Retired Brown County Publishing employee Floyd Ferdon died last week, as announced in a Sept. 24 2025 story in The Denmark News. According to the story:
During a career that spanned nearly five decades, Ferdon served as a newspaper typesetter, but also experienced changes in practice and technological advances during that career.
Ferdon served his six-year typesetting apprenticeship at the Green Bay Press-Gazette until events in the early 1970s sent the local newspaper industry reeling. In January 1972, 52 P-G pressmen were displaced because of increased automation. That led to Ferdon and others going out on strike.
Ferdon and his fellow striking workers from the International Typographer’s Union formed the Daily News a a strike newspaper to earn money for strikers and to support their cause. Ferdon adapted old and obsolete Linotype machines to be used for the Daily News, which printed during its first year in Shawano, then across Green Bay at various locations throughout the early 1970s.
As bankruptcy loomed for the Daily News, local printing magnate Frank Wood purchased the venture to add to the Brown County Publishing Company based in Denmark. The Daily News became the Green Bay News-Chronicle. The newspaper was assembled and printed in Denmark — resulting in Ferdon and his fellow workers relocating to the community in 1976.
He worked for the N-C until 1996, and retired from Brown County Publishing in 1999. The N-C folded in 2005 after nearly three decades of competing with the P-G in Green Bay.
