It's a Wrap

Then came baby boomers: Forget about Gen X attitude, reporters were told. It's boomers who actually read the paper. And the "minority source list": In an effort to quote more people of color, journalists were urged to compile a master list of black and Hispanic sources.

To reporters who've seen so many plans come and go, the "Information Center" is just one more rotation on the same carousel.

"Every couple years, there was a new initiative," says one reporter. "And with every initiative, we would be told, 'Newspapers are declining, you're not going to have jobs in the future — this is all so horrible that we're willing to try anything.'"

But "anything" never seemed to last more than a year.

"They spend so much money to launch something," the reporter says, "and then they'll spend even more money on a cake to say goodbye to it."

Ward Bushee, the Republic's executive editor, has a well-earned reputation as Gannett's golden boy. Unlike the Republic's first editor under Gannett, Tom Callinan, reporters say that he's personable and friendly.

Callinan, or so the joke goes, wasn't even willing to go to the bathroom, because that might mean having to say "hi" to people on staff. Not so Bushee; on his first day, he went around introducing himself to people, stunning the newsroom in the process.

The son of a small-town newspaper editor, Bushee, 58, was a reporter and sports editor at several small California papers before working his way up the Gannett ladder. He was the company's top editor in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Reno, Nevada, before Gannett sent him to Cincinnati in the wake of that paper's Chiquita scandal. (A reporter had illegally hacked into the banana company's voice mail, causing a major uproar.) Three years later, in 2002, Gannett sent him to Phoenix.

Each year, Gannett honors its top five editors with something called the "president's ring." The rings have existed for 16 years; Bushee has won 12.

The Republic may get ridiculed around town, but Gannett thinks the paper is great. Even the hated Monday edition, Bushee reports, has been picked by the corporate office as a "best practice" for other papers to emulate.

Reporters don't have a bad word to say about Bushee. They do wonder, though, whether he and other top editors at the Republic actually have a vision of their own.

"I don't think they've spent five minutes thinking about what the paper ought to be," says one reporter. "They think what Gannett tells them to think."

To hear Bushee tell it, though, the Information Center plan is at least partially homegrown. It comes from conversations that began in Phoenix four years ago, he says. Sue Clark Johnson, the former Republic publisher who now runs Gannett's newspaper division, based the Information Center on ideas that percolated during her time in Phoenix.

It's now a company-wide effort. A dozen Gannett papers, including the Republic, spent 2006 working on partial "pilot projects" for the plan. And three Gannett papers took the plunge and became "Information Centers" last year, according to the company's annual report.

Bushee's task was still cut out for him.

It's one thing to reorganize a staff of a dozen reporters and editors. The Phoenix Information Center, Bushee says, is "larger and more complex than others because of the scale of organization" — more than 400 reporters and editors.

There were numerous meetings to explain the new changes, and more than 90 training sessions over an eight-week period. Staff photographers were enlisted to teach writers how to take pictures: Part of the new game plan called for everyone to do a little bit of everything.

There were also sessions on "management/people skills."

"To be successful in the kind of massive organizational change we are attempting requires skills related to the work we produce," Managing Editor Randy Lovely wrote to the staff in March, "and the way we work with each other."

For all the planning, though, there was chaos. Despite the plethora of meetings, no one ever made it clear exactly how, or even if, new Web-based briefs were to be edited before posting. And the Web team was in despair over a plan that split them up and assigned them to work directly with "content managers" — formerly known as editors.

Across the Republic, both reporters and editors were asked to log on to an internal Web site to reapply for their beats. The idea was that everyone had a job, but that assignments might change drastically. (Reporters selling themselves for a new beat were given just 750 characters to explain their strengths.)

In the end, when the changes were announced in March, reporters estimated that at least 80 percent of the paper's reporters stayed on the same beat. But there were enough changes that, one reporter says, it wasn't uncommon to find people consoling each other after a good cry in the bathroom.

The changes seemed designed to keep things short and sweet.

In 2006, the Republic sent features writer Barbara Yost to Europe to cover the development process of Sam Fox's new Scottsdale hotspot, Olive & Ivy. At 5,000 words, the two-part series ran nearly to New Times length — and won Yost a coveted James Beard Award. Yost deserved the assignment; she's long been regarded as one of the paper's best feature writers.