Category: News & Publishing

News & Publishing

HR Directors Talk Challenges and Opportunities in Staffing Newspaper Organizations

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By Gretchen A. Peck

It goes without saying that newsrooms are profoundly differently from even five to 10 years ago. Beyond the newsroom and across the news organization, no job title, no position and no role has benefitted from the comfort of status quo. Sales, graphics and production, circulation and audience, marketing, and more have been tested and changed. This has undoubtedly made recruiting and staffing more complicated.

Plus, consolidation, layoffs, and an image problem have been working against newspapers’ efforts to attract and keep skilled, experienced, talented people. These are all challenges we face, but they can also be fixed.

Read more at: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/feature/hr-directors-talk-challenges-and-opportunities-in-staffing-newspaper-organizations/

News & Publishing

Eyes in the Skies: Drones Deliver News

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By Gretchen A. Peck

The manufacturers of flying eyes in the sky prefer that you not call them drones. It seems the term has acquired a bad rep, thanks to the legacy of weaponized systems and the fear that they’ll become the next method for spying on U.S. citizens. The makers, as well as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), prefer to use less colloquial terms, such as unmanned aircraft system (UAS) or unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs).

“The association that lobbies for unmanned vehicles had a conference last year, and if you were part of the media and you wanted to access WiFi there, the password was ‘dontsaydrones.’ They absolutely hate that word,” said Matt Waite, professor and founder of the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

“They know that the well has been poisoned, and the argument against the word is that it undersells the complexity of the technology,” Waite continued. “Drone makes it sound stupid, makes it sound less than it really is. I’m of the mind that the word ‘drone’ is here to stay, because it’s a single syllable, and no one is going to change a single-syllable word for ‘unmanned aerial systems,’ ‘unmanned vehicles,’ or ‘remotely powered aircraft,’ which is my current favorite. But we’ve conflated the word drone to mean everything from the $30 toy that’s the size of the palm of my hand or sits on my desk, to the $130 million Global Hawk, which is as big as a fighter plane and one of the most complicated aircraft systems on the planet. … What that does is open up the opportunity for anybody to apply whatever phobia, bias, and insecurity they want to the word.”

No matter what you call them, this seems certain: The United States has a love-hate relationship with drones, and the culture is influencing how quickly journalists will be able to legally leverage them.

Read more at: https://www.editorandpublisher.com/news/eyes-in-the-sky-drones-delivering-news/

Published in Editor & Publisher magazine, August 2014

P.S. I’m sharing this article again in 2018. Much has changed in the time since it was written.

 

News & Publishing

Beyond the Paywall: Future Valuation of News

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By Gretchen A. Peck

News pay models seem to be caught in a publishing purgatory. Newspaper publishers have the need to make content accessible, shareable, viral even. And yet, much of it is nestled behind paywalls, some of which have been erected with greater success than others. This quagmire — coupled with the decline of mass-appeal advertising in favor of highly targeted campaigns — presents a bleak future for newspapers if these unsustainable models aren’t overhauled. But determining how to valuate content is only half the challenge. First, news enterprises have to figure out how best to prove that value to potential new subscribers.

Read more at: https://www.editorandpublisher.com/news/beyond-the-paywall-future-valuation-of-news/

Published by Editor & Publisher magazine, July 2014

News & Publishing

Business Record: Magazine highlights publishing industry in Des Moines

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https://businessrecord.com/Content/Default/-All-Latest-News/Article/Magazine-highlights-publishing-industry-in-Des-Moines/-3/248/59838

Publishing Executive magazine featured Des Moines as a “City Spotlight” in its August issue.

The article, titled “Fertile Ground for Publishing,” lays out the benefits of doing business in the city, from the Forbes rankings to the low unemployment rate, and how that has related to the publishing industry.

“The Midwest may be renowned for its slower pace of life, but one shouldn’t confuse that for apathy,” writes the author, Gretchen Peck. “All of these Des Moines publishing houses reflect the local culture: Say ‘no’ to status quo. They’re thirsty for knowledge and innovation.”

The article quotes a number of local industry professionals, including Janette Larkin, publisher of Business Publications Corporation Inc., and Art Slusark, vice president of corporate communications and government relations at Meredith Corp.

News & Publishing

Making a Connection with Interactive Children’s Books

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Publishers deploy low-tech and high-tech content to engage kids and get them invested in reading.

By Gretchen A. Peck

Though the very word “interactivity” conjures images of electronic gadgets, things to swipe, and other bells and whistles, it isn’t a new concept for children’s books. Publishers have been designing interactive content for quite a long time.

“There have been-literally, across centuries-any number of books that could be considered interactive,” says Christopher Franceschelli, president and publisher of Brooklyn-based Handprint Books. “There were books with pop-up elements dating back to the 16th Century, and an extensive pop-up industry in Germany in the 19th Century. There was a renaissance for those here in the States during the 1960s and 1970s. And we’ve had sticker books, books with die-cut elements, scratch-and-sniff books, and holographic inserts. If you can think of it, it already exists, so there has been a long tradition of interactive books, long before the first ebook was ever contemplated.”

Read more at: https://www.bookbusinessmag.com/article/making-connection-with-interactive-childrens-books/

Published by Book Business magazine, August 2014

News & Publishing

Intersections: Data and Digital Advertising

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By Gretchen A. Peck

As they now become digital publishers, newspaper organizations have a glut of audience insight into what both readers want and advertisers want to know.

“Newspapers are among the most trusted brands for providing valuable and useful content. Further, they have long-standing relationships with huge numbers of consumers,” said Peyton Marcus, practice executive at Digital Media Solutions, Infinitive. “But they must learn to think along the lines of truly digital and 100-percent audience centricity if they are to thrive as ad-driven businesses. That means seeing more clearly the links between the technology they use to run the business, how it impacts the customer [and] audience experience, and how they use data to manage their businesses.”

In buying or selling targeted digital advertising, it’s prudent to know the target (in this case, the newspaper publishers’) audiences, and among them, advertisers’ prospects. Marketers may wish to target members of the community based on demographics alone, but may be more easily compelled by greater insight into preferences, interests, geography, chronology, behaviors, hot buttons, shopping histories, and other information afforded by digital media.

Read more at: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/feature/intersections-data-and-digital-advertising/

Published in Editor & Publisher magazine, February 2014

News & Publishing

Events are paying off for publishers

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By Gretchen A. Peck

Publishers understand the need to diversify, and there are plenty of smart channels in which to extend editorial brands, including live and virtual events. Events have the potential to unlock new revenue, solidify audience engagement, and bolster advertisers’ integrated marketing campaigns.

But hosting events is risky business. A poorly attended one can quickly put a dent in an otherwise healthy P&L. One marred by poor planning can damage a publication’s brand or turn off event sponsors. Logistically speaking, events are complicated to plan, market, and execute.

Here publishers share 5 hard-won tips for making events a success.

Read more at: https://www.pubexec.com/article/events-are-paying-off-publishers/

Published by Publishing Executive magazine, December 2014

News & Publishing

Back to the Wheelhouse: Advertising Sales in the Digital Age

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By Gretchen A. Peck

It’s easy to wax nostalgic about newspapers’ heydays, when the selling of ads was as simple as it was to valuate the content, the service, the roles newspapers played in the community. Sales professionals back then need only dangle these carrots to compel an advertiser. It was, indeed, a simpler time.

Things became more dicey as marketing morphed into something far more sophisticated, with buzzwords such as “demographics” and “targeted marketing” representing new lingo, and ad decisions were now inspired by measurements and metrics rather than by the relationships between publisher and advertiser.

Today, technology drives nearly every aspect of the publisher-advertiser-reader relationship, and that’s had some notable influence on not only the kinds of ads that are selling and how they’re being sold, but also on the ad-sales labor market.

Read more at: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/feature/back-to-the-wheelhouse-advertising-sales-in-the-digital-age/

Published by Editor & Publisher magazine, January 2014

News & Publishing

Data-Driven Publishing

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By Gretchen A. Peck

Sophisticated knowledge about your readers — how they consume your content and what they care about — can lead to compelling opportunities for advertisers.

Read more at: http://digitaleditions.napco.com/publication/?i=195935#{“issue_id”:195935,”page”:26}

Published by Publishing Executive magazine, February 2014