"All of the jobs involve “business process,” the company said in a frequently asked questions document — things like paying bills, invoicing customers, preparing monthly summary reports and reconciling the books."
Anyone know where these latest layoffs happened? Which papers were affected?
https://www.poynter.org/locally/2020/gannett-will-outsource-485-business-side-jobs-to-india/
Echoing some of the sentiments above.
The overarching hypocrisy at “USA Today/ Gannett” is beyond the pale. They sanctimoniously and publicly chide Companies that move operations Offshore, any then proceed to do the same, without comment.
I may have worked at the same family owned newspaper group as Htas+1bogxV5H above, as I recognize some of those tactics.
@Htas After never intending on making that place a career, in my years, I survived through NY Times reductions, Halifax reductions, and GateHouse reductions. I watched family-owned acquisitions that were forced to implement the GateHouse way and were ultimately driven into the ground. Not even related to finance, even though we caught a lot of flack for holding customers accountable, just overall - generic layouts, no local content, random days costing $6.00 and taking the customer's full month of payments, and being charged for wanting a bill. Even in my teenage years, I thought Gannett was the "pinnacle" of the newspaper industry. But instead we got a second-rate, cutthroat GateHouse version, and I just saw quality people get whacked, take a buyout, or find a job that wasn't anywhere near the newspaper industry. I just hope that everyone I grew to care about over the years manage to get out if they haven't already.
Well said. I recognized myself in your description of one who “ feel blessed to survive another round of layoffs”.
I dodged a number of bullets after Gatehouse bought our paper in 2017. My number finally came up in 2020.
Sad to see the state of the newspaper industry at this time. I feel like we are at the beginning of the end.
Late reply, but it was mostly advertising and circulation finance (order to cash), and heavily began on the GateHouse side. Pretty much all of the FRC was wiped out (50-65) save for a few managers and leads left to manage the BPO. Any legacy GH properties in the field who weren’t a part of the FRC had their positions that performed FRC functions eliminated as well (around 50-75 positions). The CCC in Springfield, Mo (legacy Gannett advertising credit and collections) has gone / will be going (around 50), the ABG (adv billing group, legacy Gannett statements, adjustments, accounts, and cash posting - 40ish), the GateHouse CRC (circulation processing - -50ish) and field folks that did what the center did (?) are also slated to go.
It’s been a disaster. Retention bonuses couldn’t keep people from going out and getting new jobs as soon as they could once it was announced and no replacing was allowed. The original center in India messed things up so badly during the shadow period that they had to move operations to Manila, I believe and start training fresh. They wiped out a ton of legacy GateHouse finance and systems management without any notice once they thought they understood the extent of their jobs in order to nestle it under the Tallahassee team.
And everyone kept saying there’s a reason GateHouse is a mess. It’s a tangled beast that’s just been in aggressive acquisition mode for 5ish years. We need to untangle it into a little package with a bow on it, then lift and shift. But the new CFO brought in an “outsourcing pro” senior VP who he worked with before and she said it could be done and within a month of her starting and with less than a month before Christmas we had to tell our staff they would all lose their job in the next 18 months. All while not being allowed to tell them we weren’t losing ours or we risked losing ours. Lo and behold I got axed the same week as them since my usefulness had come to an end despite being told of all the things they had planned for me.
Everyone I talked to as well as myself, came out on top. We took time off we hadn’t been able to take for years, have a work life balance again, and found jobs better than we had there. The thing about the newspaper industry that people don’t always realize is that you begin to feel like you’re “blessed” to still work there when you survive so many layoffs. Especially with no college degree. It becomes a sense of self-worth to survive another round, even if it means absorbing another persons job, and you start to feel like you’re not going to do better so you never look. And then when you do, it becomes a whole new world of opportunity and other employers are impressed at all you juggled as a single person.