Question Everything

Bringing Readers Back Into the Fold: Or how newspapers can stop apologizing and start regaining their audience. In case you missed it, click here for part 1 *** In my last post, I began a long, slow dive into the issue of content: its importance, its necessity and its apparently new addition to the world of marketing. And I posited the question, in light of content being such a heavy focus for advertisers and consumers in 2013, what are newspapers to do? How can they hope to compete? Well, before any journalists reading this go looking for the tallest building, let’s think for a second about what sets newspaper apart from these other media; what is the one thing it does better than any other? Wait, wait, don’t tell me. Oh, I know. It’s content. (See what I did there?) Yes, content, the two-syllable word from where my diatribe sprung. Newspaper and print are writer’s mediums (I’m a writer, I would know). They are a haven for those who still love long-form stories, in-dep...

Note: So, I started writing this little blog post and it quickly turned into a "Jerry Maguire"-esque mission statement. As a result, I've split the post into two parts and I will post the 2nd one in a couple of days. **** 2013 and What that Means for Content It tickles me just a bit that this year’s newest marketing buzz-phrase appears to be “content marketing.” And it makes me giggle for a couple of reasons. If you’ve got a website, what else exactly would you be marketing except content? As a business, what precisely do you think consumers want besides content? In 2013, is it really a revelation that we should be marketing substance versus platitudes?  If your answer to any of these questions was something besides ‘nothing’ or ‘no,’ then I think we’ve got a problem. Of course, companies market their goods and services to their consumers in the hopes that they will win the battle at the point of sale, but as our world becomes ever more global and our techno...

Hello, my name is Megan and I am addicted to media.  There, I said it. I am and have been addicted to media for quite some time. I amassed mountains of books in my youth, going so far as to create my own card catalog to keep track of them (for those of you younger than 25, ask your older colleagues what that means). In second grade, I pretended to edit a magazine, recruiting an editorial board and holding "story" meetings. Our magazines were actually blank pages full of scribbles stapled into manilla folders, but hey, we were generating some good content. When I got older, I started to appreciate other types of media, namely newspaper. There was always a newspaper in our house on the weekends when I was growing up, I was used to the smudgy fingers and ad circulars, the horoscopes and the crosswords, and especially the comics. During my "Garfield" phase I cut out every strip that was in the paper and saved them. Yup, every one. In college, I was lucky en...

SOPA and PIPA are the latest acronyms to flood the interwebs, many of the articles promising death and destruction should either of these bills pass in the Congress. I whole-heartedly agree they are not good for America, Americans or the world at large, however, I think the real issues surrounding them, while alarming, have kept us from focusing on some of the other byproducts such laws would create. I do not intend to cause a frenzy, however, I do want to draw your attention to the less discussed fall-out of the passage of bills like these. 1. Censorship is a slippery slope and we won’t gain traction back quickly. No matter how anyone spins it, SOPA is a form of censorship. The language written into the bill does not directly state it, but then again, it never would have gotten as far as it has with a blatant mention of the “c” word. In fact, there is language at the front of the bill that expressly states it’s not meant to infringe on the 1 st Amendment. (1) FIRST AMENDMENT-...

Let’s think about this for a minute: There are two things that set websites apart from one another: Content Quality Whoever has the best combination of both is going to slice through the online noise and win eyeballs. Aside from sounding creepy, that probably also sounds all but impossible. How can you win the quality content war when posting a 140 character tweet takes less than thirty seconds, making your Facebook status update which clocks in at 45 seconds, obsolete? The answer isn’t faster or quicker – it’s more. Before the internet or long distance phone calls, there was a glorious tradition in this country of the printed word. Newspapers published both morning and evening editions and competed in large and small markets for pennies. Hearst and Pulitzer, two giants of industry and media, duked it out in New York City at the turn of the 20 th Century, treating their rivalry as a war fought on American soil. They undercut each other’s prices, gouged the delivery boys to mak...

Nostalgia is a common house guest this time of year. We pull out boxes of ornaments wrapped in mildewed tissue and remember the stories that accompany each as we hang them on tree branches, some fake, some real, and listen to Christmas carols or sip hot chocolate. We anticipate the two biggest eating holidays of the year, thinking about all of our favorites that mom or grandma will make and that we only get to indulge on an annual basis. Green bean casserole and sweet potatoes with little marshmallows, pecan pie and eggnog are just a few of the small splurges we save for this heady time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Despite new technology and even newer sensibilities that might eschew nostalgia and tradition, retailers bank on our adherence to these annual rituals. National and local stores make a pretty hefty bet at the start of their fiscal year that a majority of their money will be made in these four to six weeks and then they spend inordinate amounts of advertising dollar...