Time flies. One day, you are taking a short-term assignment. Turn around, and you find yourself as the senior surviving “former publisher" of The News.
I invite you to a quick journey back in time, as The News aged from 97 to 125.
My wife Cathy and I were headed to Charlottesville and business school when we arrived in Greenville for a six-month stint in January 1971. The Greenville News was three years shy of the century mark, and the company was investigating the wisdom and economics of accepting a new form of advertising: pre-printed ad circulars.
My assignment was to determine the costs and compare the return with that of traditional ads printed on the pages of the paper. It seemed pretty simple at the time. Three months later, I had completed a deep dive into the hundreds of steps necessary to transform a salesperson's ad concept, sometimes neatly sketched out, other times not, into an advertisement printed in the columns of the paper.
