A 6th grade teacher here in northern Virginia made positive headlines last week for teaching virtually from a treehouse. Nellie Williams said “a lot of math was involved” to remodel the space this summer with her husband, but she enjoys the serenity and uniqueness of the unconventional classroom—and how it connects with students.“They are really excited to have a teacher that is teaching from a treehouse,” she said.

I was reading an article titled 8 Opportunities for Subscriber Retention on the INMA blog by Amy Shioji, vice president of customer experience and insights at Gannett, and maybe the takeaway that struck me most was number 7: Collaborate with newsrooms early and often.

"For us, customer intelligence became the new currency internally. So every team meeting would start with an insight from a customer conversation, and people learned very quickly that if they really weren't having regular contact with customers, they really weren't having say in those meetings."

When Pro Farmer asked their audience if they would recommend the company to others, the 0-10 answer included an open text opportunity so Pro Farmer can get more information—specifically what might be most valuable and what might be lacking.   "Our survey resulted in multiple concerns from text responses about user log-ins and passwords to the websites," said Pro Farmer marketing manager Joe May, in a webinar earlier this year that will also be given in a live session at our Business Information & Media Summit (BIMS) Nov. 11-13 in Hollywood, Fla.   "So what we did was proactively remind our users the basics—how to reset their password; how to set their browser to remember their credentials so they don't have to enter it every single time," May said. "That's a simple action that we probably all take for granted, but for our audience... [let's just say that] 50 years old is considered a young farmer. Age range can go from a farmer in their 20s to a ...

In 2010, the then 40-year-old National Journal had about 150 journalists, president Kevin Turpin recalls. "We have 25 now," he told a SIPA 2019 audience earlier this month. "But we employ over 60 analysts now plus more in research and consulting." Those employees contribute to what's now a bank of about 50,000 PowerPoint presentations and a lucrative custom PowerPoint business.

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."