History | A long-ago date, and a fateful choice

[October 1987: I was 30, first day on the job in Little Rock, Ark.]

Part 1
On Sept. 10, 2007, Vice President Tara Connell was no doubt putting the finishing touches on a bizarrely worded and even more bizarrely timed memo. The next day, it would be zapped across the company's entire network, a process I believe that can take many hours to deliver to something like 31,000 e-mail accounts.

Read it now, and you'll see that the note, written over the signature of the chairman and chief executive officer of the No. 1 newspaper publisher in the United States of America, is predicting an ominous wave of layoffs, pension freezes, crashing stock prices, six-figure all-cash bonuses, Gannett Foundation insanity, shameful golf trips -- oh, you get the picture.

Chairman and CEO Craig Dubow, working side by side with an especially powerful chief financial officer in Gracia Martore, was about to start dismantling a 101-year-old company that traced its roots to what is now the Star-Gazette in Elmira, N.Y. (Many of you recognize that name because of Elmira Confidential.)

Part 2
And so, that next day, a very strange release date, someone hit the send button on that e-mail, and it chugged and chugged across Gannett.

But it didn't make its way to Gannett Blog.

That is because Gannett Blog did not exist. Barely 18 months ago, there was no blog whatsover about the No. 1 newspaper publisher in the U.S., even though the company had more than 50,000 employees in companies coast to coast and in the United Kingdom.

I had been wrestling for days with a decision about whether to launch what is now this blog, which by then I had been keeping privately for a year. In the end, though, my gut instinct told me to hit the publish button later that day, with this post.

I mention this now, because I just spent several hours, deleting hundreds of comments posted here beginning Saturday, when I arrived in Washington, D.C., for a Q&A with the chairman and chief executive officer of the Gannett Co. Inc., a Fortune 500 company in which I own one share of stock, but 20 years of sweat equity.

Part 3
Here's the point: I enjoy my new job very, very much. But isn't it extraordinary, how technology can now arbitrarily hand just one person so much strength through crowdsourcing? You may or may not like my editing style. We'll often disagree. But as I once more put one foot in front of the other with this post, I really want to earn everyone's trust, and run a big-tent show.

Keep coming back. It works, if you work it!

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