Big changes

So my newspaper got a bit blindsided by the news that we've been sold to another company along with 14 other dailies my current company owns. We were told last night about 20 minutes for 5pm and even the publisher was a bit shell shocked.

Of course there were a lot of shocked faces during the announcement, mostly because I think the first thing people wonder is if they will still have a job. When you have a family to support, you have to be at least a little wary. But we've been told no one's losing their jobs and that our new parent company will work to make the transition as painless as possible.

The next thing you start thinking about is how something like this affects aspects of your job. For instance, in my department, which is the Online department, nearly every tool we use to publish the paper to the web, to schedule and post banner ads is proprietary software owned by our current company. If this sale closes by November 30th, does that mean everything will be taken away and we have to learn/design all new stuff to get the paper online in a month? Impossible. What about our archives? They go back to 1997. How will we transfer all that to new servers? Oh god the DNS transferring will be a friggin' nightmare...

All these thoughts zip through your brain in a space of seconds until you feel a bit overwhelmed. THEN you start wondering what this new company is like. What about your benefits, your 401k, your insurance... It's not long before you start to panic a little and when you come in to work the next day, everyone's office-hopping trying to get a read on everybody's reactions or trying to glean more info.

It's been an interesting thing to observe, to be honest. For my part, I'm concerned about transitioning all our stuff because it will be me drowning in the DNS nightmare (I hate dealing with DNS crap with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns) - I say I'm concerned but I'm also kind of excited. I think this will be good for us.

My paper is pretty forward-thinking and we've been one of the top papers at my current company to lead the way in using the web to enrich the readers' experience. I was told my paper was a deal breaker in this sale. They wanted us, the current folks didn't want to give us up. In the end, their debt spoke louder than their desire to hang onto us. Fine by me.

The new company looks pretty good from everything I'm reading and I think I'll enjoy observing this new experience. I've never been through a major shift like this. Should be cool.