A good O&E buddy just emailed to say her position is being eliminated. The papers are being reduced to two sections, Filter and Pink are both gone. The Birmingham office will close at the end of the month, staffers are being shipped to a facility in Sterling Heights.
Even when you see it coming…
Advertisement
Crash positions, everyone!
Moving out of Birmingham is huge. I can see the Eccentric losing a ton of circulation when word gets out that the company’s moving to STERLING HEIGHTS, of all places. What an insult!
Honestly, putting an end to Pink was the merciful thing to do, they’ve chopped it back to almost nothing over the past couple of years. But Filter was cool. What seems a little ominous is that those two sections were the last ‘excess,’ so to speak. The next cut – and there will be a next cut – will hit bone.
Hometown staffers were told a few weeks ago, during all the DMP home delivery drama, that it would be ‘business as usual’ there. Gannett must have a different definition for ‘usual’ than the rest of us…
In regard to circulation, The Observer has been distributed free in our subdivision in Farmington every Thursday and Sunday for a while now. They just chuck ‘em at the end of the driveways, sometimes (rarely) they’re in a plastic bag with advertising (last week there was a mini box of Cheerios) but usually the paper is just rolled up and tied with a piece of plastic strap or a rubber band (you should see these things launch from a snow blower!). The times I’ve looked at the paper it’s had the same inserts as the Free Press. Is it possible that some folks are paying for it?
When I first started with the O&E, I was working for the Oxford Eccentric (which has disappeared, along with the Lake Orion, Clarkston and Waterford papers) and we would get regular complaints from people who didn’t ask for and didn’t want the newspapers being delivered to them. One guy even went so far as to contact the police to have us ticketed for littering! The company uses free distribution to entice people to subscribe, but mostly to shore up their circulation numbers and justify their ad rates. You’re getting the paper so they can tell the people distributing free Cheerios samples that their product is going to 20,000 homes – when paid circulation is only 15,000. Even with the cost of printing and distributing those extra papers, it pays off.
We’ve had a paid subscription and I’ll probably renew. I have always been fond of newsprint.
It is kind of a pain, because the paper has to be picked up and carried from the end of the driveway to the recycling bin (if it’s dry) or the trash (if it’s wet). At least the other local “papers” come in the mail, so it’s just a few steps to the recycling bin…and they help subsidize the post office.
While I do consider it to be littering, I don’t plan to make an issue over it because I figure they’re in the throes of death and will probably be gone within a year. UNLESS they make a habit of including food products, then, if only for the sake of wildlife that can get themselves in all sorts of trouble trying to open packages, we’ll have to do something to bring it to an end.
But I think time is on my side and we can wait it out.
Sadly, Dave, I think you’re right.
I agree with you both about the paper, it will stop showning up one day. Do you think we can stop the phone books that get thrown on my porch each year?
In light of the current situation in Michigan, the act of saving even one job is a credit. The idea of moving O&E from Birmingham to Sterling Heights will do just that. The thought that moving from Birmingham to Sterling Heights ” is an insult” is classless. This state has too many problems to be insulting one place from another. There is no difference between the two. I would think that when people in Sterling Heights read something like this that they may feel the same.
The only cultural difference between the two is in the persons mind who think that way.
You owe the people of Sterling Height an apology for your thoughtless comment.
Although, progressives like things to be on a class warfare level it is time for a change. I live in Farmington Hills and I certainly find it much classier than Farmington.
Art, I find it odd that you’re chiding me for making a joke about Birmingham (or Sterling Heights, depending on your point of view) and then you write – apparently with a straight face – that you find Farmington Hills much classier than Farmington. I’m not sure I take your point. Unless your point was to insult me. Then I get it.
Class warfare accusations aside (and come on, it was a joke, lighten up), I find it difficult to believe a company the size of Gannett couldn’t find a way to save jobs without taking reporters out of the county. Thousands of square feet of office space stands empty in Oakland County and can be had for a song.
A couple of my friends lost their jobs over this, and they lost their jobs after being assured a few weeks ago that everything was okay. So if you’re looking for someone to pat Gannett on the back because they saved other jobs, it won’t be me.
My Farmington Hills to Farmington, then, was as much a tongue-in -cheek as you Bir-SH. (I hope). Certainly, no insult was implied or meant. It is just not necessary to –sadly–even joke about somehting like this. I do not find much humour in people loosing jobs. I would suggest, though, that the newpaper business will be a soon to be forgotten business, as indicated by the Freep and News situation.
I would suggest we will soon have a discussion about L B Patterson. I look forward to that.
Art, I’m probably just a little over-sensitive about being from Farmington. We have big chips on our shoulders, ask anybody.
I think you’re right about the newspaper business, to a degree. The Gannetts and Journal-Registers of the world will merge and survive, probably at the cost of really local news.
On the other hand, the Sherman Publications weeklies in Oxford, Lake Orion and points north, seems to be doing okay. They’re a small, privately owned outfit and as local as local gets. Hometown pushed into that area six or seven years ago, but every one of those papers is gone – they simply couldn’t compete. I think when you give people that kind of intensely local coverage, with no pretense, they respond.
As for Brooks… I read an article the other day that listed all the people who have expressed an interest or might be expected to run, and I made this prediction: The race will be Brooks and John Cherry. And if that’s what happens, Brooks will be our next governor. I think he manages the county well, and he does it with a deep political divide on the county board. That’s Michigan, on a smaller scale.
But I worry about him.