Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Media General's editing hub plans confirmed

My previous post about Media General looking at creating an editing hub for its three largest papers in Richmond, Va.; Tampa, Fla.; and Winston-Salem, N.C., has been confirmed in an article announcing the resignation of Winston-Salem Managing Editor Ken Otterbourg:

From the article:

"Also, I have some disagreements with Media General's plans for our newsroom," he said. "I'm not in favor of consolidating our editing."

Media General Inc., the owner of the Journal and other media outlets, is considering consolidating the copy-editing and design functions of its three largest newspapers -- Winston-Salem, Richmond and Tampa, Fla. -- in one location. It already has created such news centers for its community newspapers in North Carolina and Virginia.

"I appreciate Ken's concerns about the impact on the (newspaper's) quality," said Carl Crothers, the newspaper's vice president and executive editor. "We are going to make sure that the newspaper's quality will not be affected."


And to be fair, though my sources apparently had the Richmond/Tampa/Winston-Salem thing dead on, there were rumors earlier about MG's smaller papers (the editing of many now having been consolidated in Lynchburg, Va.), and Rachel Kaufman of Media Jobs Daily had that rumor in October.

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4 Comments:

At 1/6/10, 11:13 AM, Blogger fev said...

"We are going to make sure that the newspaper's quality will not be affected."

And that blip on the radar? It's only geese ...

Happy New Year, Fish!

 
At 1/6/10, 11:17 AM, Blogger Doug said...

Or, as George Carlin's famous weather routine went -- don't sweat the geese because the radar's also picking up a line of Russian ICBMs ....

Same to you, fev.

Fish

 
At 1/6/10, 1:38 PM, Anonymous Lannie Byrd said...

Apparently, Gannett has created an editing hub for it's Louisiana newspapers, too. They have an add on JournalismJobs for an Editor for their Louisiana Content Production Center

 
At 1/6/10, 3:19 PM, Blogger Doug said...

Yep. I expect we will see lots more of this.

In a way it harkens back to the old Thompson idea of clustering papers and trying to consolidate the management/sales efforts. That was botched terribly; we'll see how these efforts go.

 

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