I am going to take the day off today and just post a story written about my wife, Linda, in a local web site dedicated to IT publishing. I have always been very proud of her career, and still love her despite the fact that she continues to make jokes about me.
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Kennedy gets set to leave CIO editor post
by Jennifer O'Brien for Media News
IDG veteran and powerhouse Linda Kennedy is gearing up for a sea change as she prepares to hang up her CIO editor hat and president of enterprise role as of October 1st. But she won't be stepping away entirely from the tech publishing house as she will continue to head up the CIO Executive Council.
"I was doing three full-time jobs, but now I'll just be doing one, and I won't have to be in the office every day," Kennedy said of her upcoming shift into a slower pace.
"Originally, my intent was to retire at the same time as Don. I couldn't have him kicking back and having all the fun. On a personal note, I'm not going to leave Don at home to mess up the linen closet and all the glasses."
Kennedy said the move to semi-retirement has been in the cards for some time. "It was almost four years ago, back in July 2004, when we made the decision to retire. As part of that transition, we also wanted to help transition the company away from print to new media and also find new ways of engaging with the audience."
But Kennedy said her recent work on the executive council has inspired her to stay in the role a little while longer.
"I don't plan to stay in the council role forever, but I want to see it through to the next level. I enjoy working with CIOs on a one-to-one basis," she said.
"It's great to be involved with a group that are so involved. I feel the human interaction, and the things we're doing, and where we're going, is so much more quantifiable than doing a magazine. You're not in a constant feedback loop with the magazine, whereas with the council the outcome is so broad and personal. It's a different kind of satisfying. When I started, it was a leap as far as knowing you could make a difference."
And while Kennedy prepares for her life change (and admitted she's pleased to take a break from daily deadlines; "god it's nice after a decade of deadlines"), she reflects on her close to twenty years at IDG.
"The magazine remained true to itself, and so did all the people involved, and all the writers," she said. "I come from a background that says, create a magazine that people will need. The audience creates the need for advertisers, and we ran true to that. Not all stories have to be negative. We never gave into outside pressure. We were true to the ideal to write stories that resonate with the readership."
Kennedy said the magazine has come a long way since the early days when it was a product awkwardly called IT Casebook, which was an adjunct to Computerworld and dished out feature stories about senior IT people and the issues surrounding the business relationship.
"If I had any regrets, it's that CIO started out life as IT Casebook. The name is too much like the term case study."
But things turned around, she said, once the magazine stood on its own two feet. "The smartest thing we ever did was roll it out on its on own, making it standalone."
Asked her biggest challenge in her role, she said "it was always staying ahead of the curve."
"A newspaper by definition is dealing with news of the moment. I'm not saying they never look over the horizon, but the pump is primed because there's always something happening: new product, new CEO info. News is driven by the events of the day. Whereas a mag like CIO isn't event driven. To get people to read it, you have to give them something they're not getting someplace else. What's happening today is not enough, it has to be tomorrow, a look over the horizon."
Asked some of her greatest achievements and milestones, she humbly praised the team around her.
"It's very tough to put a milestone or to put something you're proud of as an individual thing, when it's part of the work that everyone has done," she said.
"I'm proud of the magazine and all the people who've been part of it. To work with people on a regular basis with the calibre of Sue Bushell to be with me from day one. I've had the best collaborative team on a long term basis. Take for example, Beverley Head. The day she left the Fin, I got in touch with her. Caron Schumann, she's the person who's done my illustrations from day one. The whole is bigger than the sum of the parts, and it's not about me."
Kennedy who started at IDG in the US, working for Digital News doing the product profiles, landed a job at PC World when the husband-and-wife team ventured Down Under (Don came over as editor of Computerworld). Kennedy eventually became the PC World editor, which she said is an early IDG factoid that many don't seem to know about.
"I was so proud of it because I was not a PC person," she explained. "I was at Digital and had PCs at home, but no one would ever accuse me of being a techie. No one would have asked me how to change a motherboard."
During her time as editor, the team's coverage of the Windows 3.0 story stands out for Kennedy. "This was pre-Internet days. We had news feeds, which came over teletype, but there was a lag time. While [Australia is] a global country, there was no huge vast communication. There was nothing coming out of the US, so it was personally great for me because I put the team on the ground and we did a lot of local coverage," she said.
"Looking back, here was this non-techie person being attuned to something in the market. Although, it probably would have been more noteworthy if I had missed it."
Indeed, there's more to Kennedy's future than work as she plans to jump into travel mode.
"I want to go stand at the cracks at the edge of the world," Kennedy said. "I want to stand at as many places as we can where plates meet. For example, Iceland and the North Atlantic plate. I would love to stand at places like the San Andreas fault and places in Indonesia."
But don't expect to see Kennedy doing the stereotypical retirement thing and travelling around Oz in a camper van. "I don't think you can put Linda and camper van in the same sentence," she chuckled. 
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