'The Best Way to Keep the Devil at the Door Is to Be Rich.'

The debut issue consisted of eight pages, mostly filled with glowing profiles of the Solidarity candidates. The Solidarity logo was featured on the front page, along with the slogan "There's no liberty without Solidarity." All 150,000 copies of the first issue sold out, and Solidarity candidates won every contested seat in the June 1989 election.

Gazeta Wyborcza established itself as a political force almost immediately after the June 1989 election. But soon after, the newspaper declared its own independence from the Solidarity coalition. The party had begun to split into different factions, and the paper had taken sides, endorsing Walesa's opponent, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, in the 1990 presidential election. (Mazowiecki lost; Michnik ran and won a seat in the country's first noncommunist parliament, which he kept from 1989 to 1991.) Walesa was furious and demanded that the Solidarity logo be removed from the paper. He also pushed to get Michnik fired. The logo was removed, and Michnik offered to resign. But Luczywo, among others at the paper, wouldn't hear of it.

"Even before we had published our first issue, we wanted to be an independent newspaper," Luczywo says. "We created a parent company as owner of the newspaper and called it Agora because in Polish, 'agora' means 'a place to exchange views freely.' Walesa thought that Solidarity should own the paper. He just didn't understand the concept of free media. We were lucky to be free from him."

Cautiously Bold, Boldly Cautious

Just as Poland was struggling to reinvent itself during that new period, so too was Gazeta Wyborcza . For years, Polish newspapers had been political platforms. Now Gazeta Wyborcza had to find a way to make itself relevant in a new, capitalist society. "Before was a time of rebellion and revolution," says Luczywo. "Now we were in a market economy and had to find constructive ways to help people live in this new society. Everything that was happening in western societies was happening here: globalization, technology, civil rights. But we also had a totally new system that people had to find their place in." Thus, Gazeta Wyborcza was thrust into a classic strategic dilemma: How do you create a new purpose for your enterprise when the market -- and the world around you -- is changing?

Luczywo began working on the answer to that question. Dressed in a black T-shirt and pants, wearing no makeup, and scribbling notes to herself on an empty cigarette box and on the palm of her hand, Luczywo hardly seems like a business dynamo. But everyone agrees: While Michnik, a brilliant writer and a deep thinker, set the paper's political persona, it was mostly Luczywo -- the organizer, the editor -- who figured out how to reach the new Polish mass market. "In Poland, there weren't any models for independent newspapers," says Luczywo. "We had to be good about asking people abroad for advice. We had to be willing to learn from other people about how to do what we wanted to do."

In fact, one of Luczywo's earliest guiding principles -- that a newspaper should strive to serve the needs of every reader -- was inspired by a media conference that she attended in Prague in 1990. New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. "spoke about how a free media needs to meet as many of its readers' needs as possible," Luczywo recalls. "That may sound banal, but it is a really big thought for a newspaper. It is not an easy thing for a newspaper to do. And I thought, That's exactly what we are going to do."

Luczywo was among those people who pushed for the paper to start regional editions, and she was an early supporter of its supplements. Today, the paper has 20 regional editions and 11 themed sections, dubbed "day bombs" -- supplements that explode with ads and practical information about such specialized topics as cars, employment, travel, and real estate. The paper also regularly runs consumer-oriented articles, such as a recent series that exposed poor conditions in Poland's maternity wards. The supplements and regional editions have been key to the paper's success, helping Gazeta Wyborcza establish itself as the must-read paper. Its Monday employment supplement -- which now runs more than 100 pages and bulges with ads -- carried the first serious job listings in Poland. Its glossy Saturday women's magazine, High Heels, which launched in April 1999, helped boost Saturday sales 8% (to 474,000) in its first year.

"We set up offices all around the country, with sales and editorial people in each one," says Luczywo, nibbling at a bowl of raspberries on her desk. "At the time, many people thought that the supplements and regional editions were a crazy thing to do because nobody here had done that before. But Poles needed consumer news to help them make their way in this new world. And our forecast for the future was that if you don't have a local presence in advertising and in news, you can't become a national newspaper." The strategy paid off: Gazeta Wyborcza captured 23% of local advertising and 62% of the national advertising in 1999, far more than any of its competitors.