The newspaper power house, which owns 81 papers including USA Today, the Arizona Republic and the Indianapolis Star, will be moving in-house page designers to their own "studios" in five spread-out locations. These five design studios will layout pages for multiple papers daily.
The impact: design will be consolidated, many designers will be out of jobs and the process will go from designers working on a newspaper's team to being completely separate from the story process as the company attempts to save money.
The good news? Gannett promises all 81 papers will not look the same (although they will have many similar features). Riiiight.
As a former page designer and current newspaper editor, I have it on good authority that creativity can come in short supply at times. If I were expected to design pages for even 10 newspapers, I think I would start to repeat at some point. And begin working on autopilot. (Don't worry. I won't be applying for one of the jobs.)
Another kicker — many Gannett employees found out about the consolidation through rumors and a leaked blog post. Days later, they were officially contacted by the publisher. Oops.
So what does this mean for news design? Will all multi-paper publishers pick up this tactic? Will this method actually save the company enough dollars to make a difference? Or will this just produce cookie-cutter pages from burned-out designers with no connection to the reporters?
The switch is not set to begin for another year or so — the timing will not be the same for each hub. So the impact will not be immediately known. Guess we'll have to see.
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