It didn’t take former USA Today editor and reporter Jim Hopkins to tell 42,000 Gannett Co. employees that newspaper life as they knew it was undergoing a dramatic and fundamental change.

However, it took Hopkins and his Gannett Blog (http://gannettblog.blogspot.com) to connect these employees at scattered sites across the county in a new and meaningful way, delivering to them “critical, vital” information and signaling an end to “the days of one-way communication between management and employees.”

The biggest story at papers large and small across the United States in the past couple years has been the economy; the biggest challenge in those same newsrooms has been the Internet.

Before September’s big economic meltdown, those of us still working in traditional newsrooms were scrambling for new and innovative ways to cover the personal side of foreclosures and job loss, the pain of consumers at gas pumps and grocery checkouts.

The rise of the Internet made the fast-moving delivery model of daily print organizations — and the even-faster model of broadcast outlets — seem wheezing, lumbering and old.

The speed with which the Internet could get information to people was breathtaking: It was inconceivable a couple years ago that journalists would be tweeting important stories in bites as things unfolded, yet here we are, receiving Twitter reports from hot spots around the world.

Media giants chose to happily overpay to gobble up smaller media companies and family-owned newspapers, as if they were at an all-you-can-eat buffet. In the end, they saddled themselves with a mountain of debt to buy things for which there is no longer a need.

People using laptops and free wi-fi connections at the local coffee shop are bloodying traditional media companies, which are invested dearly in production facilities, equipment, and bloated newsroom and corporate structures.

The result, which feels disastrous right now, should end up being liberating. At least that’s what Hopkins thinks.

“We’re going through a messy transition, and there’s going to be a big gap for information in communities,” he said from San Francisco during a phone interview. “We know there’s a big demand for information, so there will be investors.”

Hopkins took a buyout after a 20-year career with Gannett Co., whose flagship is USA Today, the paper at which Hopkins worked. Gannett Co. owns 85 daily newspapers, some weeklies, and 23 television stations.

In September 2007 — a full year before the great economic collapse — Hopkins started Gannett Blog.

In the beginning, it had a lot of attitude mixed with snark. Ever the David to Gannett’s Goliath, Hopkins relentlessly nipped at the heels of company executives, calling them out for the perks of their positions and questioning the wisdom of their decisions.

“From (Gannett’s) perspective, it was a jarring experience,” Hopkins said. “For many years Gannett (executives) did not have a blogger watching them and they were not quite sure how to approach it.”

Then, while Hopkins peppered the publishing behemoth with his digital slingshot — “I made some of it too personal,” he said — things for the corporation began to change; Gannett employees felt the ground begin to rumble beneath their feet.

“In the early stages, we (Hopkins and Gannett Co.) got off on the wrong foot,” Hopkins said, describing that time as him doing a “not particularly interesting version of other blogs.”

“The reason why I dialed it back in a big way,” he said, “was the first layoff.”

And what a layoff it was.

When the smoke cleared in November, 10 percent of Gannett’s workforce — over 4,000 people — was gone.

“Everything got very serious,” Hopkins said. “The blog seemed to take on a less-adversarial tone.”

While Hopkins continued to pursue corporate executives, the site became THE source of inside information for Gannett employees and industry watchers.

Through Gannett Blog, we witnessed the 2008 fourth-quarter job slashing, paper by paper. Sources at various properties posted who was gone and who was left standing; they chronicled the pain of it all.

We watched as newsroom jobs at USA Today got whacked in December. Then came weeklong, unpaid furloughs for all Gannett employees in the first quarter of 2009, followed by layoffs at other properties; I lost my job at the paper where I worked for nearly two decades. Then came a second-quarter round of furloughs.

Through it all, Hopkins solicited information; post after post after post reported the casualties online as axes fell across the country. He stayed ahead of the story, consistently providing eerily accurate information about what would happen next from sources across the company.

Every newsroom in the Gannett chain worried that the Gannett Reaper would appear at the door at any moment. As the layoffs happened, Gannett Blog became that for which Hopkins had always hoped: “It was a place where people could feel safe to share. … In addition to the hard news information, it became a cathartic place to grieve their careers and the loss of their coworkers.”

“If you dipped in (Gannett Blog) once in a while, it was depressing,” Hopkins said. “I read maybe 200 posts a day, and it became toxic for me.”

The news this week is that Hopkins will continue to work on Gannett Blog in a limited fashion, and cease active management of it on Oct. 1.

He’s anticipating another huge round of job cuts at Gannett.

“I don’t have the stomach to go through another big layoff,” he said. “I’ve done my part. It’s someone else’s turn now.”

The blog, which debuted as a site devoted to reporting the inner workings of the largest publisher in the United States, instead became an example of the power of connecting with sources via the Internet.

“I offered management an up-close and personal experience about what blogging is all about,” Hopkins said. “My suspicion is that until I started this blog, citizen journalism was (to them) an abstract notion.

“Readers and I were giving management on a daily — even hourly — basis an important lesson in how technology can change the landscape for a very large company.”

Hopkins also wanted to prove the money-making potential of a “really newsy site.”

“What I demonstrated is that if you provide accurate, fair, original content, you can ask readers to pay for it,” he said. “How many papers today ask readers to pay for what’s online? If you simply ask, people will do it.”

Since mid-October, Hopkins estimates he’s taken in about $12,000: $8,000 from a core group of between 500 and 700 consistent donors, the rest from advertising. Hopkins estimates that with all the hours he’s devoted to the blog, he’s earned minimum wage. Not a lot, to be sure, but enough to spur him along to other projects.

He reports that Gannett Blog gets more than 100,000 page views a month, ranking it in the top 8 percent of all blogs, according to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008. He also reports that Gannett Blog gets more than 10,000 unique monthly visitors, ranking it in the top 12 percent.

All this from a one-man operation.

Hopkins always intended the site to be a short-term project. “…Two or three years max,” he wrote. “That was because I assumed management intended to break up the company — something it might have accomplished, if the board of directors hadn't waited until it was too late (i.e. the real estate bust and the credit crisis that followed).”

Hopkins’ new blog is Ibiza Confidential, which he describes as a “new community for adventurous gay men”: “We’re chronicling our journey to the globe’s top financial, cultural and spiritual destinations. Our inaugural ’09 stop: Ibiza, the glitzy Mediterranean resort island.”

It seems poised to become a blog hit: “One week after its soft launch,” Hopkins writes, “Ibiza Confidential has become one of search-engine giant Google's Top 10 results when you enter the keywords gay men Ibiza!”

Hopkins remains optimistic about the future of journalism, predicting an amazing renaissance and redefining of the profession, in which he wants to take part.

“My No. 1 job as a journalist is to carry on the tradition, to teach younger people about the really important stuff,” he said. “…The younger people will bring the technology.”

Gannett Blog for Hopkins was a virtual classroom. “I was blessed with the opportunity to use the blog to teach.

“Maybe in three years, we’ll look at this amazing stuff we’re doing now,” he said. “We have to grit our teeth, hang on really tight and wait it out.”