By Joel Thurtell
BOBS is dead.
That’s the word I’m hearing from insiders at The Detroit Free Press.
What’s BOBS?
It was a neat monthly set of awards voted by Freepsters to fellow staffers for taking the best photo, writing a story with the most flair, using the greatest ingenuity to get a story, and there was even one overall super-BOBS award for staffers who did something “above and beyond” the requirements of the job.
The award was named to honor the late Bob McGruder, one of the top editors of the Free Press for many years.
McGruder always encouraged Freepsters, be they reporters, photographers, editors, copy editors, whoever, to push themselves to the limit of their abilities.
Several BOBS awards were given out each month. There was more than honor involved. A $50 check meant the paper put its money where its platitudes were. It was enough of a prize that staffers could take a spouse or significant other to dinner.
It was a neat way of saying thank you from managers to staffers who often work long hours and don’t get much if anything in the way of pay raises.
My sources inside the paper tell me Gannett announced an end to the BOBS program until further notice.
Cost-cutting was blamed.
There’s more to it.
The end of the BOBS awards means one more vestige of the Free Press’ good old days under Knight-Ridder is gone.
In roughly half a year, Gannett has removed about three dozen senior staffers — people with memories of how the Free Press operated in the days when it took itself seriously as a newspaper rather than one of millions of clueless Internet sites.
Oh yes, there’s a culture purge going on, even if the blame is placed on the bottom line.
The younger the work force, the less experienced they are, the more malleable they can be. So the managers think.
Frankly, I think young people are just as smart as we old farts. Some of those young people are the most active members of The Newspaper Guild.
They know what bullshit smells like.
While it’s sad to see an institution like BOBS vanish, it’s not the end.
The end would be if people stopped questioning managers’ policies.
From what I hear, the discontent continues to brew, along with persistent rumors — reported in joelontheroad.com a few weeks ago — that Free Press owner Gannett plans to stop printing the paper either three or four days a week and will rely on the Web for those days when the paper isn’t delivered. What’s good for the Freep might well be good for the Detroit News also.
Again I’m hearing of plans to convert what remains of the print version of the Detroit dailies to tabloid format.
Got a tip from inside the Freep? Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
