Larry Kramer’s Exit Brings Some Answers, But More Questions for Standalone Gannett
USA Today Publisher Larry Kramer surprised a lot of people with his retirement, announced this morning. Yet, in the news, we see further clarified Gannett’s precedent-setting shift in editorial organization, which I wrote about last week (“What Are They Thinking: Larry Kramer and the reshaping of Gannett”).
Just a couple of weeks after being named the first Chief Content Officer of the new post-split Gannett, Kramer told me Monday afternoon that he had a change of heart, wanting to spend more time with family and reduce, rather than expand, his business travel schedule.
“It was a job designed for me, but it would have taken a three- to five-year commitment and a ton of travel,” he said. Instead, Kramer will retire and is being appointed to a seat on the new Gannett board. There, he’ll focus on the company’s substantial challenges as a standalone newspaper legacy company trying to get digital more quickly as print advertising spirals ever downward.
65-year-old Kramer, who lives in New York City and has begun to discover the joys of grandfatherhood, plans to join another board or two. His full-time executive days, though, he says, are over. Many observers were surprised when the long-time newsman and founder of the Marketwatch business news site took on the USA Today job in 2012. He’d pocketed substantial wealth from the $519 million Marketwatch sale to Dow Jones in 2005. He didn’t need the job, but wanted the challenge.
First published at Capital New York
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Now, he has set the table for a successor, as the new Gannett builds on the news centralization and innovation that has marked his tenure.
Kramer said a national search firm will conduct the quest for his successor in the Chief Content Officer job. Further, he explained in more detail than we’d previously heard the new organization that the C.C.O. will head.
Gannett will have an editor-in-chief, reporting to Kramer’s successor. Expect current USA Today editor-in-chief Dave Callaway to be a strong candidate for that position, with other internal candidates in the mix.
The biggest change, though, is the one I isolated last week: “The chief content officer will likely be over the editors. The editors would have a hard line toward the chief content officer, and a line to their publishers. That’s a monster change, but it requires people working together,” said Kramer. In that sense, the time-pressured collegiality has been a work in constant progress as USA Today began making more national news sections for Gannett’s biggest regional papers and heading up networked investigative projects, which I detailed last week.
Kramer makes the point of Gannett’s double change.
“This is both a split and a merger; merging USA Today into the other papers meant that all my key departments are now shared departments. They are part of the big company. USA Today structure becomes the structure for marketing, for sales. They wouldn’t report to the USA Today publisher anymore. They report to John Zidich,” just named president of domestic publishing as Gannett newspapers split off from its broadcast and digital assets as TEGNA.
Already, circulation and distribution functions had been merged. Up next: Sales and marketing integration.
We’ve all paid more attention to the split than the “merger.” As Kramer explains it, the merging of functions, and savings associated with reducing headcount, has been a key Gannett strategy, given its revenue shortfalls. “That’s where we were getting a lot of costs out.”
Kramer said he wasn’t interested in a wider business-side position, if it had been offered.
“I didn’t want to be the head of the publishing division,” he said, assessing the potentials emerging from the split/merger; a centrally directed Gannett would sit atop a newsroom of some 2.700 journalists, making it the largest single newsroom workforce in the world.
“I don’t really want to run 92 newspapers,” Kramer said. “That definitely would have been something too late to start on. That’s not what I wanted to do.
“They were willing to carve out the editorial job to give me because that was something I was willing to do, which was cool, and I think it was a good message for the company.”
Indeed, that carve-out made a lot of sense for Gannett—and for its standing among investors and the trade. We can see a logical argument for a Gannett creating a chief content officer position and restructuring its editorial reporting relationships. Absolutely critical, though, is who steps into the position.
Larry Kramer—given both his business and editorial chops, and industry standing—personified the potential of such a move. Now, with the job vacant, Gannett’s editors, and its whole, new organization, confronts a major question mark, just at the point of split, which will be completed by month’s end.
As Kramer notes, the chief content officer position requires someone with wider than just news editorial experience, as Gannett pushes forward into such extensions as documentary-making, and most effectively leverages Facebook and other social distribution partnerships. Finding that perfect fit won’t be easy; witness the New York Times’ recent travails in finding top executive leadership. Gannett, with its recent acquisition of 11 more community dailies from Digital First Media and with appetite for more buys, is a company clearly on the move. Today’s news, though, charts just one more obstacle on its post-split journey ahead.