Gannett Amends Company’s 401(K) Plan
McLean, Va. – Gannett Co., Inc., (NYSE:GCI) announced today the Board of Directors has amended the company’s 401(k) Plan to allow employees the immediate right to diversify all of their Plan investments.
Previously, employees under age 55 could not sell the shares of Gannett common stock they received as the company-match portion of the 401(k) Plan.
Gannett’s 401(k) Plan includes 12 different investment funds, including the company-match stock fund and a voluntary Gannett stock fund.
Douglas H. McCorkindale, Gannett’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, said: “Our Board reviewed the 401(k) Plan restrictions and decided they simply were outmoded. While the Board considers Gannett stock to be an excellent investment, the directors want to provide our employees with the flexibility to plan their own financial future.”
McCorkindale said that 13.5 percent of the 401(k) Plan assets consist of the company-match stock fund. Employees also have voluntarily invested about 10 percent of the plan assets in the discretionary Gannett stock fund, which has always been freely transferable. During 2001, McCorkindale said, the return on Gannett common stock increased 8.14 percent, compared with a -11.88 percent return on the S&P 500 Index.
Gannett Co., Inc. is an international news and information company that publishes 95 daily newspapers in the USA, including USA TODAY, the nation’s largest-selling daily newspaper. The company also owns in excess of 300 non-daily publications in the USA and USA WEEKEND, a weekly newspaper magazine. In the United Kingdom, Gannett subsidiary Newsquest plc publishes more than 300 titles, including 15 daily newspapers. Gannett also operates 22 television stations in the United States and is an Internet leader with sites sponsored by most of its TV stations and newspapers including USATODAY.com, one of the most popular news sites on the Web.