Elizabeth Green (pictured), CEO of Brief Media—a leading publisher in the veterinary medicine field—once delivered a dynamic keynote at BIMS titled Disrupting Goliath: Tales of a Small Cap Media Innovator. "I've spent my entire tenure as a publisher watching Goliath," she said. What she learned helped her to build one of the top brands in the field.

“It is crazy in our office. All those drive-by pickup people are coming today and tomorrow. We have about 20 sponsors—a school, a math tutoring company, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, Girl Scouts, Maryland Hall for Creative Arts, Annapolis Pediatrics… We go live Monday night.”

"It is time to re-imagine what the workplace is for," writes Sue Unerman, chief transformation officer at MediaCom, on Haymarket Media’s Campaign site. “If you took someone who might have known Charles Dickens and, through the power of time-travel, transported them to an office in 2019, undoubtedly they would be shocked and surprised by mobile phones, computers and the number of women around. They would be less shocked by the overall look of the place: lots of people with their heads down at desks working away, with some managers walking around occasionally to see what they were up to.”   Up until now, most of what we have read takes the form of, “when offices reopen…,” “people going back to normal…,” etc. But as spring turns to summer turns to fall, new conversations are taking place, more focused on the realities of the new normal—where people are not returning to offices until at least next ...

Earlier this year, Money-Media launched Health Payer Specialist, targeting health insurance carriers—many of whom are paying the bills for COVID-19 medical treatment. "On March 3, we announced that our free beta test was ending at the end of the month," said Dan Fink, managing director of Money-Media. "The next week, everything seemed to change overnight and the pandemic was suddenly a real thing. We thought this was going to scupper our product launch, but we actually saw amazing results. We brought on 20+ corporate licenses during the month of March."   Fink will be shedding brighter light on this on Tuesday, June 2, in a SIPA 2020 Virtual Conference session appropriately titled Growing Your Audience in the Time of Pandemic. Joining him will be Stephanie Williford, CEO of EB Medicine. When EB Medicine put COVID-19 content in front of the paywall, website traffic exploded (153% increase) and a modest increase in subscriptions (9%) followed. "We al ...

"Like most B2B publishers over the last three years, we've been trying to take our reach much higher up the value chain within the audience. We have VVIP segments within our audience, so a lot of the editors and editorial directors are running hang-outs for those groups."   That's from Jonathon Whiteley, CEO of Incisive Media, a large B2B publisher in the UK. It comes from an InPublishing article about Incisive's strategy during the pandemic.   We've all been disrupted to different degrees during COVID-19. But when we do return to some sort of normalcy—hopefully soon—various types of virtual hang-outs may be one element we continue to see more of, especially if travel still lags.   Here are other elements that might remain prevalent post-pandemic:   Remote working. In comments from a video call last week published by Associations Now, Sunil Prashara, president and CEO of the Project Management Institute, said that wo ...

Diane Schwartz, CEO of Ragan Communications, wrote an excellent article yesterday on the Ragan website off of her interview with Steve Cody, founder and CEO of PR and marketing firm Peppercomm. She credits him with building a team culture, steeped in tactical communications that especially helps in these precarious times.   "At his daily '12@12' meetings (12-minute meetings at high noon), employees are encouraged to share humorous or lighthearted updates to help lift the team's collective spirits," she writes. Thus when Cody reaches out now to his employees, it's genuine. "When you're 23- or 24-years-old, [a crisis like this can be] a rude awakening. I encourage them to get together [online], share TV shows, hobbies, book recommendations. Some of them are stuck in 800-square-foot apartments. They know they can raise their hands and ask for help."   As we all work hard to find revenue drivers now and ideas that resonate with our audience, Schwartz's intervie ...

"I've been arguing for a long time that we will be saved as an institution by bearing down on quality, quality, quality. Just do the most deeply reported, beautifully written, carefully edited, fact-checked, copyedited, and beautifully designed stories — and the reader will come. They want to be supportive and they want access. And it turns out to be true. Thank God for it."   That comes from a NiemanLab story this week about The Atlantic adding 36,000 new subscribers in the last four weeks, according to a staff email from editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg. The surge happened, "even as we lifted paywall restrictions on our coronavirus coverage," Goldberg wrote. (There has been a separate discussion taking place whether publishers should be "noble" and lift any paywalls on their coronavirus reporting or treat it like any other special reporting they do and charge accordingly. Poynter has a column strongly promoting the latter here.)   I emailed&nbs ...

Remote working continues to be a debatable issue. Many editorial departments for B2B publishers—Lexipol and Bobit Business Media’s Trucking Info to name a couple—are run without main offices, better to attract and retain the best writers. But other publishers—I recall Marijuana Business Daily—require some degree of coming to the office each week. In a fascinating and comprehensive SIPA webinar titled Remote Employees: When to Do It and How to Optimize the Arrangement last October, Heather Farley, COO of Access Intelligence, and Dan Fink, managing director of Money-Media, gave great insights on the work-ins and work-outs of remote work. One are where they agreed was on managers working remotely. Money-Media may be a bit more emphatic, but both executives see flaws in it. "Currently, our policy doesn't allow managers to be full-time remote when their team is located in a central office," Fink said. "We do allow managers to work part ...