My friend Tim Gallagher is stepping down as publisher of the Ventura County Star.

I really enjoyed working with Tim — decent, honest, loyal, hard working, great newsman, and a strong leader. I learned a lot from him.

The thing I will always most appreciate about Tim is that when I told the newsroom that the days posting non-local news stories on the top of the VCS.com home page were over, and that we were going to start updating more often with local stories, Tim backed the strategy.

It was a courageous move on his part. All he had at the time was my word that it would work. There were no newspaper sites that we knew of at the time that were being that aggressive about pushing local-only updates. It wasn’t a uniformly popular decision at VCS.

The locally focused, web-first strategy is now common place in the industry, and a proven traffic-growth driver, but in early 2004, it was still just a theory.

Tim has never been afraid to back entrepreneurial decisions, and that’s rare in our industry.

I wish him all the best in his new pursuits.