America’s Paper*, USA TODAY*, has just conducted an overhaul of itself and its website. “Big whoop,” you might say. “The only time I read that rag is when it’s slipped under my hotel-room door.” (Sad that you can slip a newspaper under a door these days, but let’s move on.) Well, you should care because USAT* is owned by Gannett, which also owns the Burlington Freeploid and 80 other local newspapers.  And because, according to Gannett Blog, an independent online journal produced by ex-USATer Jim Hopkins, the USAT* redesign is meant to be a template for every local Gannett newspaper.

*According to a Gannett news release, the newspaper in question should always be referred to as “USA TODAY,” never “USA Today” or “USAT.” They also want “USA” and “TODAY” to appear on the same line — don’t have “USA” at the end of a line and “TODAY” at the beginning of the next. Also, you can call it a “newspaper,” but don’t call it a “paper.” I’m proud of myself; I just violated three of their four rules of Brand Management in a single paragraph.

Hopkins writes that the redesign has been marshaled by Augusta Duffey, executive creative director for Gannett. She’s a creative designer by trade, but until her recent arrival at Gannett, she’d worked at advertising agencies most of her career. Which raises some ethical hackles among professional journalists concerned about a radical reshape of the paper and its content from a purely marketing point of view. As opposed to, say, a journalistic point of view.

And Duffey, according to her LinkedIn profile, is “driving redesign of all of Gannett’s digital and print platforms, including USA Today (sic) as well as 81 local newspapers and 23 broadcast channels.”

So the shiny new Freeploid is a little box on Gannett’s hillside, as identical as possible to all the other little boxes. And made of ticky-tacky by an advertising designer.

But that’s not all. Mr. Hopkins has more glad tidings for Vermont readers.  

The revamped USAT has been referred to as the paper’s first substantial reinvention in its 30-year history. But that’s not true; the paper’s inner workings were completely overhauled two years ago. It was supposed to reposition USAT as a viable player in the new-media environment. Part of the big redo was the “newsroom of tomorrow,” that would allow the paper to do more with less (there were about 130 layoffs at the time) and position it “for our next quarter century,” bragged then-Publisher Dave Hunke.

Since then, USAT revenues have continued to plummet, and most elements of the “newsroom of tomorrow” never came into being, or existed briefly and were then aborted. As for Hunke, he was kicked upstairs earlier this year, and just “retired” at the age of 60.

And this is the kind of genius that’s in charge of Vermont’s biggest newspaper. As Hopkins puts it:

Even if you don’t care about USAT, the paper’s new website and digital offerings are likely to serve as a template and proving ground for those 100 other community newspaper and TV sites that Gannett operates from coast to coast.

…Corporate has invested enormous resources in USAT’s technology in hopes that it can leverage that across the company. Its success or failure could push all those community sites ahead, or leave them further behind.

Those “enormous resources” are being poured into Gannett’s second attempt at reinventing USAT, and not into actual journalism, at a time when Gannett’s publishing arm is hurting for money. (Gannett’s TV properties, by contrast, are raking in record profits, as Paul Heintz reports. You tell me where corporate is going to spend most of its time and effort.)

And, just to shatter whatever faith you might have in the Freeploid’s corporate overlords, they are betting heavily on the Gannett-wide Sports Media Group, which is meant to aggregate all sports news from all Gannett properties into a wonderful new multi-platform sports news network that, Hopkins says, “would challenge heavyweights ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and Yahoo Sports.” You know, the established heavyweights with a multi-year head start on Gannett, well-established reader loyalty, and loads of attractive original content. Good luck with that.

This is a bad time to be running a newspaper anywhere under any circumstances. But when you add the relentless push for profits from a corporate owner, plus that owner’s track record of failure at meeting the challenges of today’s media environment, you have to conclude that there are many dark days in our Freeploid’s future.