On the NPR quiz show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, they've taken to asking celebrity guests on "Not My Job" a multiple choice question—where all the choices are right! It makes sense. Number one, it allows them to give three correct pieces of information, and two, nobody loses. I thought of that watching Jim Sinkinson give his thorough, benefit-laden Copywriting Bootcamp today at Day 2 of BIMS 2020.

“Company A Acquires Company B.” "Great, I read the same thing in Google," Jim Sinkinson of Fired Up! Marketing once told us about a headline he received. “Your content should not be about the industry per se, it should be about the reader. There are important developments afoot in that acquisition that are going to affect me.”

"The first 30 days of our relationship with a subscriber is crucial as this is when churn is at its highest. Subscribers are figuring out how they want to use our products and how the different platforms fit their lifestyle and add value to their day. Therefore, we must make quick and tactical work of the time we have to lay out the best welcome mat and create a Globe habit in the daily routines of new subscribers."

On the phone last week, Stephanie Williford, CEO of EB Medicine, spoke to me excitedly about SIPA's new Executive Councils, groups that will consist of 12 niche publishers who meet by video conference 11 times a year, plus once a year for an in-person meeting in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with SIPA's annual conference in June.

Communication is not the first thing you think about when deciding to launch a new product, but it should be right up there. Writing about a new product launch, Infiniti Research wrote this: "Our first recommendation was to implement a value-based prioritization framework to help identify the most critical milestone that needs to be focused on to give out the right message to the end-users."

"Identify the problem," Jim Sinkinson told us last year in a session on developing new products. "Customers aren't going to tell you what kind of product to develop. They're only going to tell you what their habits are and what the problems are. It's up to you to determine the solution."

"Market your editorial consistently to your existing readers," Jim Sinkinson told our Business Information & Media Summit audience in November. "You sold them a subscription, you're sending it to them digitally or by print. Don't take for granted that just because they paid for it that they're going to read it. And if they don't read it, they won't renew."

A site called Disqus polled readers and commenters last year about whether or not they pay for online news and why. "By examining the current sentiment around paying for news, we hope to provide publishers with insights that will help them build successful businesses supported by loyal, engaged readers."

"I looked at the company and realized that strategy at the end of the day is simply resource allocation. That's my job. So I need to resource the appropriate level towards technology differently than we have been."  —Thomas president and CEO Tony Uphoff   Another successful Business Information & Media Summit (BIMS) concluded yesterday with an incredible keynote from Uphoff—Thomas has completely transitioned from being a legacy print/directory company to a data platform company—and more insightful and solution-oriented sessions.   I'll be writing about more BIMS sessions in the coming weeks but meanwhile here are some highlights from the conference to give you a taste.   Make your content valuable and affordable. "If [one of your customers] doesn't want to buy your content because he says it's too expensive for him, then maybe you need to do some soul searching in your content," Grey Montgomery, preside ...

Videos draw eyeballs. Jim Sinkinson, who will be presenting the pre-conference workshop at next week's Business Information & Media Summit (BIMS) in Fort Lauderdale, has said just having "video" in a subject line triggers a huge jump in clicks.