Christy Bulkeley: Interview #5

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Ritchie: Last time we talked a little bit about your leaving Saratoga, how that came about. We jumped ahead at one point, and you were describing one of the situations in Danville. I wonder if we could start out with Danville today and how you were introduced to the community there, what it was like when you got there.

Bulkeley: Danville was November of 1976. As we talked before, Neuharth wanted me to go in and clean up behind the guy who had been there. When I went, it was a week or two after elections, so in terms of the government and political stuff, people were starting to look at new things. The staff had the five regular department heads, plus one gofer who had been a department head and had for years done just assorted odds and ends of things.

Ritchie: Were they all-men department heads?

Bulkeley: They were all men. Some of them had thought they would be the next publisher. The paper was without a publisher for about a week, I guess, between the promotion of the prior one and the time that I got there. Basically, the difference between Danville and Saratoga showed in almost everything. Danville is a working-class, blue-collar town, and in those days, in the mid-seventies, the sixties and early seventies had missed Danville altogether. In addition, the working class and blue-collar white people hadn't learned about initiative. There were so many generations of workers, union workers, small-business people who still considered themselves working class, not small-business owners, that it really was a very passive kind of a place that was reflected in the newspaper coverage. It was reflected in how they reacted to me. The tendency, if people didn't like something, was to wait until it was too late to do anything and then complain to each other.

Ritchie: You mean in the newspaper or in the town?

Bulkeley: In the town, in general. In any bar or coffee shop you could hear complaints about bosses or complaints about city council or complaints about one thing or another, that most of us think you're entitled to take to the person responsible, that you're entitled to talk to city council or your councilmen before a decision is made, and try to talk them out of it if you don't like it.

Ritchie: And work it out some way.

Bulkeley: And work out compromises. But that didn't happen in Danville. I think I mentioned the last time, even the plant managers of the big employers were so conditioned into just being cogs in a wheel, that they didn't really exercise initiative or do anything about change. They followed the patterns they inherited. That started to break up when I got there. For openers, my predecessor [Jim Graham] had been on the United Way and Chamber of Commerce boards of directors, and as became clear over time to me, usually when a CEO was changed, the new one

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Bulkeley: Automatically questioning anything that came from anybody who was supposedly establishment. It wasn't really being very constructive. It wasn't really working at covering things before decisions were made; it simply was going public with the same kind of harping that people did in the bars and the coffee shops, and then very arrogantly announcing, well, the newsroom was independent from the rest of the newspaper, never recognizing that the newsroom was part of the community and had responsibility to community.

Ritchie: Who would most of your advertisers be in a town like Danville?

Bulkeley: Danville was the center of a regional economy.

Ritchie: It's on the eastern border?

Bulkeley: It's on the eastern border of Illinois, five miles from the state line. Twenty percent of its economy and geography lap over into Indiana. But it basically is the center. The next circle of communities is Champaign-Urbana, the University of Illinois central city. North is Kewanee, Illinois, which is sort of a swing at the edge of the Chicago-Cook County area and the countryside. To the northeast is Purdue, Lafayette, and West Lafayette—Purdue University. Due east, there isn't anything until Indianapolis, along the interstate, but the Lafayette economy sort of bumps down into Crawfordsville and Terre Haute, Indiana, down to the southeast and south. Then to the south there isn't a whole lot. There are a bunch of little towns, and it gradually merges over to Eastern Illinois University in Charleston. But basically we were surrounded by papers, by cities with bigger papers, and all of the little towns of the countryside. The Danville economy was dominated by agriculture and by the heavy industries that I mentioned before—heavy industry manufacturing plants of seventeen Fortune 500 companies and four food-related, plus us, the newspaper.

Ritchie: Were you the only paper in town?

Bulkeley: Yes, the Gannett newspaper. The Commercial-News had been the only newspaper since the early thirties. At the turn of the century, there were four—one Republican, one Democrat, one business, and one other, which gradually had merged down into two and then into one that was left to DePauw University in Greencastle by the last two owners, left the paper to DePauw in the thirties, early thirties. The university, as a Methodist college, wanted to sell it to somebody who wouldn't allow liquor and tobacco advertising in it, looked around, found Frank Gannett, who didn't allow at least liquor advertising in his newspapers, and agreed to buy the paper. So he bought it in 1934. It was Gannett's western outpost until the expansion of the company that began in the late sixties.

Ritchie: So Gannett had owned it for some time.

Bulkeley: Gannett had owned it since 1934. As the western outpost, it really had pretty much run its own show. It had returned good profits, which gets me back to your question about retailers. By the mid-seventies, Danville had two department stores, one downtown, one in a small strip mall at the north end of town. Both had been home-owned, but by then one was owned by Carson Pirie Scott, had been Bloch and Kohl. They're long gone, and I've forgotten. Bloch and Kohl was merged with Carson Pirie Scott. Meis & Co. had been home-owned and had merged into another company. A whole extended family of Meises had owned department stores in the Midwest.

Ritchie: That's one I haven't heard of—the name.

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Ritchie: Was there not much building and construction?

Bulkeley: No, they only built what was needed. There were developments and there were houses being built. We looked at a couple across the lake. The bottom of Danville, besides having the interstate, had a river, and a branch of the river ran down its west side, had been dammed to make the lake that was the city's water supply. Across the lake was the establishment country club surrounded by the growing establishment subdivision, which is where we were supposed to live, but we wanted to live more in the city, partly because we wanted to try to do even a little town with one car, partly because I didn't want to spend my time running back and forth to the office, and didn't want to have to commute that much.

But the combination of a tight real estate market but with lots of realtors churning the property with still in the mid-seventies the end of the captive retail, retailers could spend less than the statistical norms on advertising, because they didn't have to go anywhere except into our paper. They didn't have to do the radio stations or other newspapers or shoppers. There was a little shopper in town that some people had financed getting started, to send a message to the newspaper to shape up, but it was not well managed. It took some of the grocery store inserts, the advertising supplements it was carrying when I got there, but it was not well run, and nobody was serious about it really. They were just trying to send a message to the newspaper.

Ritchie: This was during your tenure at the newspaper?

Bulkeley: It was there when I got there. Our ad staff had been told to leave alone the people who were advertising in it and not even call on them, although some of them were small businesses, service businesses and retail businesses we should have had, and didn't, because our rates weren't structured to encourage small businesses. Once the shopper started and had them in it, our staff was told to leave alone anybody who was advertising, that sooner or later those people would, of course, have to come to the newspaper. But the shopper disappeared primarily of its own volition within a couple of years simply because it wasn't well managed, and we started building more competitive rates. We also tried to operate with more integrity. I found the ad rate structure was based on annual bulk rates. You got a lower rate per inch at the higher volume you advertised.

Ritchie: Did Gannett set these rates? How were these rates set?

Bulkeley: Each property had its own rates, and it basically was what the market would bear to get as much revenue as possible with as little cost. But the bulk rates were really to try to lock in big customers, they were built for big customers. The rate per inch would be lower based on higher volume.

Ritchie: If you advertised every Saturday in the paper?

Bulkeley: Or X number of inches per year, then whenever you used those inches. But the principle of bulk-rate contracts was if you advertised more than you'd anticipated when you signed it [a contract], and went to the next [price] layer, at the end of the year you'd get the rebate. That would bring your average rate down to whatever you had earned by going to the higher level. If you didn't come up to the level you'd advertised, you'd be charged the difference. So if you had had a contract that said you should pay two dollars an inch, but your annual total came at the one-dollar-an-inch level, the paper was supposed to go back and bill you the difference, with a valid contract that says you could. But nobody had done that at the paper. The big advertisers who knew to ask for their rebates got them. Little advertisers were neither short rated nor rebated. The contracts were not resigned every year or when the rates changed.

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Ritchie: Where would this blame come from? From the higher-ups at Gannett?

Bulkeley: Basically a lot of the middle management staff at Gannett. The corporate guys were all right. Al [Neuharth] and Jack Purcell, who was the chief financial guy at the time, both understood that I had done something the guys hadn't and accomplished it, were quite helpful during the trauma. But Purcell left Gannett shortly after I went to Danville, and Neuharth was beginning by the late seventies to build toward USA Today and was also beginning to transition out, moving the next generation into key jobs. So it becomes the matter of the grapevine and the middle management guys at the corporation. There weren't very many women at significant levels on the corporate staff yet either, but one of them who was, was connected with some friends of ours, who kept sending messages saying, "She's got to cover her backside. They're still out to get her."

Ritchie: Meaning you?

Bulkeley: Meaning me.

Ritchie: And "they" being?

Bulkeley: Middle management, corporate staff guys.

Ritchie: How large was Gannett's corporate staff at this time?

Bulkeley: It had moved out of the fifth floor of the Gannett Rochester building up to a building called Lincoln Tower, one of the first high-class office buildings, taking two or three floors. So I suppose by then it was over 100 people, well on its way up. When I first went to Rochester, the corporate staff was a handful of people on the fifth floor. As it went public, it got to be more and more, and as the company grew, of course, it got to be more.

The other problems we had were things like open union contracts with the printers in the composing room and the press room. The contracts that had expired had language in them that in most properties had been negotiated out in the late sixties and early seventies, but for whatever reason they had not been negotiated out of Danville, and we had to make the progress in one contract in getting flexibility for new technology. We had to make that kind of progress in one contract when most properties had been able to ease into it over two- and three-year contracts.

Ritchie: So the situation with the union was not—

Bulkeley: Not very good. It was compounded by the fact that my production director and this jobless executive, who was helping with the negotiations, both of them sided with the union in our private conversations. The basic principle that we were trying to get in the contract, which was standard throughout the industry, was lifetime job guarantees in return for the freedom to use whatever was the most appropriate computer technology to come along. In those days, it basically was relieving newsrooms of the retyping of all copy that went on in the composing rooms.

Ritchie: Would these people be retrained as the technology changed?

Bulkeley: Yes, that would be part of the deal. Their jobs would be bought out or training would be offered to do the work with new technology. Knowing that was coming, newspapers had quit hiring new people for their composing rooms. When we were talking about Saratoga, we talked about the massive amounts of overtime it was taking to get the paper out, because they had quit hiring.

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they told him he was supposed to go do [the jobs], and then he just waited until they moved him. But his seniority, the fact that he had been at a paper that size was part of the excuse I was given when I raised the issue informally about the pay—he had all those years in size.

Ritchie: Prior to coming there.

Bulkeley: So he was overpaid for being in that job. Then why was he left there for three years? But anyway, what we ran into immediately in Danville was everybody we met wanted to know how we liked it. A massive insecurity complex. In Saratoga, everybody would tell us why we were going to love it in Saratoga with their list of things to do and their offers to take us places. Everybody in Danville said, "How do you like it here?" And we had to come up with ways to answer the question, because you don't tell people, "We're furious about being here and I am being treated like a little girl or an oddity," which I was.

In terms of the paper and running the paper, the fact that there had not been a woman there before meant I got a lot of invitations from women's organizations to come speak, which gave me a lot more access to the community than anybody had had or exercised in a long time.

Ritchie: These would be clubs of one type or another?

Bulkeley: Even the secretaries at the community college, the DAR, Daughters of the American Revolution, the PEO, one of the adult women's sororities. I don't know what that stands for, because I'm not a member, and it would be a secret anyway. But all of those kinds of organizations, plus the men's—the Rotary and Kiwanis and Lions, and all of the rest of them. I did thirty-some speeches in my first year or eighteen months in town, because I was asked. Most of the time when the women's groups called, they'd say, "We would never have dared asked your predecessor this, but—"

Ritchie: You're a woman.

Bulkeley: The men would say, "Of course, your predecessor would have belonged, so he wouldn't have had to speak, but since you can't join, I guess we have to ask you to give a speech." In Saratoga, I had gone to Rotary every week. It was a noontime meeting at one of the best eating places in town, and gave me access to people like the government executives from the county government who were in the next little town, I could see key people at Rotary and knew I could. That's where I began to understand the benefits of the service clubs in some places and under some circumstances, so that I knew later how to get our money's worth when my department heads joined, since I couldn't.

Ritchie: But you could attend meetings?

Bulkeley: In Saratoga, I was almost treated like a member. I was subject to fines. They would kid and fine me the same way they fined each other. When they did their every-other-year home show fund-raiser, I went ahead and signed up and helped, as their regular members did. They were a little surprised at that, but I figured I really should, because I was showing up all the time.

When I went to Danville, I was not even taken as a guest to any of the service clubs. They tolerated having me come speak when somebody on a program committee would badger them into having me come speak, but the time or two that I heard ahead of time about a speaker I wanted to hear, and made a department head take me, it was quite obvious that they were very unhappy

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organizations or whatever, without pay, certainly were as important to the whole community as those of us who were getting paid. But as far as I know, the club always kept the "paid work" rule in.

By the time it was five years old, the Executive Club had such a positive reputation that when Jim Thompson, the governor, wanted to come to town to do a town meeting, his advance staff called me and said, "How do we get access to the Executive Club?"

Ritchie: So they were established and recognized.

Bulkeley: So it was established to the point that the governor wanted the Executive Club for his luncheon speech, not the Rotary or the Kiwanis or the Chamber of Commerce, because the chamber only did one big annual meeting a year for members and the rest of the time it was just the board sitting there doing not much.

I forgot where I was going with that.

Ritchie: Did the Executive Club ever address issues such as ERA?

Bulkeley: It never dealt with ERA because that issue ultimately got killed before the Executive Club had an opportunity to. Over time, we brought in speakers dealing with issues all the way from workplace discrimination to mainline community issues. To my knowledge and memory, it never took stands as an organization, but it made sure that members had the information they needed, and generally the officers were women who had encountered enough negative stuff and discrimination in the workplace that had anybody analyzed the speakers, they would have seen a decided feminist tilt to the whole thing. Women ultimately got enough confidence that they could deal with those things.

One of the things I did with all of this "but we're not an ERA organization" stuff going on was break all of the rules and put an ERA bumper sticker on my car and start wearing a formal-looking lapel pin "ERA," to show people that you wouldn't get struck down by lightning if you supported the amendment.

Ritchie: When you say you broke all the rules, what rules?

Bulkeley: Journalists and newspeople—I still consider myself a journalist, even though in that capacity I was the publisher—decidedly try not to even think their own position through, think through to a position on issues, especially those they're covering and that the paper is covering. The individuals connected with the paper try not to display partisanship on political or issue positions. The car I had was the company car, which probably also should not have been subverted into supporting a political issue, but I decided there are times when the rules have to be broken. One of the reasons for knowing why the rules are there is to know when it's appropriate to break them. So I put the bumper sticker on and I wore the lapel pin.

Ritchie: Were there any repercussions that you were aware of?

Bulkeley: Nope. I had a conversation with Henri Meis, who said, "What's that pin for?"

I said, "Henri, I like to talk about baseball."

"Earned run averages?" he said. "Really?"

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on equal footing. So we had people we considered friends there, and goodness knows we sat and drank far too much more than once at Vermilion Hills, simply as a place to escape and relax with other people, including a night a major storm hit Danville we were down there.

Ritchie: Snow or rain?

Bulkeley: Wind and rain, damaged houses, knocked out the power, flooded some of the river valleys, creek valleys. David and I drove home through it. The phones were out. And as we came into town and saw the trees and the power lines all over, we drove straight home without stopping at the paper, but then I couldn't reach the paper [by telephone] until the next morning, and I wasn't going to go out in the mess by myself, because there were no street lights or anything. It was all very wet and dark, that dark that comes when it's still cloudy and when everything is wet and you just don't know where there's water and where there isn't.

The paper did a wonderful job. It's one of the things that showed me we had talent potential with that news staff. They just didn't know what to do when there wasn't a news disaster.

Ritchie: So they covered it?

Bulkeley: They covered it marvelously. Pictures—they had the whole story. They were an hour late on the press, but they had reduced power. We didn't have the computers yet. But nobody got scared of going out in the weather like the publisher did, or thought it was foolish. By then, since there was nothing I could do to help get the paper out, even as a reporter, I always felt if I wasn't covering a disaster, I shouldn't go near it and get in the way. It kept me from seeing the [Ku Klux] Klan march the one time it's ever marched where I lived.

Ritchie: In Danville?

Bulkeley: In Danville. Against the Iranians at the community college. The community college had both sides of Iranians—the pro-Shah and anti-Shah, and some of the royalty. Because it was a fast track into the University of Illinois, engineering and agronomy, they were coming there to go to Illinois, but they had to establish a college record in English before they could get in the state university. The community college, the Illinois system reimbursed for credits, subsidized community colleges for credits granted, completed, and never looked at the ratio of student-to-credit-hour, so the Iranians were allowed to take as much as twenty-three and twenty-four hours a semester in their second or third language in their first semester living in the English language. We found that out when David taught a class out there. I ultimately found it out otherwise. We [the newspaper] never took it on [as an issue], and we should have.

Ritchie: They allowed this to get the rebate money?

Bulkeley: To get the rebate money. David taught a sociology course out there, and the tenured sociology faculty members said, "Those are the textbooks. Here are the days of the tests. Here are sample test questions. I don't take roll." That was the intro to sociology. So one of the Iranian kids, as a for instance, said to David, "Dr. Finks, what you're going to do in this class with reading and writing and discussing, a reading list, it would be wonderful, and I would love to have time to do it, but I can't. I'm carrying twenty-some hours. I still read slowly in English, so I just can't keep up in here. I have to take this other one where I know this is what it is." Of course, the other thing is, they also had all the bodyguards registered at the community college.

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I was uncomfortable from the day I got there with our news product, and I was not satisfied to the day I left. The editor that I inherited ultimately moved, was promoted. I brought in an editor from West Virginia. Ron Dillman was the editor I inherited. He'd never been anywhere else to work except for a year or two, and had been in Danville twenty years, but he still saw Danville as he had seen Danville growing up in one of its little satellite towns. When he was moved to St. Thomas as the editor and then ultimately general manager and chief executive of Gannett's paper in St. Thomas, he moved that paper much farther along than anybody and developed far more potential, developed far more reality out of its potential than anybody in Gannett ever imagined could happen.

Ritchie: With him?

Bulkeley: On St. Thomas, given the vagaries of how business is done there, the cultural work habits, power, electricity uncertainties, and all kinds of things. Chuck Carpenter came in while Ron was still there, and was there for a year, a year and a half, while Ron was. I moved him from Gannett's West Virginia paper. He had also worked at the Charleston [West Virginia] paper. Chuck basically came out of a working-class background, but, I've understood much later, was very strong into denial and very much into the trappings of being an executive. He rapidly bought a house out in the executive subdivision. Years after I left, he bought a bigger house in the next executive subdivision. He always resented the fact that Gannett started enforcing the personnel benefits rules. When I got to Danville, three newspaper people had executive country club memberships paid for by the newspaper.

Ritchie: Three people?

Bulkeley: Three people—the editor, the jobless gofer, the gofer with no portfolio, and the publisher. But I was not allowed to continue those. When the gofer left, that was the end of that company-supported membership, and when Ron left for St. Thomas, I was not allowed to buy one for Chuck. If I had operated the way my predecessor [Jim Graham] did, I would have done it anyway and buried the money somewhere.

Ritchie: Did you see this as an advantage or a disadvantage to the paper?

Bulkeley: I didn't really understand the different class reactions to institutions and to people in power and to information from institutions. I only started finding that reading in the eighties, when I was gone from Danville. I had thought that Chuck would relate better than I would, did, although I had worked very hard at getting to know all kinds of people. I had thought Chuck probably would relate better to non-establishment people than I did, but instead, of course, he related to the equivalent of the yuppies of the era.

Ritchie: Because he wanted that.

Bulkeley: Because he was ambitious and grasping to move up and have more status symbols as they were, and in a town like Danville, there weren't a whole lot of them.

Ritchie: When you say you moved him from West Virginia, how did you do that?

Bulkeley: When I had an opening that could be built into an executive opening, the process works through the corporation, and you simply work with the corporate news executive over candidates—what you think you need, what the corporate executive thinks you need, and you

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Ritchie: They moved him from another paper?

Bulkeley: Moved him from another paper, out of his support systems and into a tough situation, because again it was the change agent role. While he had the intelligence to do it, he didn't have the personal ego strength to do it, and had been a printer and moved into supervision within the trade. So he just didn't have what it took to move and to not drink and to do the job. Well, I had never been around an alcoholic of any kind before knowingly. My department heads wouldn't even tell me that he was a drunk. Some of them knew it. Because socializing at that level, you don't socialize with the boss, you socialize with your peers. They realized that he was a drunk. Some of the employees, the foremen in the departments knew he was a drunk, and nobody would tell me. I must have been there three or four years by then. He was there over a year, and a lot of them thought I knew it and was accepting it and putting up with it.

Ritchie: But there was no communication about it?

Bulkeley: No. And all of this stuff I had done to try to establish communication even with the department heads, none of it worked, and I went back not in a—I don't think in a furious punish mode, but in a trying to understand why wouldn't they tell me or be sure I understood those things. Well, the foremen—you just don't talk to bosses, let alone women that way, tell them those things. The department heads really weren't sure why, but a lot of it was the whole new relationships thing and the assuming I'd known it. But the regional president who was responsible and the publisher at the other property, both had known what the guy was.

Ritchie: And never told you?

Bulkeley: Never told me. Whether they didn't understand human dynamics enough to know that you don't move people like that into tough situations or whether the publisher was, as some of them will do, unloading a problem, and the regional president trying to help those who were out to get me, I don't know. There are times, of course, when all of the paranoia is there, and I assumed that they all did it on purpose—"Make her life as hard as possible and get rid of her."

It's the lightning rod role that those of us who have been there know and understand. You do what you can to protect yourself from it, but you never realize that sometimes people's own fear of those who are different consciously or subconsciously even transcends their company loyalty. They should not have been doing things that undermined the company. If the alcoholic couldn't hold his own where he was, he should have been retired on a disability or whatever, not sold somewhere else in the company to do more damage.

Ritchie: How did you deal with the situation when it finally came to your attention?

Bulkeley: He was moved on to sick leave, given an opportunity at company expense to dry out, then get his feet back on the ground, and be relocated into a job where he wouldn't be exposed to the kinds of pressures that would create problems, but until he had been through drying out and full evaluation, nobody had any idea what that might be.

I brought in a new executive, and I sat down with the different groups of people and repeated the same old stuff about, "I'm here to try to help all of us do the best we can, because the best of all of us is what it takes to make the best for the company," and regretting that it all went on, both apologizing but also trying once again to build better communication.

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Bulkeley: They didn't like it, but I said, "I'm sorry, you guys did it. We didn't call in OSHA." The corporate guys, the good ones, knew that I wouldn't know a press guard from—well, I was going to say a hole in the wall, but I know about holes in the wall. And I went back there every day to see that they had the earmuffs on. Of course, they all said, "She's being punitive." Well, yeah, I suppose, but I also was trying to get enough of a feel for what was going on.

The other thing they did was organize. The part-time workers in the mail room and the park-time drivers organized them as a union.

Ritchie: So the press people were expanding their base?

Bulkeley: Trying to expand their base. Right. Of course, in any company that tries not to have unions, the first reaction is, "The boss screwed up." Well, yeah. I had no way to know about needing to teach contracts, and nobody ever made any effort to tell me.

I talked to my press foreman about why hadn't he ever alerted me to the problems of the press and the decibels. He said, "I brought it up with your two predecessors."

Ritchie: And they didn't do anything.

Bulkeley: "And they didn't do anything about it. I get tired of sounding like I'm complaining all the time. So I just figured if two of them had turned it down, you weren't going to make any different decision."

I said, "Well, okay, but understand that every time there's a new boss, no matter how many it is, it's a new chance to make things right. Sooner or later you're going to find a boss who wants to do things right. In this case, we have blown it, and we have all this crap we've got to deal with now."

When the corporate labor negotiator was in, we had a meeting with the drivers at one point.

Ritchie: These are the people who deliver?

Bulkeley: The people who deliver the paper in the countryside, some of it house to house, some of it bundles to carriers. More than half of our circulation was scattered around the countryside. That reminds me of something I want to talk about—the economy—in a minute.

The labor guy, after we had the meeting with some of the drivers, we met in the dining room, the lunch room, in the building, we walked back into my office, he shut the door and collapsed into the chair, one of the chairs, which I had never seen him do, and he says, "If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it."

I said, "What?"

He says, "All of the hostility from the women at you."

I said, "What don't you believe about it?"

He says, "Well, it's clearly a class sexist thing. They know they're at the bottom of the heap and you're at the top, and they hate it, and they hate you for it. That's why they were

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my predecessor hadn't really budgeted. The corporate budget instructions say, for instance, any increases over X percent, say 5 percent, in a line item or a department needed to be explained. So my predecessor would always just raise all of his expense numbers by whatever percent didn't require explanation. They'd spread it evenly across the year on the spreadsheets, but then they'd manage as they went. They didn't think ahead on, "How much raise should So-and-so get?" They'd wait till the union contracts were settled, then raise all of the professional departments the same amount, which also was archaic. Gannett had long since been preaching merit and merit pay and individual evaluation, none of which we were doing in Danville.

Ritchie: No evaluation?

Bulkeley: No evaluation. The department heads would come in and say, "I'd like to give So-and-so this much raise. He's going to retire next year, so we've got to get him way up for his pension," when he was carrying the lightest load in the department, for instance. I'd say, "Is there money for it?" They'd say, "Well, sure. We haven't been spending money, because we've been below in payroll." But no plans. Nobody ever thought through ahead of time what they were doing in the budget or anywhere else.

We started working toward that as I got department heads who were capable of it, but we had all of those things working against us when the economy started down and we started losing lineage with the interest rates up. The housing turnover stopped. The agriculture side of the economy, which was a big hunk of it, started having trouble. The banks were big advertisers, and started having cost concerns. So that recession that most people talk about as '81, '82, started in Danville in '79. Our lineage started down in the beginning of '79, and the jobs started to disappear out of our market.

Ritchie: What do you mean when you say your lineage?

Bulkeley: Lineage is jargon. Advertising space used to be sold by the agate line, which is a type measure, a measure of type. It's actually inches, quarter inches. X number of lines make an inch—I think fourteen. Twelve? Something. Anyway, it was still called ad lineage in those days, in the vernacular. But our advertising volume started down in '79.

So that recession that a lot of people didn't feel until later, we started feeling. Jobs started leaving the market late in that same year. Within two years we had 25 percent fewer jobs in our economy as the labor department defined it, which is about the same as our circulation defined it. But that also then meant we started losing our hold on the far reaches. People at the far edge bought our paper because they were coming to our town to work and they'd shop and entertain there, and their friends were there, so they needed to know whatever we told them that was going on. But when they no longer had jobs to come to there, they no longer needed our paper, and they gradually would shift over to the physically closer economies.

So by the time we got our circulation department straightened out, the economy started costing us circulation, starting costing us geographic reach. I used to watch the numbers of all of the neighboring papers. We could get them by township.

Ritchie: Circulation numbers?

Bulkeley: Circulation numbers by township, including the Chicago papers. There were a couple of tiny dailies within our circulation area and a few weeklies. The weeklies are where people would swing back and forth if they had related to other neighborhoods and communities.

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Bulkeley: Because Terre Haute television was covering the newspaper strike, and that's the only place people could get news of the newspaper strike, would be on the Terre Haute television station. But they knew about it. We'd carry a paragraph or two, but it really wasn't local news either. But that's how I discovered things like that's why television guides, TV Guide, sold much lower in our territory than in others, because it didn't carry the channels we got. Our own television schedule book was okay, the one the newspaper published, because we knew which ones we carried, but no other organization that tried to sell on television channels could match us. That also then told me that we had a way of showing the value of our television book, but our ad staff never could sell it. We simply had those other kinds of things to measure our own performance with, that for years simply weren't used by newspaper people. I don't know how I learned to use them, but I did. The zero-based budgeting they only started talking about for Gannett newsrooms in the late eighties, and we had been doing it. The Danville paper also—we talked earlier about the inane features package that Saratoga was buying and not using very much of. Danville was doing the same thing. Again it was a chance to raise the quality of our content without raising the cost.

But one of the clues of memory and how long memory lives, where you don't control change, where people don't have control over their own lives and their own change, one of the cartoons in that package was "The Born Loser," in those days only available in the package, and they [the features syndicate] used that as a way to try to leverage the whole package. They wouldn't sell it [the comic] to me independently. It was one of the most popular comics in Danville, in our area, in that area where people asked us all the time, "Do you like Danville?"

After I left, one of the first things my successor [Gary Stout] ran into in some places was, "Now can we have 'The Born Loser' back?" It had been out of the newspaper for nearly seven years.

Ritchie: Because you discontinued it?

Bulkeley: I discontinued the package. They wouldn't let me buy it separately. They wouldn't let the paper buy it separately.

Ritchie: Who is "they"?

Bulkeley: They would be the features syndicate that sold it—the Newspaper Enterprise Association in those days. The package had features for women's sections and editorial page columns, editorial page cartoons, home building pieces, comic page comics, all of those things in it.

Ritchie: But you didn't see that it benefitted the paper.

Bulkeley: Of the stuff we used, which was probably three or four comics, weekday and Sunday, and a couple of editorial page columns and some of the cartoons, we could replace with first line columnists and cartoonists and comic strips at less than we were paying to get the whole package. There was stuff in the package that we didn't use, that we could have, but even working through it and using it, we could see—I could see and some of the newspeople could see—that we could do better and quit wasting having all of this stuff come in and somebody have to sort through it for what we did want.

By the time I left, the paper was, as it turns out, able to buy "The Born Loser" independently. It had run into enough other things or other problems with the comic artist

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Ritchie: Did you get any staff reaction from this type of thing? You said they didn't read the newspapers.

Bulkeley: The editors didn't read the little newspapers. The newspeople were so busy discovering that we were providing other resource materials and the reporters in our newsroom weren't responsible for covering the countryside—the news or city councils in the little towns or whatever. But I knew that they were being used, I assumed, because people talked to me, and I wandered the plant all the time, carrying my coffee cup with me, if necessary, for cover.

The news staff also never did any learning things. In the Rochester newsroom, about once a quarter we'd have what was called a beer and cheese session with somebody—the DA [District Attorney] talking about change in the criminal law, or a judge or a politician, or a businessman or whatever. Anybody [from the news staff] was invited to come who wanted to, so we could learn more about whatever the speaker had to do with.

Ritchie: To get updated on changes in the law or something.

Bulkeley: Right, that might affect what we were doing or just because we wanted to know it. Sometimes it would be on writing—the mechanics—but more often on substance. We started doing these in Danville as I realized that I had really good newspeople who simply needed to be led into being better or being adequate for other places, because what was adequate for us wasn't good enough for many other places. So we set up the beer and cheese sessions and started doing those on a regular basis.

We did our own stylebook—the peculiar local spellings. Where the Associated Press stylebook would leave you a choice on what was the correct way to do something or spell words like "employees" or whatever, we set up our own local stylebook with all of those peculiarities. Just a lot of the things that I had taken for granted where I was before, our newsroom didn't do, because Danville had been so removed in terms of Gannett, that there hasn't been a lot of feeding back and forth of the good people.

Ritchie: Who did you report to at Gannett? Did you report to one person directly?

Bulkeley: When I first became a publisher, I reported directly to Al [Neuharth], as did every other local chief executive, which meant you didn't really report to anybody, because running a half a percent of the company, I wasn't about to think I should bother him with my questions. There also were corporate staff specialists by then in each major area—news, production, advertising, circulation, finance, personnel.

Ritchie: So if you had questions.

Bulkeley: But they were peers or service to us, not bosses.

Ritchie: Would they monitor you?

Bulkeley: They theoretically monitored the kinds of reports we sent in, including the occasional things we sent for the newsroom. All of the newspapers went in, and theoretically they read our newspapers on some kind of regular basis, audited to see where we were and what we were doing.

Ritchie: Did you ever get feedback from this in terms of your news coverage?

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She said, "I'm tired of this stuff. I'm only going to work for Gannett, so I'm not going to work until you or Lafayette has room to hire me."

Ritchie: Lafayette was also Gannett?

Bulkeley: Lafayette was a Gannett newspaper in the northeast corner of our territory. She had already done four years in Washington, in the Washington bureau, and I knew from the interview she knew how all those pieces fit together up and down the political, governmental, regulation, dollar ladder. So when we had room, we hired her at what for us was a premium, as the government affairs reporter, but she knew part of her job was to teach the rest of the people who were interested in government and politics, to teach them about negotiating space and that that was fair, about anticipating what was going to happen, not just reacting to government and political moves, initiating coverage up and down those chains, not just waiting for decisions, but talking ahead of time about what was going into decisions. And the staff flocked around her. She was a peer, so she wasn't threatening to staff. She wasn't a boss teaching a way they had to learn. I could see the dynamics happening and I could see the coverage improving.

Ritchie: It could have been you years earlier.

Bulkeley: And that was not too far off a kind of proposal I'd made that was ignored at one point in our staff.

Ritchie: What was her name?

Bulkeley: Judy Keen. She's one of those who ultimately ended up at USA Today. There was a period at USA Today where three of its seven or eight page-one reporters were women I had brought into Gannett, two of them out of Danville and one out of Saratoga. The one out of Saratoga was Marilyn Greene. I had known her first husband when we were all cub reporters together. She came back to work after fifteen years raising children, working for me and us in Saratoga, then was a features editor [at Gannett's Ithaca paper], married another editor at that paper. In Gannett, people like that didn't get fired. But anyway, I brought her into Gannett in Saratoga. She, Judy Keen, and Jean Becker, three women, all were on the front-page staff of USA Today, and I, of course, naturally said to the corporate news vice president one day, "Come on. Lots of days two of them have their bylines there at the same time. Do something and get all three of them on there at least once for me." And he knew that I was reminding him that out of two relatively little newsrooms I had produced more newspeople that understood the dynamics of that newspaper that still really wasn't understood by the trade, and could hold their own on the front page and were critically important reporters for him. It wasn't long after that, that I got my front pages with all three bylines.

Ritchie: So they understood how things worked.

Bulkeley: In many ways the front-page people at USA Today had it the easiest, because on big stories, the first layer or two of story affects everybody and everybody wants that layer of information. To some extent that happens at USA Today. But they also understood the stuff that traditional newspeople didn't think was important, that they as women who had lived through families and things on the cutting edge of change they understood was important news, and they knew how to cover it in ways that made the front page of USA Today vital to not just men, not just men looking for traditional news headlines. I wasn't smart enough to save a few of those front pages with all of their bylines; I should have.

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Bulkeley: And to the corporate chief executive office, the head of the newspaper division. I guess by then each division had a head, and then our division was broken into the regional executives whom we all reported to. But our reports went to headquarters and were circulated so that the staff specialists—see, we had that vertical structure, then we had the horizontal one connecting to the staff specialists. But their bosses would be the head of the advertising division on the corporate staff, not the head of the newspaper division. So we had a double report relationship with all of those people responsible for what happened to us. Keating didn't know the newspaper business.

The Midwest by now was fighting a recession. We'd talk about cost-saving stuff, and the stuff he'd say he was doing in Cincinnati was stuff we'd never had money to spend on in the first place. "Well," he'd say, "we cut back our messenger service among departments from twenty-four hours to twelve." He was head of not just the newspaper, but the joint agency that ran the common departments for both Cincinnati papers. The joint agency is the vehicle for getting around the antitrust laws. There's a thing called the Failing Newspaper Act, that if a city is about to lose one newspaper, they can merge all the departments under guidelines and controls and contracts, keeping the news department separate.

Well, Keating was the head of that, as well as the publisher of the Enquirer, but he didn't understand the dynamics of little places at all, where you don't have specialists anywhere and you don't have sixteen layers anywhere. We were long since down to one secretary who also did other stuff in the whole building. There were three executive secretaries when I got there. We long since had shaken out any excess reports and leftover, because nobody had ever evaluated at processes. But he'd say, "So we cut the messenger service." Well, we didn't have messenger service. When the woman at the switchboard finished sorting the mail, she called the department heads and told them their mail was ready, and they sent somebody down to get it.

Ritchie: He didn't really know how you operated.

Bulkeley: He didn't know how we operated. In the early eighties, he'd come in and visit, and I'd have him be in the lunchroom with open access of my staff, who by then was learning to talk to bosses a little bit. He wouldn't understand why would I let my staff have access to him and use up some of his precious time, having free coffee and doughnuts in the lunchroom for staff who wanted to come visit, to know he doesn't have warts or horns either. But he really was a waste of my time, because he didn't know about running newspapers. He wouldn't let us take the stuff we were having trouble with to headquarters to find out.

Ritchie: Because he wanted it to look good.

Bulkeley: Because he wanted it to look good, only wanted good to go. As USA Today started, as the economy was collapsing, as the company kept growing, the next layer of regional vice presidents was set in. The Lafayette publisher and I were asked to do regional vice presidencies.

Ritchie: So this was a new position.

Bulkeley: New position, new layer. We were reporting to Keating. I took responsibility for the small newspapers within the region. The Lafayette publisher was Mal Applegate—Mal, short for Malcolm. I took the little papers, the size I had worked at and was working at. We were, in effect, the corporate generalists providing oversight.

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made at these papers, the publishers not learning and growing, and the department heads. But in the course of it, I heard him saying how much authority I had, that I had never heard about before, how much initiative I had been expected to exercise, that Neuharth had expected to come by having these layers of supervision with somebody able to get into the properties, none of which I had been allowed to do, nor had I understood. I had really heard my job from Keating and the head of the newspaper division—Jack (John) Heselden. I had really heard a role not unlike what I saw the corporate plant managers having in Danville, that I could go look and see what was there and tell Keating, and that was it. That isn't what Neuharth expected.

I had also for years heard about Neuharth's terrible temper. So after this meeting, I said to Keating, "On a one-to-ten, where did that chewing-out stand?" I was thinking three or four, maybe. Keating said, "Well, his language was cleaner than usual. Of course, you and Madelyn were there." Madelyn Jennings, the personnel vice president. Keating says, "You and Madelyn were there, so he probably cleaned up his language for you. But otherwise, it was about a seven." Well, I was floored. If that's what he thought was a seven, no wonder he didn't want negatives to go on. But he also didn't know enough about newspapers to know he also wasn't giving us room to do anything about them, and they were going to keep piling up.

Ritchie: How many people reported to Keating?

Bulkeley: The two regional vice presidents plus the biggest papers. We basically split the papers up into the three sizes, so whatever the biggest papers in the region were at that time reported to him.

Ritchie: Directly?

Bulkeley: Directly. I don't even remember what they were.

Ritchie: Did things change after this meeting?

Bulkeley: Well, my dealing with my publishers was a lot stronger, because I knew then that Neuharth expected me to take charge, so I did. USA Today by then was started, so a lot of people blamed USA Today anytime they had to cut their budgets.

Ritchie: Because that was taking corporate money?

Bulkeley: Because it was corporate investment and certainly was big losses, big investment. One of my publishers wanted me to sit with his news staff and talk to them. He had a small news staff. Terrible newspaper. What they did was awful. I did, and we talked economy and we talked USA Today and we talked lots of things. The first question was, "We've got these vacancies on our staff. How can we be expected to do better when we have to send money to USA Today?" Well, as it turned out, that paper's profits were lower than it had been the prior year, and the cutbacks, even had it been a family-held newspaper, there would have been cutbacks. The publisher was the son of the people we had bought the paper from.

Before the Neuharth chewing-out, I probably would have done a "If that's the way it is, that's part of being here. We'll get the long-haul benefits." I sat there and I said, "The staffing situation here has nothing to do with USA Today." We don't talk profits. I mean, you don't talk dollars and stuff in Gannett. Well, I did. I said, "The fact is, you're producing fewer dollars and a lower percentage of the gross, both. Either way you measure, this paper is performing worse this year than it did last year. Even if a family owned this newspaper today, those vacancies

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our total costs were only 17 percent higher—15 [percent] maybe—in '83 than they had been in '79, though inflation was more than double digit three of those years, and nearly double digit the other two.

Some of that savings came from the computer production system that saved us overtime in the composing room. Some of it came from less business volume reducing our newsprint costs. Most of it came because we gave up staff and learned how to do the same volume of work with fewer people, with better people. And because we got everybody involved. One of the supervising clerks, the office supervisor for circulation, for instance, came to me at one point and said, "You know that night complaint clerk job that we have two people in at minimum wage? Well, for another 50> an hour, I could keep So-and-so, and she, with the switchboard person, can handle it. But if I can't pay her more, I'm going to lose her, and both of those jobs keep turning over anyway, because we just won't pay another little more."

I said, "Okay, let's try it. We'll keep her. When the other one goes, when we have a turnover that lets us raise the pay, we'll do it. We'll give her some of the raise now, but then we'll try it after that and see if it works." Well, it did. So instead of paying two people $2.80 an hour, or whatever the minimum wage was, by raising one person 50> an hour, we saved all of the rest of the other person. We stopped the turnover that had cost the office manager hiring and training time and occasionally filling-in time at an even higher rate, a much higher rate. We got better service. We got much better work from one person keeping hold of the whole job, and she didn't need to be supervised, because she was doing the whole job rather than a supervisor having to put together the two parts. It wasn't a huge savings in dollars to the bottom line, but in terms of principle and convincing materially that the people at the front lines know what it takes to do the job, it was a wonderful object lesson.

We stopped the turnover in those district manager jobs, the circulation supervision jobs, by identifying clearly the measurable parts of all of the jobs—the carrier training, keeping carriers, collections, sales—we put a weekly premium on each job [part]. At first, because we had so many carrier routes open and such lousy collections and sales, at first the standards would be set by each district, and what it took to get it up to snuff, but we left the pay where it was and then put a bonus on for each area of performance each week or every other week.

Over time, we found what caliber of people it took to keep the jobs together and how much we had to pay to do it, so we then converted it into a salaried job at the pay level, but expected the performance to stay at the highest standards. That took us a couple of years, and it tied up the circulation director a lot, but it gave him weekly training in ways that got people's attention, because they actually could make a difference in their pay each week. It helped us adjust. There had never been any adjustment to the two people in a household working and to the great increase in single-parent households. One of the reasons the district managers were failing so badly and being frustrated and turning over was that they were still expected to handle the territory that had been handled in the olden days when two parents were at home and one of them could help the kid [who was a newspaper carrier], and where kids had standards that said you do the job every day. But as we moved into one-parent households, there was nobody there to be sure the kid did the work or to help the kid if there was trouble. So the kids were having a terrible experience. We had a terrible time recruiting carriers, because everybody had done it and had a terrible time, or everybody knew somebody who had and it had been terrible, after those years of 200 and 300 percent turnover in carriers and in district managers. It took us years to straighten that out.

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In 1983, we delivered expenses only 17 percent more than 1979. A couple of times in that cycle we'd do two fiscal years at flat dollars.

Ritchie: What does that mean?

Bulkeley: That means we spent no more money to do the paper in 1980 than we spent in 1979, in spite of that giant increase in minimum wage and double-digit inflation.

Ritchie: You were holding.

Bulkeley: We held our cost flat. We had to. Our revenue was going out the window. With no payrolls in town and those terrible drops, our retailers were closing or tightening up, and had it been a family newspaper, there would have been no choice but to batten down the hatches. We almost held our profit margin, but there was no way we could send 10 or 15 percent increases or even the same number of dollars to Rochester every year. They did not exist in our marketplace. But nobody ever looked at the long haul. Keating wouldn't allow me to talk about a 25 percent job loss, a 30 percent payroll loss. Most people's double-digit unemployment in those days was, in fact, new workers in the marketplace.

In the papers I was supervising, they all had the same number of people working in their economies throughout that period. Where they had double-digit unemployment, it was because more people [were] looking for work. Some of them had loss of heavy industry jobs and additional service jobs in their particular market, but they still had the same number of people collecting paychecks. We dropped from 42,000 people collecting paychecks to 32,000 in two years. It sort of held at that 32,000 area, but continued to shift.

Ritchie: Did you ever request a transfer?

Bulkeley: Constantly, and I was told to quit belly-aching. But also during the years that Jack Heselden was in charge of the newspaper division, no woman was named to a job in a bigger place than Al put me in before he turned over responsibility to Jack. The time that I went to Danville, Al was still making the appointments. By the time I left Danville, there were twelve women publishers, at least two others had moved at least once, and I still was the publisher at the biggest paper. There was one at one the same size—Niagara Falls—but there was nobody above that. As I say, three of us had moved at least once from a teeny paper to bigger, but we were all still in the bottom half. If you ranked the newspapers by size, we were in those that were in the second half below the median.

At the same time, men were being moved from papers our size, from the department head jobs, into publisher jobs in the bigger newspapers. A guy would go from being a department head in 30,000 circulation to being publisher of a 50,000- or 60,000-circulation newspaper, rather than one of us going from the 30,000 paper into the 50,000 or 60,000, which is how it used to work. The guys would go from department head to running the whole thing in the much bigger size.

Ritchie: And you were aware of this going on?

Bulkeley: Oh, sure. All of the announcements were always made everywhere, and every year at the time of the publishers' meeting, the American Newspaper Publishers Association annual convention, Gannett always bought ads running its pictures, bragging about its diversity, among other things.

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Well, later I learned about the people who think bigger is the only kind of better, and you measure success only by having more and bigger, and that that's the kind of standard and value that was John's first cut at anything—was bigger.

Ritchie: So he expected you to ask for—

Bulkeley: A bigger place. I said, "I like places this size. I don't like rush hours. I don't like having to drive, to assume half an hour to get anywhere. There are too many things to do, to spend my life running around in traffic or being bound to two cars or whatever. I like these places and I know enough about all departments, I can help them. You've really got to start putting people who know all departments in little places, and quit having the blind leading the blind because of all of these, if nothing else, the legal messes that you get in."

Well, he asked me some questions about Danville and what was wrong with it, some of which I couldn't answer. He said, "In terms of lost circulation, about the only other places in the Midwest as bad as yours are Gary, Indiana, and Terre Haute. Why is that?"

I said, "I don't know." Well, I didn't. I hadn't paid any attention to Terre Haute and Gary, Indiana. They're both heavy industry towns. He didn't ask me, "Why has your circulation gone down so far?" I could have told him that $100,000 of write-offs in two years, whole trailer parks that had disappeared as the economy went blooey, 1,000 empty houses on the market, contrasted with a handful when I went there. I could account for almost every paper that had been claimed as sold before I got there and that we were no longer selling, but he never asked me that, and I didn't volunteer. That's part of why you get such long answers now. I've learned to volunteer until I'm cut off.

Ritchie: What did he ask you? What did he want to hear from you?

Bulkeley: He wanted me to tell him why we looked like Terre Haute and Gary, and I couldn't, so I said I couldn't. I didn't know. He didn't ask any more about circulation. I don't really remember what else we talked about that day. It wasn't very long—half an hour, maybe. But he said, "You really would go back to Saratoga?"

And I said, "Sure."

He said, "Was it a mistake to go to Danville?"

I said, "Well, in lots of ways it was. Not in terms of size; that's no big deal."

Well, this was in January. He said, "Well, we'll get you out of there," but he didn't really know what was going on. He said, "That might solve some things that we've been looking at."

Ultimately, in April of that year, I was offered to go back to Saratoga and then to carry a corporate title that was a made-up title, with no portfolio, but to cover my association work and speechmaking and things that I did and was continuing to do, simply because there weren't other people to do it. The other women mostly weren't involved in association work.

Ritchie: Professional national associations.

Bulkeley: Right. Or they didn't have the experience yet to meet the assignment, though every time anybody asked, I only went where people could pay for it, because Danville couldn't

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Bulkeley: As head of the newspaper division. She would not have been in that region, there would not have been a woman in that region to succeed me if I had not asked for her as the next publisher, because the list that the guys came up with didn't have any women on it to come into my territory. Even though they were saying, "We know you need a marketing person there next, somebody with a marketing background," and she was an experienced publisher, for goodness sakes, with a marketing background, her name didn't surface on any of the lists.

Ritchie: What was her name?

Bulkeley: Pamela Meals.

Ritchie: I asked you if you ever requested a transfer. Did you ever think of leaving Gannett and doing something else?

Bulkeley: Yes. There were two different jobs that I pursued seriously. One of them was a one-year visiting professor job at Kansas that, in fact, was financed by the Gannett Foundation, so they only occasionally could have a Gannett person in, and hadn't for a long time. The dean was a friend of mine from my work in accrediting, so I talked to him about that job, because I knew that was a safe escape and I knew that people from other companies had used that as a way to bust a pattern, whether within their company or to get out of a mold or a stereotype. So Del, in fact, had set it up for me the way he would have for one of his buddies and hadn't advertised the job or anything.

Ritchie: What was his name?

Bulkeley: Del [Delbert] Brinkman. Del Brinkman had set it up. He may have advertised in the pro forma affirmative action way, late seventies, early eighties. He probably would have had to. But they had me in to do a Women in Communications thing on campus and ran me past the faculty at a cocktail party at the dean's house and all of that stuff. I think it was the regional vice presidency that came along at that point.

The other thing that happened was a workshop on integrating newspapers, led by Jay Harris, who was still faculty and staff at Northwestern at that point, a black journalist, and Bob Maynard, put together by Phil Currie, whom we've talked about, by now a corporate staff professional on dealing with the news side, on integrating newspapers, that brought in people from all departments and of all kinds, colors, and ages, and seniority. Spent a couple of days.

Ritchie: Who sponsored this?

Bulkeley: Gannett meeting. What they did at the end of the meeting, after talking about all of the departments and how they're seen by the people who are different, in their own experiences, in the first place I found out that people who are different [i.e., African-American, Latino, etc.] basically run on the same motivations and interests that people who are the same, and that indeed they all have troubles being heard, that bosses will hear the suggestions from the white males that they don't hear from the person of color or the female, that they all had learned ways to deal with credibility in the community when somebody would say, "I want to talk to the man who's the boss," or whatever.

We learned stuff like black communities' carriers getting robbed because it's whitey's newspaper, and particularly if it's a white carrier in a black community, robberies are not unusual and nobody will help. But where there were black kids in good circulation departments, the black

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Well, David would say, "The other 5,000, there must be some people of competence." Nobody knew there were that many, let alone who they were or where they were.

Ritchie: Or what their abilities might be.

Bulkeley: Or what their abilities were. But armed with this stuff from this workshop, I hauled the department heads out to the country club, to the private meeting room, and we spent a day going through stuff and laying plans, starting with counting the pictures and the names of non-white people in our local coverage, including the inventories of carriers, the penetration. Living was still so segregated that you could identify by block the color of people that lived there. We simply established inventories of all of those places we could, and by then we had long since established what our normal turnover was in staff, so we could start talking about what percentage of hires had to be minority, rather than what should the number be at the end of the year. Because if you didn't have turnover and had expected to, I didn't think it would be fair to dock somebody on an evaluation. So I knew we had to track turnovers. What else did we track? We tracked how the Gannett Foundation grants were being used.

Ritchie: What did that have to do with minorities?

Bulkeley: Foundation grants went to nonprofits doing community service work. Up till the time I got there, almost all of the money went to the Boy Scouts and Junior Achievement, which were white organizations in Danville.

Ritchie: Did the local newspaper dispense these?

Bulkeley: Good point. In those days, each local newspaper had its fair share of Gannett Foundation money for which it could recommend grants. The foundation's main asset was still Gannett stock. The federal laws required spending 5 percent a year against asset base from 501C3s. The Gannett system in those days was a very little foundation staff. It's a totally separate organization, but because the money came from the Gannett communities, Frank Gannett's direction and will, both when he established the foundation, then when he left the money to it, were that the money should go back to Gannett communities. So there was a formula, but basically the size we were to the Gannett size would say how much our fair share of the annual money was. So we could recommend grants which the foundation would then make. In forty-some years of access to the foundation, Danville had hardly taken any money, less than $100,000, and it had all gone to the Boy Scouts.

Ultimately, by the second or third year, I created a committee of employees in order to have enough outreach to figure where it was going, and so that also became one of our tools. If we say that this is everybody's and everybody's community and everybody's newspaper, then the grant money ought to go where it's needed, and in that case the black community was certainly entitled to a fair share.

I earlier mentioned the Iranians. The only other minority in Danville were international physicians, immigrant physicians, both Asian and Mediterranean, Mid Eastern. Danville didn't have Hispanics. A few Greek restauranteurs and things, but basically the minority in those days in Danville was black.

Ritchie: No ethnic groups had settled there?

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went first, I think, to the Rockford paper. The last I knew, quite a while ago now, she had a major reporting or editing job in the Cincinnati newspaper.

Another of the early ones had been in the Champaign paper, had moved over into book publishing to get regular hours during a critical period for her kids, did not want to go back to the Champaign paper, which was still mostly white, and we were, too, but we were at least a company and Champaign was a home-owned paper.

Ritchie: She was black?

Bulkeley: Black. She wanted to work on the copy desk, which was fine, but because of the driving and because she had kids, she negotiated for, and I went along with, a four-day work week. Well, my supervisors in the newsroom didn't understand that, and they didn't understand that we needed her just as much. It didn't really matter when the forty hours were that she worked; we needed her ability and her presence. They never really understood flexible hours and how to negotiate them.

As we started laying out the plans and making them public within the building, one of the editors at one of the open meetings, one of the middle editors, said to me, "You mean we're going to give up on our reach for quality in order to have minorities?"

And I said two things. "With evaluation processes in place, any person, black, white, yellow, three-headed Lithuanian, who doesn't carry his or her share of the load will no longer stay on this staff, and you've made enough excuses to me for enough of your white people that I don't buy that quality crap. Second, the way we get money, particularly in a terrible economy like this, is to find new customers that cost as little to deliver to as possible. There are somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 households of black people who do not buy this newspaper. They live closer to the plant than most white people do. If the time comes when they understand this is everybody's paper, not just whitey's, we'll have money to fill jobs on your staff that we can't fill now. So don't tell me we're wasting money and lowering the quality. If you think that way and continue to think that way, I'll take your resignation." He stayed.

Ultimately, as USA Today borrowed some of our people, we ended up with four or five openings and were in a position to fill them in the newsroom. The editor came to me and said, "Okay, we're ready to hire nothing but minorities," and we proceeded to, and it took us maybe three months, but that's all. A lot of newspapers will say there are not qualified minorities out there. Even today, 1993, they will say that, and it's simply not true. It was not true in 1982. One of them had worked for a paper in Indiana as a reporter for five years, and for all five years was their only minority. As she came over to interview with us, it was about the same size paper, but by then we had pretty good representation throughout the building, except in production, where we weren't hiring—in the press room or the composing room. But because of the local market and turnover, inside sales and outside sales both had people of color, and the other clerical jobs were well mixed. As she walked through the building, you could see her relax and lighten up, simply become less tense, less defensive or protective, probably is a better word in a job interview situation, because she found out she was no longer going to be the only one, that we had reached what probably was critical mass, although who knows, where you can maintain the mix, because of the grapevines.

We also for a long time told our minority employees first of openings before we even posted inside. We gave them advanced notice, because they were still having to convince people that it was an okay place for black people to work. One of the things we didn't keep track of and

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the status quo. Then you do wait until you've got the narrowest job possible and say, "Gee, I went to all of these places and they didn't have anybody for that job," but they never say they filled four general assignment entry-level jobs. The corporation was not asking for turnover as part of the accountability for minorities. We were, and we filed it with the corporation all the time, but nobody ever picked up on it. So anyway, as much as I could reconstruct, I put the whole thing together.

One of the critical points, another of the turning points was when some people in the black community that the paper had not identified until we started being out there came to us and said, "Our kids need to understand newspaper. Help us help them do a newspaper." Well, what grew out of all of that was a weekly newspaper in the summer with black high school and college kids doing all of the reporting and deciding what the stories were, coming in our newsroom to do the writing and the editing, with our staff helping edit, but under serious constraints. Part of what I knew was to let people tell their stories their own way, and I had to let those kids have their head to get what they thought was the story or found was the story. We had to be careful about grammatical demands. We insisted on basic standard English and on those elements of style that made sense, like doing time, date, place, in the same order all the time, using the same abbreviations all the time for street and address and correct spelling and stuff. But it was up to them to decide what was important and why.

We published an eight-page tabloid newspaper with our staff working as volunteers, basically, to work with them, and a couple of critical staff people, some of whom had the contacts in the community to do it, to help, because they'd been there forever, one of whom was Berniece Courtney. We called her Niecy. Niecy had grown up with a lot of the people who by now were the leaders of the black community and had been in the tiny little part of town that was integrated, so she knew a lot of the people we didn't, and I ultimately moved her from number two out of three in the features department into our personnel role. She really was coordinating our affirmative action stuff and our community outreach.

But it was a wonderful paper. Of course, because it was covering a part of the community and talking to people who had never been talked to, they kept scooping the newsroom, which drove the newsroom crazy. They named the paper Black Awareness. I suppose today it would be AAA—African-American Awareness. Out of that bunch, four or five out of the first group of twelve or thirteen went to journalism, only one of whom had started out that way. One of them—I came in one day for my share of the work. We did our meetings and things out in Laura Lee Fellowship House, which was the black community center. Laura Lee had been one of the early black leaders. But then we'd work in the newsroom, and they even helped do the paste-up. Even our union guys from the composing room would stay and help on their own time. We printed a couple thousand copies which pretty well saturated the black community and community centers—the stores and barbershops and churches. We ran it off the newsprint that would have been thrown away anyway, because it was too short to do anything with, too short for part of our newspaper run.

Ritchie: Because of the size?

Bulkeley: Because it would only print 1,000 or 2,000. Too short to paste in to make a whole new roll of newsprint, because where you paste paper together it wastes copies or it breaks and damages others. So we were using newsprint that would have been thrown away, printed on spare time in the press room, and all of the rest of our staff time was donated the first year. They scooped the newsroom. We published five or six or seven copies. We did not save enough,

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communities in for workshops on campus. One of them was at Berkeley. The Newspaper Fund, which is the foundation related to the Wall Street Journal Company, would finance workshops for a couple of weeks, but these all took kids out of their community. It didn't give them the impact so that at some level they got to understanding of the role of news and news media in community and the responsibility to the public and to readers for accuracy, accurate representation of what people told you for news, proper behavior and demeanor in dealing with news sources. Those kids would never more do a Sam Donaldson shout/yell/crap/abuse news reporters, those kids who grew up learning news on the streets, if they had to keep their job, which isn't all that different from my original work for the Argus girls.

"Argus," by the way, means "sentinel." It comes out of Greek or Roman mythology. I looked it up after we talked about it, and I didn't go back and look it up again when I remembered. I forgot the particulars. But it's in unabridged dictionaries.

Ritchie: Had there ever been a black newspaper in Danville?

Bulkeley: No. Of course, this one didn't last once we got our own news fixed. I have no idea of all of the black reporters and journalists and salespeople who have been through there and gone on to other things. Between that and my other stuff, though, there's at least one black publisher Gannett has that's a woman I brought into Gannett. I met her through an accrediting trip to a backwoods Arkansas state university. I knew from talking to her that she'd gotten everything there was to get out of a journalism education. She wouldn't come to Danville. She followed up and wanted to come to Gannett, wouldn't come to Danville. She said, "It's not a big enough place for me to have what I expect in a community." And she probably was right, but she went to Rockford. She's now the publisher, ironically, in Chillicothe, Ohio, again one of those papers that reported to me once upon a time.

Ritchie: What is her name?

Bulkeley: Wait a minute. She's been promoted. Her name is Dorothy Bland. She was in Chillicothe. She's been promoted, and I've forgotten to where. That was just in the last few weeks, sometime this spring, maybe, or early summer. But she would not be in Gannett if it had not been initially for me. One of the guys that she worked with as assistant to, in fact, had been my first editor in Saratoga. And one of the guys that I took a chance on, one of his other publishers had said, "He's doing all he can do," but again it was another case of somebody who needed to get out of his home town. Once he got out of his home town, he blossomed. As it turns out, Dorothy ended up doing her assistant to the publisher, learning the other departments' work, for this guy, and then went on to one of the papers that I used to supervise. Even in a company as big as Gannett, the pieces just keep overlapping and connecting.

Ritchie: Did the summer program for the black students continue after you left?

Bulkeley: I think they did it one or two more years, and maybe only one. Whether it had outlived its usefulness, because the newspaper was doing a more complete job, or whether the publisher was unwilling to invest staff people in it, and didn't understand the dynamics of it, I don't know.

Ritchie: You were going to talk about the Frank Tripp Award.

Bulkeley: I wanted to talk about Jessica Lee, too. The Tripp Award, I simply put together our whole program and said we didn't know it had worked until this year, but it's really a five-year thing, and eventually it got recognized at the corporate level. It did not get the first prize in

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There was an Ohio newspaper—Akron, Ohio—that went from an all-white newsroom to an integrated newsroom at the same time I was doing the whole newspaper in Danville. It was not a Gannett paper. I think it was Akron or a suburb. No, it wasn't Akron, because that's where the guy went next. It was a suburb, close enough to a big city that he could bring in black journalists who were liberal arts graduates, for instance, who would come to his town because it was close enough to a big city.

Ritchie: Which you didn't have the advantage of.

Bulkeley: I didn't have the advantage of. The University of Illinois had some minority faculty, but that was early in minority faculty days. So the closest minorities were the Rantoul Chanute Air Force Base, which was already gearing down, and not all journalists thought all military people were a peer class anyway. NCOs [Non-Commissioned Officers] weren't considered peer class; only officers. I'm not sure that the air force had much for minority officers, particularly in small bases that were being phased out.

[End Tape 3, Side A; Begin Tape 3, Side B]

Bulkeley: In fact, it was far enough down the air force pecking order by then that it had a woman in charge of it. It must not have had a whole lot to offer. So our minorities who wanted entertainment had to go to Chicago. The black Elks Club in Danville still had black musicians stopping by on their way between St. Louis and Chicago. Danville had a big enough black community during the days of jazz moving north, and Danville also had had a hemp plant during World War II and before, which meant it had some of the best marijuana in the country in the forties and the fifties and the sixties, and it was close enough to Route 66 that it became a regular stopping point for black musicians. Bobby Short's home, of course, we talked about that earlier. But they still, even in the seventies and early eighties, were stopping by for jam sessions at the black Elks, but that wasn't enough variety and diversity, and no access to social life other than sitting around the club for the young black reporters when we started to have enough. And they were beginning to be accepted by white reporters and editors and other people in the community.

Ritchie: So you were at a disadvantage there.

Bulkeley: In terms of integrating.

Ritchie: In terms of location.

Bulkeley: And in terms of location. But all of those things would have happened. They wouldn't have happened as soon. The minority stuff, had it had champions other than me and the affirmative action guys on the corporate staff, had it had white men learning from it, could have been transported other places faster, but because of that crowd that was working to discredit me and my work all the time, even a lot of that stuff didn't get carried beyond Danville unless there were people promoted from there who took it with.

I remember one time being told by Madelyn Jennings, whom I mentioned earlier, Madelyn told me about a Danville alum, a young black man, who had just been on a panel at the editors society, had come to Danville after my time, had moved on in an entry-level editing job somewhere else, was on a panel at the American Society of Newspaper Editors, as an editor, and one of the audience questions was, "Does it make any difference?" And that young man who was one of the few blacks where he was, and was an editor, said, "It sure does," and talked about being

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Well, I went home and I wrote him a letter. We did an annual "Letters to the Editor" banquet in Danville, inviting writers of letters to come hear some big speaker. I went home and I wrote him, and I said, "Come be the speaker," and already had arranged to work with the Economic Development Corporation to put that together with our "Letters to the Editor" dinner, accomplishing a whole bunch of things, getting them a name speaker for the dinner so everybody who paid membership would be interested in coming, getting regular people who had found enough voice to write letters together with business leaders, just all kinds of mixing and knitting together a whole community kind of a thing.

I got him to agree. Neuharth made the company planes available if we needed it, but, of course, he wasn't going to need our plane; he had his own. I got the whole thing set up, and that's when I was moved.

Ritchie: Back to Saratoga.

Bulkeley: Back to Saratoga. So I left before it was totally put together. The Economic Development Corporation was doing the dinner detail. We were simply going to buy the tickets to the dinner. The Economic Development Corporation was going to handle all the logistics other than our letter-writers. They negotiated the meal price based on the number, based on our people coming. My successor [Gary Stout] canceled our participation, canceled the plans we had for the pre-dinner cocktail party to give this guy proper access to business leaders, which he should have had and which they should have had, so there was no cocktail party at all. Nobody else moved into the gap.

None of our people went to the dinner except me. I went back for it and had, in fact, arranged house sale or movers or something, to help cover that cost. So all of this deal that I had set up with Neuharth looking in on it, because Neuharth thought that the challenge to him to come and creating a forum was superb, and it was only because he knew Neuharth was watching, that this guy was willing to do it. Neuharth was looking in on all of it. But my successor and his bosses, who had made this commitment now for money, canceled all of the company stuff, and it wasn't that big a deal. I mean, it wasn't going to make or break his $100,000 commitment one way or the other.

That kind of stuff then continued, so I don't know whether Black Awareness died because he wouldn't let people do it. He also diverted Niecy [Courtney] into selling newspaper in education copies, out nagging school districts to buy papers, and that kind of stuff to try to shore up numbers and bring in the money he'd promised, since he couldn't do it by saving. So lots of the dynamics I simply was cut off from ever thereafter, and David and I were so exhausted and worn out with the whole thing, that we didn't even make a big deal effort about keeping in touch until we were invited back for the dinner, that luncheon, and the fact that anybody asked, said, "Well, I guess I should go." Then David decided he'd go, too, and as it turned out, that's when my father died. He died six weeks before that. So we ended up taking my mother with us, because she wasn't able to stay alone at that point.

David called one of his golfing buddies and had him gather up the people by then we wanted to see and catch up with, to go out for dinner with. The Executive Club not only did the luncheon, they did a cocktail party. By then they had a women CEO subgroup of the Executive Club, and that group just did dinner at the country club which by now some of them were allowed to join on their own.