Venting, laughing, crying

Hey,

In case you haven't heard of this, there's a great blog where Gannett employees are venting fear, anger, etc about layoffs. I've included an E&P story below.

One of the blog entries, I"m told, goes like this: A reporter who worked at a paper 25 years received the dreaded call -- he was out. The reporter didn't seem surprised, anxious or worried. And when the editor told him the paper had arranged a time for him to come in and clean out his desk, the reporter said there was no need. He had cleaned it out himself in anticipation of being let go. Well, when management went to check the desk, it was locked. They had to get new keys. And when they finally opened it, every drawer was filled with Xeroxes of the reporters bar arse. And across the cheeks of each Xerox, the reporter had scribbled the name of a different manager. The stuff of legends.

Here's story about blog (link to blog is in story):

In Fraught Week For Gannett Employees, Hopkins' Blog Provides a Comfort Zone By Mark Fitzgerald Published: December 04, 2008 12:47 PM ET
CHICAGO Jim Hopkins was a business writer and sometime-investigative reporter for Gannett Co. papers for 20 years, but he says he's never done more rewarding work than what he's doing now -- providing a forum for anxious journalists as Gannett swings the axe at its more than 80 dailies.
In November, Gannett announced it would pare its workforce by 10% by the beginning of December.
With the layoffs apparently being compressed into this single week, the chopping, Hopkins' "Gannett Blog" (http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/) is the one place amid the chopping that Gannett employees can go to find out what's happening around the chain.
"The company has not even formally acknowledged this layoff is underway," Hopkins said in a telephone interview Thursday from his San Francisco home. "And they have not responded to any of what I've written for a couple of weeks now."
By early Thursday, the site had documented cuts of some 1,770 jobs at 57 of Gannett's 85 dailies. “This is the continuation of that, it is about 10%, which results in about 2,000 positions,” Gannett spokesperson Tara Connell told E&P Thursday. She noted the layoffs had been announced previously, and that all papers except the Detroit Free Press and USA Today would have cuts. While Gannett’s been quiet, Hopkins has heard plenty from Gannett employees, those who have already received the bad news from their paper's HR department and those who wonder if they're next. His blog, which normally gets about 2,500 visits a day, recorded more than 31,000 on Wednesday. Hundreds of comments have also been posted -- many thanking Hopkins for the blog itself. "Without Jim ... all this emotion would NEVER be felt or allowed to be heard," one anonymous poster wrote at the end of a first-person account from a reporter laid off from The Indianapolis Star. "God bless him too." "I hope everyone sends him $5," another wrote, referring to the contribution Hopkins asks for.Giving Gannetteers a place to get together is the point of Gannett Blog, says Hopkins, who actually created it in September 2007."More than two years ago, I started becoming concerned about the company's direction, and where it was going," he said. Gannett's strategic plan, he thought, seemed unlikely to work. "So I wanted to make a place where (Gannett employees) could share inform about the company so they could make smarter choices about their careers," Hopkins continued. "Most Gannett employees work for small newspapers. They're scattered across the United states, physically separated from each other."At the time he was working as a business editor and reporter for USA Today out of its San Francisco office. "For four months I blogged anonymously," he says. "It wasn't until January [of 2008] that I put my name on it." That was when Hopkins, 51, took a buyout from Gannett. The severance payments ran out this October, and Hopkins has been living on savings and the occasional contribution to the blog.The layoffs, he says, are "tragic -- and I don't say that lightly." Hundreds of people "are being thrown out of work in the worst economy any of us have seen since the Great Depression." Most Gannett employees, he said, are shocked. After all, Gannett was a company that rarely downsized, because it always ran lean. "I'd been anticipating these layoffs for a long time," said Hopkins. "But they were extraordinary for this company, (and so) people were not used to it, and many of them didn't see the warning signs." Hopkins says he never hears from Gannett's corporate executives and only rarely from its spokesperson, although he's sure it's read in the McLean, Va., headquarters."I don't hate Gannett," Hopkins said. "I liked what I did there. ... But none of the work I did in my first career was anything like this. It's been the most rewarding exprience of my career. I get a lot of nice notes from people thanking me -- I should be thanking them, I think, for the opportunity to help them through this."