Gannett is the largest newspaper company in the United States with more than 250 daily papers in 46 states across the country. In the quickly changing digital-age, Gannett has managed to keep print thriving by adapting with the times to ensure the longevity of credible local journalism and working with flexible and customizable software like Stibo DX’s CUE. Stibo DX spoke with Stacey Martin, Vice President of the Design Center at Gannett about the publisher’s longevity and relationship with CUE Print.
Stibo DX: Amid the Gannett-GateHouse integration, what were some of the major factors in keeping CUE Print as the CMS for print publications?
Stacey Martin: As we integrated the two organizations, we had a few key goals in mind. We wanted to honor the work both groups had done prior to becoming one – so we wanted to be thorough and thoughtful in our review of existing systems and workflows in use by each team. Ultimately the factors that were most critical in our review were 1) finding efficiency for our design teams and 2) having a system that allowed us to support sharing content and design across multiple publications. In our review, we found CUE to be the best solution in meeting our needs.
DX: Although Gannett is transitioning to a more digital model, print is still a solid business for the company. How is Gannett emphasizing the value of print and how does working with CUE Print support that?
SM: Our print readers are a passionate and loyal audience. They come to us because they appreciate the curation of content that the familiar print format provides. Gannett continues to focus on providing the best content and presentation to our print audience and CUE Print provides us with the tools to produce the award-winning design that our readers love.
DX: There’s a Poynter article about Gannett investing in “expanded content” in its 30 largest dailies. What does that look like and how would CUE Print aid that transition?
SM: One of our company-wide goals focused on retaining our valuable print customers and one way the Content group could do that was to add content in our Sunday print editions. For our largest dailies, the editors developed specific plans for their market that offered readers a variety of things they had been missing – longer-read analysis pieces, historical/archive pieces looking back in time for their community, photo pages with coverage of community events, even full pages of puzzles to supplement what they were already running on Sunday. While each plan was unique to the local community, they did have some shared elements, especially some of the long-read pieces where we could design once and use in many different publications.
DX: In July 2021, Gannett completed its roll-out of CUE Print to all the former GateHouse titles, allowing content to be shared across the entire group. Tell me about sharing content across titles and how CUE Print helps makes this possible?
SM: Gannett knows that readers heavily rely on our titles for local news, but we also know there are stories which resonate with readers across a geographic area or a topic of particular interest. CUE Print allows us to easily take a local story and, via default packaging, create multiple appearances of the same story across a state or region. We use sourcing of pages heavily in our sharing of complete page design – or even just design of centerpiece cover presentations. CUE Print’s functionality also helps us easily curate the best of news or sports wire offerings for use in all our products on a daily basis.