Decoding The Tennessean's "Newsroom Of The Future" Statement

The Tennessean essentially fired its staff yesterday.

That's not snark. There were 89 slots in the newsroom, and there will be 76 at the end of the month. Everyone has been invited to reapply for jobs in the new newsroom.

The Scene asked for Tennessean staffers to contact us and many did. There was a level of outrage and anger that we haven't seen before. Much of it was directed at Stefanie Murray, the VP/Content who led the meeting with the newsroom yesterday, and her column explaining the changes.

That seems like the best place to explain the coming changes. From the column:

For the past month, I've been telling you in my Sunday column about some of the things we're doing and thinking about inside The Tennessean newsroom. Today, we took a bold step forward in our evolution. I want to make sure you — our readers — get a sneak peek directly from me at what's happening inside 1100 Broadway.

I'm confident you'll love the end result: we're promising a stronger, more interesting Tennessean delivered by a highly engaged group of journalists who care about Nashville.

Here are those columns:

— Murray used John Seigenthaler's funeral to chat up USA Today executives about aggressively using audience data to "give consumers the experience they want."

— Murray wonders what Seigenthaler would think about the five most popular stories on the site for the first half of 2014.

— Murray finally got around to registering to vote, but not in time for the August primary that she has had the paper launch a social media campaign in support of greater turnout.

The bottom line is that we're embarking on an ambitious project to create the newsroom of the future, right here in Nashville. We are testing an exciting new structure that is geared toward building a dynamic, responsive newsroom. This is a "reset" for us, an entirely different way of operating that gives us more reporters and columnists and puts them even closer to the communities they cover. Our goal is to empower them to be more focused on YOUR needs and interests. We will use scientific principles even more than before to listen to what our readers want and act accordingly. In other words, our judgment will improve because our listening is improving.

There's absolutely nothing new about this. Gannett has been using focus group research to shape the coverage that it gives you for decades. It's what led to the launch of USA Today and has been the backbone of any number of initiatives ("News 2000," anyone? "Real Life, Real News"?). All that it means in a digital age is that they will be gathering as much consumer information as humanly possible about readers in order to give them what they want. Of course, that can mean Taylor Swift as much as it means chasing kids trapped in a pretty bad DCS system.

A Gannett executive said that this "will let us gather the very local news and information that customers want, then distribute it when, where and how our customers seek it. It is the essence of our Vision and Mission and a key element of our Strategic Plan. …Implementing the Center across Gannett quickly is essential. Our industry is changing in ways that create great opportunity for Gannett.”

Oh, wait. That was actually from eight years ago, the last time the company rolled out the "newsroom of the future."

So what does that mean? Current positions in our newsroom are changing dramatically, and every job in the newsroom is being redefined. Instead, we're starting from square one with a new approach and a new set of jobs. Our employees will have the opportunity to choose the jobs they want to apply for.

Here's why it's being redefined — to save money.

Now, there is certainly a Hunger Games aspect to all of this as they take the number of middle managers from 10 or 11 down to 4. But for other parts of the newsroom, they're also re-grading the jobs. So, for instance, if my current HR classification is Photographer 3, I look at the new organization chart and see that not only are there fewer slots (from 10 down to 6), there are now only Photographer 2 and Photographer 1 slots, with lower salaries. How many staffers will lose money in this? It depends on who applies.

Current and former Tennessean staff will tell you that morale has been a problem for a long time. But the idea of making an entire newsroom look at a chart and choose two jobs they can apply for is insane.

Gannett HR will make the final evaluations, although input from senior management will play a part. This would seem to explain the — unconfirmed — raft of negative evaluations the Scene heard about in the last few months coming from Tennessean managers. Was groundwork being laid?

Certainly no one will ever write a love song about middle management, but facets of that layer are useful in a newsroom. Reporters will always gripe about their editors, but if you suggest to almost any of them that they are better off without one, they will laugh at you. Given the number of reporters with limited or no professional experience that they've hired over the last few years, those managers were in place to coach up the kids and make sure nothing dumb got published. Now Murray seems to be saying that reporters must file perfect stories directly to the web with little or no editing.

By this fall, you'll see a shift in coverage. We're adding a reporter to cover University of Tennessee athletics, focusing two reporters on the comings-and-goings of Nashville's lively retail scene and adding a reporter focused on tourism. We'll have a four-person investigative team whose important mission is to serve as the watchdogs of the community. And we'll have several columnists, including a metro columnist, a second sports columnist, a columnist focused on telling neighborhood and human-interest stories, and a columnist to write about food and the food culture in Metro Nashville. Also new: we'll have staffers whose job it is to talk to, and engage with, the community.

Adding a UT beat writer is certainly interesting. But considering the content sharing arrangement between the papers in the state which already gives them UT coverage — as well as AP — it's a complete luxury. And the paper had an investigative team before they dismantled it and ran off Walter Roche.

Two reporters focusing on the comings-and-goings of Nashville's lively retail scene is exactly double the number of people covering state government and the legislature full-time, and we live in the capital city. Is this anything beyond what Cathi Aycock has been doing? And a tourism reporter? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just embed someone from the Chamber?

Here's the breakdown of the columnists:

New sports columnist — Also a luxury item, unless they're just prepping for David Climer's retirement.

Metro columnist — With Gail Kerr's long absences from the paper, a Metro columnist was something that was desperately missing. There are a few people who could do the gig (Michael Cass, Chas Sisk), but I always thought Heidi Hall would make an interesting choice. It's too bad she's leaving for Vandy.

Neighborhood and Human Interest columnist — I have no idea what this is. If it's someone who will go out and find interesting stories, great. If it's fodder for the zoned edition that lands on your driveway every week, not so much.

In addition to announcing the new structure, today I also named two employees who will serve with me as The Tennessean's new newsroom leadership team. Maria De Varenne will be news director, guiding and driving our content creation staff to produce accurate, compelling and interesting journalism every day. De Varenne joined The Tennessean in December 2011, and under her leadership, The Tennessean and Tennessean.com have won numerous regional, state and national news awards. She's been integral in our push for access to public records and investigations of the State Department of Children's Services, the State Department of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and conservatorships in Tennessee.

De Varenne is a member of the Rotary Club of Nashville, Nashville Cable, the Nashville Business Conditions Council, and is a graduate of Leadership Nashville. Before coming here, she was the editor and vice president/news of The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif.

Sometimes I wonder if De Varenne regrets taking this job. The publisher who hired her left a year-and-a-half later. Her new boss brought

. She had her VP title taken away and now Murray has named herself executive editor, moving De Varenne over to be news director. She's had to cut staff constantly.

It must be cold comfort for the rest of the newsroom to see the former editor treated as poorly as they've been treated by Gannett.

David Anesta will serve as The Tennessean's consumer experience director, a new role for our company. In this job, Anesta will direct and improve the experience and presentation of our content across all platforms, including our print products, our website, our phone and tablet apps and more. Anesta comes to the newsroom from the Gannett Design Studio here in Nashville, which produces The Tennessean. Anesta was the creative director in the studio, and prior to joining Gannett in 2011, he worked in various creative roles at The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, The New York Post and The Prague Post. Anesta has been a publication designer, graphic artist, art director and illustrator since he graduated from the University of Miami in 2000.

Anesta — saddled with the most corporate-sounding title in any newsroom in America — will be tasked with making all of this work with the production hub that produces Gannett's papers for the Southeast. Good luck, but one request: Please no more 6-column illustrations from stock photography services.

Nashville is a vibrant, growing city. And just as it is experiencing a resurgence, so is The Tennessean. We've been in this community for more than 100 years, and we're continually reinventing ourselves — just like Nashville itself. As I've said before, our purpose is to impact and influence a better quality of life in Middle Tennessee. We see this new newsroom as our biggest step to date to making sure that we can fulfill that purpose, every day.

In the best possible world, editors are people who don't sugarcoat something that is bad and then try to sell you on opportunities. Fifteen percent of the newsroom will be gone soon and there are implications for that decision. You don't cut that many journalists and not have it affect the final product, but Murray's column makes it sound like a brave new world instead. I don't blame her. I'd rather talk about metrics and audience engagement than layoffs.

We renew our request: Gannett, please sell The Tennessean