Gannett Blog's Hopkins Ends Run Today

By: Joe Strupp Jim Hopkins, the former USA Today journalist who has been running the popular (if unofficial) Gannett Blog for nearly two years, leaves the Web site today satisfied he did what he wanted to do.

"Most important, it was a safe place where employees could gather and share information about their futures," Hopkins, 52, said Friday, just hours before he plans to end his updates of the site at midnight. "I have described myself from the start as a shareholder activist. I am not a traditional journalist, I have a point of view."

After 20 years at different Gannett newsrooms, the most recent as a USA Today business reporter and editor, Hopkins began to build the blog in 2006, but did not launch it publicly until Sept. 11, 2007.

He said a memo about future cuts from Gannett CEO Craig Dubow that day prompted him to go public, posting the memo and beginning a nearly two-year run of updates on news, views, and most important for many, layoffs.

"I did not expect to be blogging about Gannett for this long," Hopkins said by phone from Spain, where he currently lives with partner, Jim "Sparky" Chace. "I did not want to be spending the rest of my life writing about a shrinking company. It was meant to be a short-term project."

But as the popularity grew, Hopkins maintained the site and drew praise from many employees, and objections from the company.

"The official reaction is that they prefer employees get information from management," Hopkins said of Gannett. "Their position is that I am not a reliable source of information, which is not true."

Gannett officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

Hopkins, who was a USA Today employee until he took a buyout in January 2008, kept his identity hidden for those first four months of public blogging. He went public after taking the buyout, which he called "very generous."

He said he had hoped to get at least 500 unique visitors a day, claiming to have up to 4,000 on some recent days. He said he had planned to stop updating the blog last October, then moved it to June 1, then delaying it until today when the word of this week's 1,000-plus layoffs first came out.

"It has to end sometime," Hopkins said as he continued to update the latest layoff figures from a laptop. "I will leave the site up, but there will be no more new posts on it."

As for Gannett's future, Hopkins does not see it being successful: "The company has too much debt, it can't service the debt and even all of this cost-cutting will not be enough."

On his own future, Hopkins, living on the Spanish island of Ibiza, plans to launch a blog for gay businessmen and entrepreneurs. The title at the moment: Ibiza Confidential.

"Particularly for those who control a corporate budget," he said. "This is the first generation of gay men who have lived out of the closet and have influence over spending on communication, marketing, you name it."

He says he will not hand over control of the Gannett Blog to anyone, but believes something could be started to take its place: "There has got to be more than one person in the world who can do this."