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Posted by Tommy Thomason on May 14, 2012
The summer months will feature pre-convention skirmishes between the Obama and Romney camps, but all too often community newspapers largely ignore the national race to focus exclusively on local campaigns.
Too bad. Tip O’Neil’s insight still rings true: All politics is local. Every vote for the national ticket is cast locally. Most national candidates have political roots first planted in local politics. And national candidates owe their current position to local organization and local successes in the early primary states.
So how can Texas community newspapers cover national races if those candidates never come to town? How do you localize a national election?
Start by picturing the Democratic and Republican...
Posted by Jim Busch on May 9, 2012
The most useful tools in a salesperson’s tool box are questions.
Good questions get the customer talking and help the sales person uncover needs that their products can fill. Questions keep the customer engaged and help them to see the value your products offer. When I am interviewing a customer, I try to cover what I call the “5 C’s.” Here they are:
Company: how their business works
Customers: who they want to reach
Current Marketing: how are they trying to reach those people
Competition: who they need to beat
Challenges: what they worry about
The answers to the 5 C’s questions will give you everything you need to know to sell the customer and to develop an effective program to help them achieve their goals...
Posted by Tommy Thomason on April 30, 2012
Many of the problems we face in community journalism are the same ones our predecessors had to cope with. Reluctant sources, personnel problems, slow ad sales, competition, ethical dilemmas – the problems look different in 2012, but they’re essentially the same old issues re-framed for today’s media world.
But we do have one unique issue for 2012: Will the next generation of readers read newspapers, or will they even seek out news as we define it, at all?
So spend a few minutes with these two online articles. They’re talking about young people and where they get – or don’t get – news. And though they take different approaches, they agree that tomorrow’s readers will not approach news the same way our generation has. I remember our...
Posted by Heather Noel on April 24, 2012
We'll be live-blogging "Uncovering the best local business stories" beginning at 9 a.m. on Thursday, April 26. Co-sponsored by TCCJ, the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, and the Texas Press Association, the workshop will feature Carlie Kollath, business reporter for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal; Chris Roush, business journalism professor at the University of North Carolina; Doug Swanson, investigative projects editor for the Dallas Morning News; and Linda Austin, executive director of the Reynolds Center. We'll hope you'll follow along on the live blog and join us on Twitter at the hashtag #bizj.
Uncovering the best local business stories
Posted by Jim Busch on March 7, 2012
I am in the process of reading Walter Issacson’s excellent biography of Steve Jobs. Reading biographies of recognized leaders is an effective way to learn from their successes and to avoid the mistakes they made.
Steve Jobs understood that to build a great company he needed to recruit great people. He knew that having his friend and early collaborator Steve Wozniak on board was critical for Apple’s success. Wozniak’s genius for computer engineering was behind many of the company’s early products.
Wozniak turned down the offer to be a major partner and founder of Apple. The chance to be an executive and to become a very wealthy man could not entice him to leave his job as an engineer for Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs...