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A GCN is Born

January 25, 2006
by Brent Kellogg

The one thing I keep forgetting is that there are always new Genoa City News readers coming on board and that they may not understand what the GCN is all about. When writing articles about the people and events in this crazy city, in which the nicknames 'hunkmonkey' and 'albino' are used, I try to insert the names J.T. Hellstrom and Amber Moore. I take for granted that newcomers will figure out who is who, what the Little Shop of Horrors and the Jitter Joint are, and what the word 'irreverent' means.

For the most part, they do. Many readers have written to say they loved when the nickname 'Gerbil' was assigned to Professor Korbel. Truth be told, the name was a fluke; just something that popped into my warped mind. I'd wanted to use what other GCN contributors have since named Korbel, 'Cornball', only long ago that name was given to Victor Newman's secretary, Connie.

Connie hasn't been seen in eons, but she'll always be Connie Cornball to me because, well, she was so corny, always away from her desk.

What I'm trying to segue into here, is the question I've been getting via email a lot lately. Besides applauding the GCN for being so "comprehensive", that reading it is better than watching Y&R, and that in increasing numbers they've stopping watching entirely choosing to get all their news here, what readers ask most often is how the GCN was born; how did I, its creator, get into it?

Up front I want to say the GCN is not all about me. It would not be what it is today without the others who have, and continue, contributing their time and energy to it, for free I might add, most notably Amanda who writes the daily newsbrief. Long before Phyllis Brooks, who wrote the newsbrief five days a week for more than 5 years, long before Todd Brown, who wrote the popular Viewpoint, long before Jon Burrows, who wrote a column I can't recall the name of it's been so long, and now coordinates and writes Only in Genoa City, long before Juanita Smith, who writes The Slap, long before Michael Kelly and the others whose names are no less important because there's not enough space to list them all, there were others who made the GCN happen.

More importantly, the GCN would not exist if not for you, the reader.

That said, here's how the GCN came to be.

Way back when Tom Selleck played Jed Andrews, I found myself unemployed and spending too much time around the house. Each weekday like clockwork my wife would watch Y&R and I couldn't help but hear what was being said. The more I listened the more I started asking, "What the hell is wrong with these people?"

At about the same time, when few knew what the Internet was and the highest speed modem was 300 baud, a new service called Prodigy came along. An improvement over the hard to use CompuServe, the only other service being AOL, Prodigy had bulletin boards and one about Y&R caught my eye. Scanning it one day, I found many people were asking what had happened on Y&R. When there were no detailed replies, I thought, why don't I write a daily report?

And so I did.

It was as straight and as factual as could be, at first. But the more I watched, the more idiotic things I saw people doing and saying, the more I injected those things into the reports. The more I questioned the stupidity of one Cricket Blair, the more I saw her as a creepy bug and thus the nickname 'Bug' was coined. Paul Williams became 'Clueless' for obvious reasons, and while readers howled with approval and said I was writing what they were thinking, a few got grumpy. They bitched and moaned that there was no difference between fictional characters and real life actors and that I was therefore being disrespectful to call Cricket a bug even though a cricket, in real life, is a bug.

Things got worse when Olivia and baby Nate Hastings were nicknamed, 'Olive and Baby Oil'. That the dump they lived in with Nathan Hastings looked like an oil rig complete with an industrial-sized trash can in the kitchen by the front door, didn't stop a few detractors from complaining to Prodigy that I was a "racist" and therefore should be banned from Prodigy. Prodigy suspended me a number of times and when I wouldn't toe the line, refused to give me an account - period.

Alas, while it looked like the GCN was doomed, along came an ever increasingly easy to use, Internet! And lo, dudes like me could have their own websites, for a steep fee. More so then than now, the costs of sites were based on bandwidth. The more the site used, the higher the fee, and the GCN consumed some massive bandwidth. As they do now to a certain degree, readers came to the rescue. They donated money to keep the GCN going and the detractors weren't happy. They complained to the Internet Service Providers and one by one ISPs dropped us for stirring up controversy.

A struggle to stay in print, the GCN never gave up. We bounced around like Sharon Newman in need of sex with all kinds of URL's until five years ago an ISP, its executives themselves GCN fans, gave us such a deal with a URL of our choosing, www.yrnews.com at a price that wouldn't max our credit card out.

Not a huge success story, the GCN, still somewhat a struggle*, has grown to what you see today. It is what it is because it reflects what most of you think. And isn't it true? Great minds think alike.

See also: Writing the GCN

*Readers support the GCN by merely visiting banner ads merchants without obligation.

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