is a huge MLive audience outside of Ann Arbor that looks to us, and we will continue to share that content, for them to use in their ways. We'll still meet those needs, but it will be our thing and we will share it with them.
CARTY: Just to be clear, so if you have someone who covers a Michigan football game, that same story will run on MLive, in the other Booth papers and on your site?
DEARING: Yeah, we will still be the source of Michigan sports coverage for the sister papers and MLive. It would be our staff that will be doing that, and we'll be heavily staffed in sports, it's an important area for us. You can't do everything with a smaller staff. We'll be pretty heavily staffed in sports. We'll be staffed to do the job.
CARTY: Will the other papers and MLive have access to all of your other contents or will that be exclusive to you?
DEARING: No, we want everything out there anywhere. I want it on your blog if you think it's interesting. I want it on MLive. I want it on other sites. No, we want to get it out there to anyone who wants it, will use it, or will expose it to somebody. That's the online way.
CARTY: So then what will draw me to AnnArbor.com, instead of going to MLive to read the same story?
DEARING: Because I think we will have a tool, in a way that will be set up to, say, take much more advantage of video. Video is huge in sports - highlights, all of that. Really, you don't get a lot of that on websites. We need to do a lot of that. You have a choice, you can go to 13 blogs, or you can come to us and we'll tell you what's being said on 13 blogs, and send you to the blog to read more. We'll make sure all of the stats and all of the types of things that people might ... you know, if you have the right resources you can get into a depth of information about things. We would try to do things like get players to blog, get coaches to blog, podcasts - just all the tools. We want to do all of that on our site, and, yeah, we'll send MLive a story, but the experience you get on our site will be a very rich and deep experience.
CARTY: Do you envision any exclusive content just for your site?
DEARING: (Laughs) No, there is no exclusive content anywhere in the world any more. I mean, no, that's the old model, it's the old way of doing business. In the world we live in now, you send your stuff out, you want as many people to read it in as many places as possible.
CARTY: Who will sell ads for this product, will it have its own dedicated ad staff?
DEARING: It will. It will have an ad staff that will be of the size, or larger, than the Ann Arbor News current ad staff. It will have a sales force. It will have a sales manager. The difference is, we'll be able to create and sell tools that we haven't been able to create and sell. It will be kind of better for advertisers. What newspapers have struggled with forever is you have these people who have spent their lives selling print, and are just beginning to learn to sell online. And then, we kind of confuse them with different products - what's ours? What's MLive? What will work in the market. Then advertisers want different things, and oh, we can't do that. We will have a staff that is trained to sell digital first, although certainly people will be able to want and have print ads as well. It will be a large print staff trained to sell new digital advertising tools to advertisers.
CARTY: What role does the print product have, and why two days a week? What can you share about the thinking behind that?
DEARING: You know ... I want people to understand we'd publish a seven-day paper if we could. We don't hate print, we love print. We all spent our careers in print. If it was still possible to print a seven-day paper, we would. And people still want a paper, it's just that the economic model, you'd go out of business trying to give it to them seven days a week. Now, because our challenge is to succeed online, we've made a conscious decision to print two days a week, so the focus is online. But, in the market, for readers, for customers, there's still a demand for print. We think we can meet that demand twice a week, and we'll give it to them.
CARTY: I've felt at times when the News has done some speciality publications, they've really become content afterthoughts. How do you keep that product from becoming an afterthought, how do you keep it relevant and an integral part of the overall product?
DEARING: Well, we have to. We're talking to the community now, and the community is not happy that print is going away. They still value it and they still want it. If we had to do what we're going to do now, and still put out a paper five days a week, I'm not sure what the answer would be. But can we be a 24/7 online digital organization and can we put out two print papers a week, and do a good job with that, and give people a good print product? With the staffing we have, I think we can.
COMING NEXT: Dearing reacts to skepticism of Newhouse's ability to succeed with this venture, and what exactly qualifies Laurel Champion and two other newspaper people to lead a cutting-edge web publication?
CARTY: Do you have a range of content producers you will employ? Can you say, "I'd be surprised if we had 50 people," or "I'd be surprised if we didn't have 10"? Do you have an idea in your head?
DEARING: I have an idea, but I'm just not quite ready yet. I would think within the next week or so that we expect to have an organization of roughly X number of people and that roughly X percentage of them are going to be journalists, content people. We're just not quite at the point yet where I can say something now that I know I can live with 2 weeks from now, and not sound like I pulled the rug out or said something that wasn't true. We're just not right there yet.
CARTY: Do you have a structure in mind, and is it a traditional newspaper structure with copy editors and a sports editor, etc."
DEARING: I have a structure and it will not look anything like a traditional newsroom. All the jobs will have parallel to to traditional jobs, but we won't call them what we call them now. I'm calling reporters digital journalists. Now, will I have a digital journalist who covers cops? The answer is yes, and that person will send text messages and Tweet and blog and do constant updates, and do video, and look for ways to geomap crime incidents and all of that. But there will be a person who covers cops and sits in court and covers trials, and goes and reads the police blotter and talks to cops and finds out what's going on. That will be there. But the way that person brings that information to people will be what's not traditional, that's why we're calling them digital journalists.
Each of the four areas - news, sports, entertainment and community - will have a person who leads that area. We won't call the news person the city editor, but that person will be responsible for news in a lot of traditional areas we think of as news - cops, K-12, health, science - traditional news topics. We've been clear in saying that we will not have a copy desk, that we will outsource that to one of our sister papers, and that the actual copy desk function and page production for the print product will be done elsewhere. What we'll have instead are producer/copy editors who read content. We don't want words online that are misspelled or typos. A lot of that happens now on the Web because nobody's looking at stuff before it goes on line. If we're a professional news organization, somebody has to look at it, and edit it, and use proper grammar. This is a pretty literate market. Their role will be more than how it gets posted and links, that kind of thing.
CARTY: What are you looking for as you evaluate candidates?
DEARING: Certainly people are going to have an advantage if they've already begun to adapt within the Ann Arbor News structure now. If they've seen they've needed to move in that direction - people who are already on Twitter, people who are on Facebook, people who are doing video. People who see we're moving to a digital age and have already begun to look in that area. I need a couple of people who are just a helluva reporter, people who you know if you give them a story, they will get to the bottom of it, and they will report the hell out of it. And they will not let that bone go until they have the story. If someone has those skills and doesn't know how to log on to a computer, we'll teach them. We've got to have a couple of people who are reporters to their bone and can do any story. That's part of it. But I'd also like some people who come from more of a blogging background, who can help bring a culture so that people who don't can kind of see, oh, that's how it's done, that's that orientation, I can do that.
This is going to be an evolving organization. We need people who are a little comfortable with change, with unpredictability. People who, when we say, 'Now that we've really got this thing going, we actually need you to do this,' will say, oh, yeah, I'm adaptable, I'm flexible. It would help to have a pretty good work ethic. Everyone in this organization is going to have to work pretty hard for it to be a success. A history of good work ethic isn't going to hurt somebody who applies with us.
CARTY: Among the blogging community in Ann Arbor and the Michigan sports world, there's a level of skepticism, if not hostility, toward MLive, for various reasons. How closely affiliated with MLive and Newhouse Internet strategy in general will this site be?
DEARING: I definitely want to set the right tone here in terms of MLive. We're going to work with MLive to some degree. I don't know exactly how that's going to look, what we're going to do. This organization is being built outside the MLive structure and outside the Advance Internet structure, and we will not look or operate anything like MLive or Advance Internet. Now, that said, they are still the major source of information in Michigan and we'll need to work with them in certain ways, and we're still exploring. At the staff meeting today, there were a lot of questions about that, and a lot of non-answers, because until today, we couldn't talk to MLive. We haven't even been able to talk to them about what we want to do, and now that we can talk to them, we have a lot of things to figure out.
I'll give you an example, if you look at everything we've got to accomplish, I don't think we're going to build a new prep tool, we're going to use the MLive prep tool. I think we're going to participate in that, and cooperate with that, and keep it up to information, the way the existing papers do.
On the other hand, I think U of M sports, that's our franchise, we've got to do that. We're going to do that with our staff, on our site, in the way we think best serves. We're going to shoot for a level of excellence in that that can't be met or touched anywhere else - and we want to engage bloggers and people out there in the sports world and work with that. If they're successful, we're successful, and we want what we're doing to be something that engages everybody.
CARTY: Will your Michigan sports content be exclusive to AnnArbor.com?
DEARING: No, I should be clear, it's our responsibility - we will have a new page for Michigan sports of our own creation - however, there are seven other papers in Michigan that look to us for Michigan sports coverage, there is a huge MLive audience outside of Ann Arbor that looks to us, and we will continue to share that content, for them to use in their ways. We'll still meet those needs, but it will be our thing and we will share it with them.
CARTY: Just to be clear, so if you have someone who covers a Michigan football game, that same story will run on MLive, in the other Booth papers and on your site?
DEARING: Yeah, we will still be the source of Michigan sports coverage for the sister papers and MLive. It would be our staff that will be doing that, and we'll be heavily staffed in sports, it's an important area for us. You can't do everything with a smaller staff. We'll be pretty heavily staffed in sports. We'll be staffed to do the job.
CARTY: Will the other papers and MLive have access to all of your other contents or will that be exclusive to you?
DEARING: No, we want everything out there anywhere. I want it on your blog if you think it's interesting. I want it on MLive. I want it on other sites. No, we want to get it out there to anyone who wants it, will use it, or will expose it to somebody. That's the online way.
CARTY: So then what will draw me to AnnArbor.com, instead of going to MLive to read the same story?
DEARING: Because I think we will have a tool, in a way that will be set up to, say, take much more advantage of video. Video is huge in sports - highlights, all of that. Really, you don't get a lot of that on websites. We need to do a lot of that. You have a choice, you can go to 13 blogs, or you can come to us and we'll tell you what's being said on 13 blogs, and send you to the blog to read more. We'll make sure all of the stats and all of the types of things that people might ... you know, if you have the right resources you can get into a depth of information about things. We would try to do things like get players to blog, get coaches to blog, podcasts - just all the tools. We want to do all of that on our site, and, yeah, we'll send MLive a story, but the experience you get on our site will be a very rich and deep experience.
CARTY: Do you envision any exclusive content just for your site?
DEARING: (Laughs) No, there is no exclusive content anywhere in the world any more. I mean, no, that's the old model, it's the old way of doing business. In the world we live in now, you send your stuff out, you want as many people to read it in as many places as possible.
CARTY: Who will sell ads for this product, will it have its own dedicated ad staff?
DEARING: It will. It will have an ad staff that will be of the size, or larger, than the Ann Arbor News current ad staff. It will have a sales force. It will have a sales manager. The difference is, we'll be able to create and sell tools that we haven't been able to create and sell. It will be kind of better for advertisers. What newspapers have struggled with forever is you have these people who have spent their lives selling print, and are just beginning to learn to sell online. And then, we kind of confuse them with different products - what's ours? What's MLive? What will work in the market. Then advertisers want different things, and oh, we can't do that. We will have a staff that is trained to sell digital first, although certainly people will be able to want and have print ads as well. It will be a large print staff trained to sell new digital advertising tools to advertisers.
CARTY: What role does the print product have, and why two days a week? What can you share about the thinking behind that?
DEARING: You know ... I want people to understand we'd publish a seven-day paper if we could. We don't hate print, we love print. We all spent our careers in print. If it was still possible to print a seven-day paper, we would. And people still want a paper, it's just that the economic model, you'd go out of business trying to give it to them seven days a week. Now, because our challenge is to succeed online, we've made a conscious decision to print two days a week, so the focus is online. But, in the market, for readers, for customers, there's still a demand for print. We think we can meet that demand twice a week, and we'll give it to them.
CARTY: I've felt at times when the News has done some speciality publications, they've really become content afterthoughts. How do you keep that product from becoming an afterthought, how do you keep it relevant and an integral part of the overall product?
DEARING: Well, we have to. We're talking to the community now, and the community is not happy that print is going away. They still value it and they still want it. If we had to do what we're going to do now, and still put out a paper five days a week, I'm not sure what the answer would be. But can we be a 24/7 online digital organization and can we put out two print papers a week, and do a good job with that, and give people a good print product? With the staffing we have, I think we can.
COMING NEXT: Dearing reacts to skepticism of Newhouse's ability to succeed with this venture, and what exactly qualifies Laurel Champion and two other newspaper people to lead a cutting-edge web publication?
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17 comments:
Brad,
You leave me laughing as you make your point, as usual. Tone is hard to read on the net or in e-mail, so I feel an obligation to point out that Tony wasn't at all condescending when he made that point. I think he was simply trying to paint a difference in the overall communities. I visit Utah and Colorado fairly frequently. They're different places. Utah is much more conservative and traditional. Colorado's much more granola. I don't think acknowledging that is being condescending. There's a similar comparison to be made between A2 and Jackson.
The "junior varsity" comment, if true, is inappropriate. I can assure you that I never heard anyone in A2 express anything close to a sentiment like that.
I think your points about Jackson being ahead of the curve in consolidating are on the money.
As another Jackson employee put it to me in an e-mail, while Ann Arbor was installing plasma TVs in the newsroom, Jackson was cutting costs and staff. I can't argue with that.
But I also think the explanations are much more complex than simply saying, "Well, Jackson ran a leaner operation sooner," and that Tony's explanation is probably at least part of that more complex explanation.
Good to have you in the conversation here. Jim
I have a very, very, very hard time seeing AnnArbor.com do a decent job with sports coverage. Where is all this video and podcast coverage going to come from? What is the quality going to be like? Video recorded from a cell phone isn't going to cut it.
I also would love to hear your thoughts, Jim, on how this is going to effect high schools and player visibility, that directly impacts things like recruiting and scholarships. Will athletes from Ann Arbor be disadvantaged because there isn't a local paper covering them? Obviously, there will be no more "Ann Arbor (Insert sports here) Player of the Year", which leaves A2 kids competing against the entire Detroit Metro area. Maybe a "Rivals Ann Arbor" will pop up to provide local hs sports coverage with an eye towards college visibility?
I'm also not hearing Dearing mention anything about the local part of local news. Whenever there are interviews and people are asked about where they get their news, they always mention where they get national news. The logical follow-up "Where do you get your local news?" is never asked. Do we really expect citizen journalists to be thorough and unbiased as they report on ALL political candidates? Do we really foresee thorough coverage of local religion and school issues? I'm not encouraged
Carty, thanks for all this coverage. You're providing a tremendous public service.
Jim, the only thing missing from Dearing's self-important rambling on this pie-in-the-sky plan is demanding those backward baseball cap guys to staff his pipedream website. At Flint, during one of Tony's drab and boring staff meetings, he said the new journalism would use outside-the-box types, the "guys who wear their baseball caps backwards." Maybe he could recruit new reporters from the X Games. He also envisioned a TV studio at the Flint Journal. He asks for great reporters, yet he was brought in to axe those people in Flint. Honestly, can anyone give me one solid reason to believe this guy?
KL, that's very kind, and I appreciate it very much. As an aside, the best journalism prospect I've seen in my entire career is the sports editor of your student paper.
Got a fun note from an A2 staffer today:
"Lots going on that is keeping you busy Mr. Blogger. The law school student front is a neat cover."
That wouldn't have been as funny, of course, had I received it in the law school library last night, where I was still stuck after 11 p.m.
The hypocricy displayed this week has been too much to bear. Three old-school print journalists are going to invent and run an exciting, hip, video-infused annarbor.com. that, by the way, is still going to cover cops and courts (but will google-map the crimes so that makes it fresh ... yeah, right.)
John Foren in Flint, a junior varity journalist if ever there was one -- whose idea of an investigative story is to run school superintendent salaries and Flint's most famous dog names -- is telling reporters whose pay has been cut in half that there's no reason to talk about it or post anything to Facebook, Twitter, etc. Wow. That whole First Amendement thing stinks when the dogpoop is in your backyard, isn't is John?
When Channel 5 in Flint ran a story about speculation of the very thing that happened on Monday across Booth, Paul Chafee, another journalistic luminary, walked across the street and told them to stop because, after all, they're reporting partners. Channel 5 complied.
If these intellectual pygmies are the people leading the "new" way of practicing journalism at Booth, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Don't the networks PAY for the exclusive rights to broadcast Wolverine football and basketball? Not to mention the professional sports. I don't think newspapers and their internet components are going to be able to pony up the bucks they would need to gather video. So, I guess their choice would be to link to the Mgoblue.com highlight and post-game interview site. There is some independent journalism. Or maybe the sports video that Tony is referring to is coverage of prep games. That truly would be something we haven't seen before.
I can't get over the fact this company will be run by traditional, older Newhouse folk and be expected to succeed. What, specifically, has Laurel done in her professional journalism career that was "cutting edge"? She's a perfect example of the good-old-buddy hierarchy. Because her daddy or granddaddy were publishers, a position was created in the early 2000s so she could work alongside the current publisher a few years before they promoted her. It's sickening.
And does anyone else see the irony of Dearing being brought back to tell people in the area they'll still get the same, great coverage they got before the Ann Arbor News folded? Just like he told Ypsi folk the same thing as the Ypsilanti Press folded into the Ann Arbor News? He was a big part of that transition for Newhouse.
I agree completely with anonymous 11:09. It is very dishonest for these people to talk about exciting new ways of practicing journalism (with new people and new. low pay scales)when the charge is being led by warmed-over Booth/Newhouse lifers.
Tony Dearing (my old editor at CM Life) gave a silly response to your question in Part 1 about why a seven-day paper can survive in a place like Jackson but not Ann Arbor.
Dearing said Jackson, Flint, Bay City and Saginaw are all traditional communities where the hillbillies and throwbacks (my interpretation) still enjoy printed newspapers.
Uh, Tony, you must have noticed Flint, Bay City and Saginaw are no longer seven-day papers, either. Only Jackson. Your explanation makes no sense, dude.
As a 24-year employee of the Citizen Patriot, I am used to condescending attitudes from elsewhere in the Booth chain. Sometimes we feel like we are regarded as the junior varsity. This sort of thing may cloud your perception over there in Ann Arbor, Jim.
Let me supply a better explanation.
For a long time, employees of the Citizen Patriot (reporters, anyway) have been paid significantly less than employees at other Booth papers. For several years, we have taken staff cuts and consolidations to be more efficient.
Most other Booth papers are far behind us on that score. Obviously, I would be a fool to predict we can survive forever but that's why we can survive longer.
Because I think we will have a tool, in a way that will be set up to, say, take much more advantage of video. Video is huge in sports - highlights, all of that. Really, you don't get a lot of that on websites. We need to do a lot of that.
Wow. De-lusional. Video turns me off to webpages, especially on newspaper sites. It bogs everything down.
And because you know this will be done on the cheap and by people who are working 15 hours a day, it will not be high-quality. So expect a lot of Blair Witch Project video without the amateurish B-movie charm.
the only video I watch is at youtube, or if the embedded video at a professional site like cnn or yahoo is clearly youtube. Otherwise, I refuse to watch because I know there will be a 20, 40 or 60 second ad I don't want to sit through first.
"Otherwise, I refuse to watch because I know there will be a 20, 40 or 60 second ad I don't want to sit through first."
Now you're just complaining for the sake of complaining. 20 seconds? Really? You can't just press mute? Check your e-mail during the ad? No one is forcing you to watch it.
Also, I fail to see why people have to post anonymously about this subject. I still think that unless someone is posting vital information, all anonymous posts should be spiked.
Well word is Joe Grech is "consulting" for the "new" venture.
Seems to me that it's hard to forge a new path with old thinking and the same people who refused to combat the Newhouse insanity the first time around.
I will be watching this development with interest and an eye on my wallet. I can easily see things getting to a point where a newspaper decides that part of their revenue is going to come from readers. And if one paper is successful doing this, the others will follow in rapid succession.
It has been great being able to read any newspaper in any city online, but I can't help but wonder how long the free ride is going to last.
Anon 12:18 said:
"Well word is Joe Grech is "consulting" for the "new" venture.
Seems to me that it's hard to forge a new path with old thinking and the same people who refused to combat the Newhouse insanity the first time around."
If Matt Kraner wants a motivated sales staff, I sincerely hope that the above information is false.
I find it interesting that Dearing was able to describe (albeit roughly) a staffing plan that included "content leaders" (editors) and "digital journalists" (reporters), et al. He was even able to hint at staffing sizes and salary ranges for editorial. Yet there appears to be a complete void of such information when it comes to the sales/marketing side of the "new" company.
Word also has it that the sales staff will be paid by commission only, which would explain AA.com's reluctance to address the staffing levels and pay structures as they did for editorial. I cannot envision a structure that could accommodate the dictatorial management style of Joe Grech and still allow ad reps to make decent commissions, free from mundane meetings, unnecessary paperwork and ridiculous documentation in order to simply be paid at all.
I agree with anon...the existing management had their chance to stand up to Newhouse's insanity, but they chose to defend it. They don't deserve to be consulted with, and they have no idea who the REAL dedicated and hardworking employees are. They only know who has learned how to conform and "play the game" most.
If Kraner truly wants to hire the best from the stack of resumes he'll surely receive, he'd be smart to make it known upfront what Grech's role will (or hopefully won't) be with the "new venture". It would speak volumes as to how serious they really are about "abandoning broken business models" or whether they're just blowing smoke up our asses.
Time will tell, I suppose.
~~SoSad in AA
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