From the Columbia Journalism Review, a report about Gannett’s new strategy to try to save its newspapers. Before reading further, you may wish to recalibrate your bullsh*t detectors to keep from blowing them out. It helps that the writer of the piece, Ryan Chittum, pre-snarks for your protection. Ready? Here we go:

Gannett’s latest Great Leap Forward will go “digital first,” heavily emphasizing metrics to guide coverage. It will have significantly smaller newsrooms with a few more reporters and a lot fewer editors, in part because it is centralizing production work like copyediting and page design in regional hubs. All newsroom jobs have been redefined and current staff must apply for new jobs. And, of course, there are the buzzwords and the chirpy editors’ notes to readers. Assignment editors become “content coaches.” Managing editors are now “content strategists.” A diminished newsroom is a “bold new structure.”

You have to read the whole thing for more of the Dilbert-speak. None of it is surprising to newspaper people these days. I just want to highlight this from Chittum’s piece:

Gannett’s papers, of course, have grave problems, like virtually all newspapers. But they’re only going to be exacerbated by yet another round of layoffs. This is a company whose newspapers had $314 million in operating profit last year, a number that will be down significantly this year but will still likely be in the $200 million to $250 million range.

These layoffs will not result in large amounts of savings. The Tennessean, for instance, has 37 reporters right now, who probably cost it about $2 million a year. The entire newsroom payroll will probably be under $5 million, generously assuming average salary and benefits of $65,000.

The new cuts will save the paper a few hundred thousand bucks a year, perhaps. This at a paper that reportedly earns more than $10 million a year.

Newspaper journalists can be arrogant, insular, smug, self-righteous, and blind as a bat — sometimes all these things before lunch. I know because I was one for many years, and was as guilty as my colleagues. But one thing most of us were not were suckers for this kind of b.s. boosterism. Then again, most journalists just suck it up and do the best they can under the circumstances.

To be honest, nobody has figured out how to make the transition successfully from the old print model to what’s coming. I have been part of many conversations among industry colleagues in which we all bitched that we knew better than our bosses, but the truth is, if you had put us in charge, I doubt our records would have been much better. In fact, I can think of a particular digital strategy that I pioneered as an editor at the Dallas Morning News, one that made a lot of sense … except it didn’t work. This stuff is really hard. Nobody knows anything.

And yet. And yet. Who, exactly, do people at Gannett believe is the audience for their jargon? If I worked for a Gannett newspaper now, my cynicism and rage would be boiling over.

I can’t figure out if it is better or worse to be fully aware that you were being screwed, and how you are being screwed, but not being able to do anything about it except to lie back and think of Woodward and Bernstein. The pain of the industry’s collapse is bad enough without having to endure the official lying.