One summer in the mid-1990s -- I think it was 1995 -- The Idaho Statesman was girding for Corporate's impending arrival on one of those on-site strafing missions. The CEO and other top brass would take the corporate jet to a group of Gannett papers for what seemed to be one of just two flavors of meetings: You were great, or you were shit. (Someone said those on-sites don't happen anymore. True?) At the time, John Curley was CEO, and Sue Clark-Johnson I believe was regional publisher for a portfolio of Western state papers.Then and it appears now, Gannett was divided into a series of corporate duchies with seats at places like Reno and now Phoenix, where publishers were given groups of newspapers and other publishers to manage. (In Boise, there were often worried mutterings about what "Sue's" latest missive to the publisher might have meant.)
I was the paper's investigative reporter. Our publisher's minute-by-minute, 24-hour script landed me at a steakhouse cocktail hour one night and then a 7:30 a.m. hotel breakfast the next day, where Clark-Johnson stood up, proclaimed "we have had good meetings," and you could feel the pressure in the room ease. She then turned to Gary Watson, president of the Newspaper Division, to answer any questions.
I raised my hand. Question: Was it wise to have so much of the company's revenue coming from newspapers, rather than other non-paper or digital businesses? This was 1995, when Netscape would go public, igniting the Internet revolution now threatening newspapers. At the time, I was struggling to get Gannett to greenlight The Statesman's first website, and hoped Watson would offer encouragement. I recall that he kind of sneered when he replied that, no, the company's future was newspapers. And that was that.
A postscript: Watson retired in September 2005, when Clark-Johnson took his job.
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[Image: Sunday's Statesman. Gannett sold the paper in 2005; it's now part of McClatchy. The paper reports "the deadly work that more than 100 Idaho citizen-soldiers of the 321st Engineer Battalion, an all-Army Reserve battalion in Boise, did for a year while hunting roadside bombs, the biggest killer of U.S. soldiers in Iraq."]
No more onsites. Instead we have the wonderful "drill". Pretty much the same m.o.
ReplyDeleteHow does a drill work? And how's it different from the old onsites?
ReplyDeleteAh, Gary Watson. "The Red-Headed Stranger," we called him. Most intense guy in the room. Maybe the smartest, too. What has happened to him since he picked up his marbles and left the game in a fit of pique because he'd been jumped over by Dubrow. Up until then, Watson had been considered the McCorkindale's heir apparent.
ReplyDeleteOnsites are a thing of the past. It was part of the Gary Watson 20th century male newspaper culture, and I theorize that culture operated the way it did because Gannett publishers have always had much, much more local autonomy than publishers at other chains -- and thus the direct interactions of onsites were scripted because such interaction was rare, high stakes. And I think some of the adversarial nature of Gannett's 1980s-1990s management style was partly a way of making sure the best ideas and practices rose to the surface.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, onsites like that are ancient history and the tenor and practices of the relationship between local market leadership and corporate has changed a great deal, becoming much more ongoing, casual, flexible and thus also faster and more effective. Local executives are still as accountable as ever for delivering revenue performance, however.