Over on Jim’s Romenesko’s Media News blog, there’s a pretty funny memo from the head of Gannett, Craig Dubow. It was sent to all Gannett employees to announce a new central email system that will serve the company more efficiently. Gannett is a big operation, and I don’t want to make light of the difficulties any old media company has in transforming its technology. (It’s always easier for new media companies to ramp up operations using the newest and easiest technology and a lot harder if you have calcified tech infrastructures, sometimes decades old, already in place, not to mention calcified tech managers.)

All that said, there’s a priceless line here:

That means more reliable messaging and new email features at less cost to the company. It used to take up to four hours for one of my emails to be delivered across the company. With this new system, it will take minutes.

A couple of observations:

a) Boy is Dubow a dope. Anyone who thinks that getting an email message in minutes is an acceptable goal for a company information system, much less something to brag about in an email, needs to take a class in Internets 101.
b) If I were a Gannett stockholder, I’d wonder if someone that detached from basic working knowledge of the transformative medium of the particular brand of widgets the company dealt in was the guy I’d want at the helm.
c) Then I’d look at the company’s stock price and wonder if there was a connection
d) In my experience, Dubow’s cluelessness is not unusual. When I left Salon, and San Francisco, in 2002 to work at a fairly well-known traditional media company, I felt as if I’d stepped back into the past five years. Shortly after that, I went to work at another fairly well-known traditional media company and, astonishingly, felt as if I’d stepped back another five years. The technological backwardness impaired employees’ ability to do simple day-to-day work, much less meet the challenges of the roiling media waters of the last few years. This is not often mentioned in writing about the media today, but it’s probably the biggest challenge old media has to deal with.
e) The real problem here is misguided company concerns about control and security, which are, respectively, unachievable and largely chimerical. The lost productivity alone, in my experience, from using restrictive and awkward corporate email programs like Lotus Notes or Outlook are enormous. (At one place I worked, email storage was limited to 50MB, at a time when a typical PR email might contain a 3MB attachment.) Just think if Gannett had just decided to use Gmail or even AOL: Dubow might soon find his emails arriving in—wonders!—seconds. Just like the rest of us.