I began veering off into this topic in the previous post, about the Gannett-oriented blog (the one now on my blog roll).

Then I decided the concept was worthy of its own post.

Gannett vs. Singleton. Those of you who worked for both chains … what do you think?

To me, it’s not an open-and-shut case, which won’t surprise those who disparage chain ownership of any sort … but may come as a surprise to those still working for Gannett, which tends to see itself as the Cadillac of the chains. Especially since the rise of USA Today and the demise of Knight-Ridder.

I worked for Gannett for 23 years, from 1976 until 1999. And for Singleton/MediaNews from 1999 until three months ago.

So, compare and contrast? OK.

In Gannett’s favor:

1. A sense of a competence floor beneath which Gannett would not allow a product to fall. I don’t think that exists in Dean’s universe. Really bad Gannett newspapers were sure to get a new management team, and soon. I’m not sure Dean differentiates between his awful newspapers and the merely mediocre.

2. Gannett is a bigger entity with far greater opportunities. If you didn’t like where you were, in Gannett, you could transfer to one of another 80 or so newspapers, by the late 1990s. Those other papers skewed toward suburban (and smaller) newspapers the 23 years I worked for them, but they’ve bought a batch of bigger papers in the past decade. If you were competent, and really wanted to work in Cincinnati, there was a fairly good chance you could get there via Gannett transfer. With Singleton, if you work for his L.A. Newspaper Group, and you want to go to his Denver Post … I don’t think it matters a whit.

3. More internal cohesion. You really could call up another Gannett paper and ask for help, journalistically. Westchester-Rockland would send you their Yankees-Angels gamer, if you wanted. You might not have a reporter at the Olympics but you could call Gannett News Service and alert GNS to all your “hometowners” … and one of the group reporters on site would be detailed to do a story specifically for your paper. Singleton never has shared resources outside immediate neighborhoods (such as BANG and LANG).

4. A functioning corporate center. Singleton likes to talk about how streamlined it is (Dean, a secretary, a lawyer and an accountant) … but that lack of manpower at the center of things can be a drag on individual papers. To wit: Gannett always had a corporate recruiter. If you were looking for a reporter, the recruiter could send you five resumes in two days — 2-3 from within the group, maybe 2-3 who the recruiter personally had interviewed.

5. A better benefits package. It wasn’t a lopsided thing, but Gannett had a pension system in place into the mid-1990s … and then had a 401(k) system in which it matched the first 4 percent of salary you put into the 401(k). I don’t know if it’s still like that, but it was … and that was better than Singleton’s 1 percent match, as of the 1999 takeover of my paper.

6. Actual corporate-wide seminars and coaching sessions. Gannett would send out speakers to talk about pertinent topics in the industry. Many were useful. Some were not. Either way, Singleton does nothing like this, that I can recall. “Hey, the Singleton writing coach is in town!” Uh, no. But that sort of thing happened all the time, in Gannett.

In Singelton’s favor:

1. None of those ridiculous internal competitions Gannett loved to invent. (Remember News 2000, any of you Gannettoids?) The competitions often had little or no bearing on the quality of the product, but the contests often led newsrooms off on insane tangents. You would commission stories, concoct graphics, play photos … to improve your chances of scoring well in the contests. (Not because you really thought your readers wanted or needed whatever it was you were doing.) And the contests always, always were taken seriously by editors and managing editors because their salaries were pegged to how their paper performed in the eventual chain-wide grading.

If you were in Gannett for any length of time, you know we can hardly emphasize enough what a complete pain News 2000 and the “All-America” (et al) contests were.

2. On-site inspections. Once a year, the guys and gals from Rochester (and later, Roslyn/McLean) would show up, and those were crazy dog-and-pony shows. You would save up your best enterprise to run while the corporate folks were in town. The newsroom got a sudden sprucing up. Your ambitious colleagues would do some serious sucking up. It wasn’t healthy. Singleton has nothing like it … because he doesn’t have a corporate structure, to speak of. Frankly, I would prefer the ownership not to spend money on the dinners individual Gannett locations put on for visiting corporate dignitaries.

3. Singleton has no affirmative-action fixation. Gannett spent a lot of time and energy (and maybe still does) insisting that its papers “look like the communities they serve.” Which is fine, on the surface. But say you’re a Gannett property in El Paso, Texas, where the population is 90 percent Latino … There were points in time in the 1980s, for example, where hiring an all-Latino newsroom would have been extremely difficult. Because there weren’t all that many strong candidates, at the time, and because the best of them often already had been hired by someone else.

Far more than once I was instructed that a vacancy had to be filled by a (fill in the blank) minority. For example, for more than a decade, I had a paid summer internship that was open only to minorities.

Women sometimes were included in the minority category. Especially if your newsroom was too male.

All that led to some weird job searches. For instance, more than a quarter century ago I interviewed two women for the same job. I had been instructed to hire a woman. The end. I made my decision, and then called the losing candidate and told her I had gone with someone else, thanks. She reacted badly, saying, “I knew you would never hire a woman!” Eventually, she found out I had. I never heard whether that made her feel better or worse.

It also led to some lame excuses to white males (“uh, your 10 years at a metro don’t prepare you to work here”) and some spurious minorities. And quite a bit of hypocrisy, if not outright fabrications. I recall a section editor in our newsroom being ID’d, for corporate purposes, as a Native American. A status she never claimed for herself. The threshold for “minority” status was, as I recall, 50 percent, and that led to some apartheid-worthy genealogy checks. Also, more than once we presented someone with an Hispanic surname as a “minority” … when that person’s Latin parent might have been, say, Portuguese or Spanish. That is, no more Hispanic than George W. Bush, and less bilingual.

I don’t believe Singleton is anti-minority or anti-woman. He just doesn’t seem to want to commit the time and energy to worry about it. Which makes job searches easier. You just hired … whomever. The best candidate. That was a huge relief and didn’t seem to change the makeup of the staff. When I stepped down, as sports editor, in 2003, I had three women working full-time — on a staff of nine.

4. Singleton rarely interferes in the news pages of his individual holdings. In Gannett, there was always a push toward homogenization. Gannett papers tended (and maybe still do) to look the same and to have the same sort of hands-off, arm’s-length, non-partisan editorial outlook. (Talking the editorial page here.) Almost as if they were visitors to the communities they served. (Well, they were, but I digress.) Singleton seems to allow individual editors to indulge their preferences — whether they be in newshole allocation or editorial-page stances. A for-instance: Singleton owned both The Sun and Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, contiguous newspapers in SoCal. But they were seriously different, in their politics. The Bulletin was clearly Republican. The Sun most definitely was Democrat. I doubt Dean noticed.

The bottom line … was the bottom line. Dean just wants his money. He didn’t seem to care what the product looked like. And though that meant that some Singleton properties could be truly wretched newspapers, it also meant more local autonomy, and that may be a trade worth making.

5. Despite Singleton’s reputation as a cutter and a slasher, I don’t recall of a single newsroom employee having his salary cut or his raises frozen, when Dean took over San Bernardino. (I know it could be quite different in union shops, such as Long Beach, where everyone was fired and then hired back at maybe two-thirds of their former salaries.) In fact, I regularly got raises, while working for Singleton.

His usual method of reducing newsroom expense, at least before the current print meltdown, was fairly benign and truly clever, and it went like this: No departing employee could be replaced by someone at a salary even $1 above the person leaving. Thus, some veteran left, some not-so-veteran person was hired, and that person might come in with a raise but still be significantly cheaper than the dearly departed. After two or three turnovers for any one job, whether it be a two-year or five-year process, the salary paid to the newest person was (eventually) significantly below what the in-place reporter had been making when Dean bought the paper.

See? Clever. Insidious. But also relatively humane. Nobody laid off, nobody’s salary slashed. But in a few years the newsroom was reduced to entry-level-only type expenses.

I was hired by Gannett, promoted by Gannett, given chances to travel by Gannett. I was fired by Singleton. But I can’t say, with any real certainty, that one chain is/was better than the other.

Singleton fired me when the newspaper industry was in crisis. Would Gannett have done the same? Perhaps not, but Gannett would have done what it did — and that was to sell my former newspaper when it stopped making 25 percent (and up) profit every year. That’s how The Sun wound up in MediaNews in the first place, after making “only” 8 percent profit in 1998. So is it more accurate to suggest Gannett simply lets the Dean Singletons of the world do their truly dirty work?

In a perfect world, newspapers still would be owned by community-minded hometown citizens. As usually was the case 50 years ago. But that’s not how it is, anymore.

Anyone out there who has worked for both … who has an opinion? Love to hear from you.