Noob School - Leading Local: Mark Johnston on Revolutionizing Community Journalism

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Today on Noob School, we’re joined by Mark Johnston - president, CEO and co-founder of Community Journals. Mark Johnston's journey in the media industry began in 1982, leading him through significant roles at the Kansas City Star, Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis, and The Greenville News. In 1999, driven by a vision to meet the needs of local readers and advertisers, Mark co-founded the Greenville Journal, which has since become a prominent community weekly newspaper with a circulation of 35,000. Known for his entrepreneurial spirit and dedication to high-quality journalism, Mark has been instrumental in shaping Community Journals into a trusted source of local news and information. Tune in as we delve into his experiences, challenges, and the insights he has gained throughout his remarkable career in media and publishing. Get your sales in rhythm with The Sterling Method: https://SterlingSales.co I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #SalesTraining #B2BSales #SalesExcellence #SalesStrategy #BusinessGrowth #SalesLeadership #SalesSuccess #SalesCoaching #SalesSkills #SalesInnovation #SalesTips #SalesPerformance #SalesTransformation #SalesTeamDevelopment #SalesMotivation #SalesEnablement #SalesGoals #SalesExpertise #SalesInsights #SalesTrends

New School. All right, welcome back to the Noob School. John Sterling here. I believe this is episode 121, 112 for those keeping track at home. Today I've got a good friend from Greenville, Mark Johnston. Mark claims to be a local even though he's not.

He's only been over here, what, 30 years? Yep. So I don't know. We'll have to debate that. But Mark owns and started community journals, which is a number of publications both print and digital that cover various aspects of doing business in living in being an artist in every kind of thing I can think of in Greenville

that involves Greenvilleian so when you read about it you kind of kind of looking in there for maybe I was in a picture somewhere kind of thing at least I look at that way but a very big part of our community all these different publications and I want to hear all about kind of how we got to that point in life by going back to the beginning, starting there and kind of building up to it. So let's start with where you did grow up. I grew up on a farm in Belton, Missouri. Okay.

And Belton is about maybe 45 minutes south of Kansas City. My father owned and ran an insurance agency in Kansas City, downtown Kansas City, and we moved out to a farm when I was little and raised Angus cattle. And so even though my parents grew up in Kansas City, Missouri proper, I had an opportunity to grow up out in a rural setting in that environment, which was wonderful. And so your father obviously was having to deal with city people all the time with an insurance agency. Why would he move the family out to a farm? Well, I think primarily because of my mother, she was kind of a farm girl, even though she didn't raise, I mean, she was out there with the cattle.

In fact, they raised hackney ponies prior to that. So they were in a horse showing business. So she was kind of a favored the country living. And I think, you know, my father went along with it. It was kind of a pain because he'd have to drive into downtown Kansas City. every day to go to work. But it was kind of fun. You know, we had lots of chickens.

It wasn't a working farm. It was, you know, chickens and cows and things like that. And, you know, he'd take a couple dozen eggs into the office, you know, every week and kind of hand them out. But it was primarily my mother that made that call. And I would guess. I'm just guessing, but that would give you as a young person a more sense of responsibility. of getting up at a certain time and having chores? Kind of, but, you know, short of having to bail hay and take care of chickens and stuff,

there wasn't in painting fence and things like that. It was just a wonderful opportunity to grow up, you know, on a farm, you know, because you're running in the creeks and you're camping out, and it was just, you know, my kids, we raised them quite differently, primarily in Greenville, South Carolina, which was another outstanding experience for them. But, you know, we weren't out there on the combine, you know, working, you know, the corn fields. Okay, all right. And then through that, you ended up going to University of Kansas?

Yep, it was graduated from the University of Kansas with a degree in journalism, advertising, and marketing. That kind of goes back. I think we've had this conversation before about following my father's footsteps with his insurance agency. You know, he, I don't know how much he enjoyed that. This was a company that bonded big contractors. I mean, it was the three martini lunch, high stress type of situation. And I, from the get go, I found advertising and marketing very compelling and interesting. And so when I went to KU, you know, KU's got a really strong journalism school that specializes in it. Now, MU has a great journalism school, but that's most on the news and editorial side.

Didn't want to get into news and editorial. I wanted to get in the business side and the sexy side of advertising and marketing. And I was graduated from KU and then had an opportunity to work at the Kansas City Star. Okay. Because my grandparents knew some of the management there that kind of helped me get in the door. But I was just right out of school and went right to work on the sales staff. And, you know, that was a time when, you know, versus today, you had newspapers, broadcast television radio, outdoor, and direct mail was just kind of the thing. Yeah.

There wasn't any Internet. There wasn't any of that type of thing. I mean, and the joke was they sold with a letter opener. I mean, that was how dominant the position of a daily newspaper was that, you know, it was included in just about any local, regional, or national ad plan. And so actually, when I started, that was the first time even started using marker research data, because we had to because the competition primarily targeted direct mail. And, you know, so they were, you know, not, it was prior to the max, but we were selling with spec ads and ideas.

Whereas prior to that, literally the old timers, those guys just, they just were processing ad orders. So it's really started to change. I would say that's probably around, you know, 80, 80, 81. Yeah. So, but prior to that, people were so sure of the power of having an ad and a newspaper that they just would buy it. I mean, well, think about that. I would say in some areas, the penetration level of a daily, gosh, it was probably 60, maybe 70 percent of the households. So, and it was a good target.

You know, they were, they had discretionary income, you know, they were re. I mean, there were two newspapers a day. So we had, you had, and two news cycles a day, so you had, and they were embedded in the lifestyle. I remember my grandparents, my parents said, get up at the breakfast table, you'd have the morning newspaper. The TV wasn't on, broadcast newsway, read the newspaper, come home at night and read the evening newspaper. And that was common in just about every market, including Greenville. I remember. Remember the Greenville?

The Piedmont, yeah. I delivered that paper back in the day. That is so common. Yeah. When you start talking about the newspaper business and newspapers, you'd be amazed how many people, when they were younger, delivered a newspaper. And I didn't because I was way out in the country, but in markets like this. But, you know, and what was happening is the morning newspaper tended to be in most markets,

regional and national, international news. And the evening newspaper, like the Piedmont or the Kansas City, pick your market, but was the local paper. Right. Well, what ended up happening in the newspaper business was that when they merged the paper, they went from the Greenville News

and the Piedmont, merged it in the Greenville News, kind of got away from the local news part of it and really gravited, to regional, national, international, international news. Same thing in Kansas City. It was a little different there. It was interesting because the Kansas City Star was the even newspaper,

but it had the brand power. So they lost the only thing that made them different. Well, they renamed the morning paper, the star, and they merged them. But same thing. Well, what had happened is almost at the same time, you know, here comes CNN. Yeah. And, you know, just in time, journalism, basically. And Desert Storm.

where in these newspapers found themselves is they used to have two cycles, publishing cycles, that they could catch more of that. But now you had one newspaper. Right. And you had cable news showing the tanks in a storm into Iraq and Iran. And it was two days late. Right. So that started kind of how it was starting to.

So I'm trying to think that was Ted Turner who did that, right? with CNN. I'm trying to think what year that was. Well, I would say, listen, I'm going to say it was the mid-80s. Okay, mid-80s. And so that's when it started to really start to change. And, you know, but so in newspapers at the time, they don't do it as much anymore, but they relied heavily on market research studies. They do one a year on readers, and they do another one on advertisers.

And they take all this data, and you make decisions based on it. Well, year after year, they do these readership studies and found that, you know, I want more local news and information. Because, again, the cable guys were doing a great job in international news, regional news, and regional, national, international news. But what people wanted to most is local news. I mean, on the top three, local news is first. local news is second, local news is third. So, you know, I had a chance. I cut my teeth in the sales operation of Star.

It was those were, it was just a fantastic opportunity because prior to the papers merging, it was still a good business. There were still advertisers that relied on print advertising, still do, frankly, this day. I mean, it hasn't totally gone away, but learned a lot. Cap Cities ABC came in and bought the company, so got to see how a big broadcast company managed.

It was very interesting. Warren Buffett was part of the purchases of ABC. So Warren Buffett would be in the Kansas City Star Building area once while. He owned one of the top distributed penetration percentage newspapers in the country in Omaha. And so, you know, but then that kind of handwriting was on the wall. I mean, we were going away from local news and information. So, but even at the time. So I had an opportunity to move to St. Louis with my family to run a group of weeklies.

That that's all they did really micro community news. And, you know, had 47 zones and a million circulation. and kind of made more money than the... Actually, it was a joint operating agreement with the St. Louis Post-Sispatch. So made as much money as the daily newspaper did in St. Louis. But again, got another dose of the significance of local community news.

So these were weekly newspapers? Yep. Weekly newspapers that covered different types of topics? Well, yeah, but there were four... Oh, different zones. Different zones. So what happened was they, just started buying that company, the general register company, started buying up, you know,

mom and pop papers in St. Louis and surrounding St. Louis. And then, you know, woke up and they had, you know, distribution of, like I said, 41. But it was really micro. It was like the cheerleaders are getting, you know, new uniforms. I mean, it really, it really dug down. Someone ran over the stop sign. Well, I want to back up just for a second, because I'm always curious about this. this. In retrospect, this all makes such good sense. Because I can remember, I was one of those people who, like, the first thing I did in the morning was go get the paper. I had to see what was in the paper, you know, every damn day. And that, all of a sudden, that just changed. I think maybe when the phone came out or something,

it was just like, there was something else, it's better. But when you were going through that, you were right in the middle of it. You measured in the journalism at a good school, you got with a good paper, and all of a sudden, you all started to see that the numbers were off, you had to merge the afternoon and begin? Well, there was more to it because, so we were recruited from St. Louis to Greenville with multimedia and with the Greenville News. But you were recruited from the weeklies? Yeah, to come in and work at a daily newspaper. So it was kind of daily, weeklies, back to Dailies.

Okay. And it was the best experience in my life. I mean, we came rolling in here, multimedia owned the company. Steve Brandt ran it. And I'll never forget, you know, at the time we were looking at a big job in Denver, Colorado and with the Denver Post. And, you know, the interview process, you know, we go into Denver and it's all Rasmatale, you know, big city stuff.

We come into Greenville, South Carolina, and it's like, I remember distinctly flying out, the first time I came in and flying out of St. Louis in an ice storm. The winds, blown, nasty. Arrived at GSP. I mean, it was like 70 degrees. And this is no exaggeration. All those beautiful hardwoods, the beautiful landscaping. Tom Stoltz, which was their advertising director at the time,

picked me up in his convertible BMW with the top down, and we went coming, rolling through, I think he took me through Thornblade, and we come rolling. I go, oh, my gosh, you know, this is, and at first I had I called my wife, and I said, this is, this is fantastic. She came down with my boys, had dinner with Steve Brant and his wife and his boys,

And it was fantastic. And that's when multimedia owned them. Well, we had a great run here because also the market was responding. You know, Circuit City was coming. Remember Circuit City? Circuit City was here. Upton's, J.B. White, Belk, Riches. You had all these big department stores running a significant amount of display advertising.

I mean, there was so much advertising in the great. Greenville News that there wasn't enough capacity, full-color, full-page capacity to print it all. That was the challenge. It's like, how can we get all this advertising in the Sunday newspaper? That's a good challenge to have. Now, I mean, it's been a while. I can't remember the last time I saw a quarter-page Dillard's ad in the Greenville News. Now, they're not running with me either, but that's how these departments, how it's changed for all of us,

It's not just the newspaper business, but department stores and financial institutions. So let's take Dillard's, for example, since you mentioned them, where are they putting their ad spend now? You know, I don't know. I've got all kinds of theories. I think during the recession and some of these times, I think they figured out that they did, well, first of all, a lot of that was driven by co-op advertising. So it was a SD Lauder ad that was paying for 80%. on the ad. So I think the dynamics changed when the co-op funding went away. So I think that they started and I also think that they came to a conclusion they didn't need that much frequency in the newspaper

because it's not on television and it's really not in direct mail. I mean it maybe it's, I don't know. I just don't know if going to the mall and shopping at Dillard's or someplace like that. I think it's just like I said. I think their business model has changed with online, you know, marketing and free shipping and everything else. So it's just a, it's a crazy time. And, you know, we sit back in the media business going, man, this is crazy. Yeah. But, you know, I start looking at a lot of the advertisers, a lot of our partners.

and their business has changed. I mean, take real estate, you know, how that's changed recently. Take the financial, the banking institute. I mean, just any segment of business today is to stay in business, I mean, you've got to, you can't just sit back. You've got to change and modify, you know, your business model, and we've had to do it too. Yeah, I think you got to, like you say,

you have to find out what they're thinking, you know, what's really going on with them, and is there some way you can help them make it happen? Because it's not always going to be the way it always was. Right. So let's talk about that for a second. If you were talking, and we'll keep you to stay on Dillard's, for example. Dillard's is a department store, right? And you were talking to the main buyer for Dillard's.

How would that conversation go? Well, I think there's, and I, wish I could have it because, you know, these guys make wholesale decisions whether they want to put their money in broadcast or do we want to go to the daily newspapers or do we want to go to the weekly newspapers. So, you know, John, it's a challenge from the get-go because if they made a corporate decision that they're not going to buy weeklies or that we're not going to buy dailies, then, you know, we're not going to buy you in Greenville and then have the guys in Charleston call up and go, hey, why aren't you advertising them? We've already decided. But that said, our mom

model, first of all, we've got 22,000 targeted distribution in Greenville County. All right. So if you're sitting there pitching a daily newspaper or you could, I don't, you know, put broadcast in there, you know, I mean, the Daily is probably at, I mean, and we got the numbers the other day, it's like less than 4,000 copies of a daily newspaper. This is another reason that they're not seeing the dealer's money. is, and this is from their own, and we may want to include this, we might not, but I mean, the distribution has changed, not just in Greenville all over the country. So in the days that you

were referring to, if Dillers could run an ad and hit 60% of the households, but now if they're running and they can't hit 4% of the households. So, but that plays in my favor because I now, and you couldn't target a daily newspaper. You could, you knew who kind of, the back to the readership studies, you knew kind of who was reading the newspaper, didn't know where they were. Yeah. Didn't, you know, they were subscribers so that, you know, if they're going to pay, I mean, I give you a total pitch on dailies all afternoon.

But the difference now, you know, in 2024 is that, you know, you're a buyer at Dillers, I've got that base. And I can tell you exactly who they're. they are and I can tell you exactly what zip codes they, I can tell you what postal carrier routes they live in because of my model, we can talk about that in a minute. So the efficiency of your buy today with me is pretty strong because these are folks ready, willing, and able to buy. They're your shoppers and most importantly, we're not talking to people that might not come

into your store necessarily. That doesn't shop at a name brand department. store in Greenville, South Carolina. They might be buying off the internet. So, but I, I just, I'm just one little speck in the, in the, in the equation. Because they, they aren't going to make a wholesale decision just to carve me out in Greenville, regardless of how great our demographic is. Right. Right. Okay. But if you were just talking to somebody who wanted to talk about whether or not they should advertise in one of your weekly magazine. what would be like your main point to them, why they should pick that versus, let's leave out the newspaper.

Because I think we know why, no newspaper, but maybe Facebook ads or Google ads or something like that. Well, and we do it. I mean, that kind of opens up another total can of worms because first and foremost, part of our pitch is it's not just who we go to. It's who we don't go to. And so you're not burning your ad budget talking to people that'll never come in your store. So it's a much more efficient buy. And also, frankly, John, your options in this market are limited. Okay, so think about it.

The dailies off the table. If you want to go broadcast, it's almost cost prohibitive. You don't see a whole lot of local. take the attorneys off, take the automotive companies off. You don't see a whole lot of locals on television, so that's not even an option. So outdoor, you know, again, you're throwing up, you're getting all these drive-bys, but how many of them are going to go buy a Rolex watch, you know, or, I mean, not even that high-end. They just, the targeting of that is negligible compared to what I do.

And I've got a portfolio of products, whereas for frequency and distribution, you've got the Greenville Journal. So that comes out every week. Obviously, we've been at it for 25 years, significant amount of brand equity, quality content that matches up against your messaging, and quality peers and other advertisers in there. the environment. It's around for a week. And I can go through the pitch on every single one. But every single one is designed to offer an advertiser what they're looking for. The brand awareness in Town Magazine is different than the benefit of frequency and distribution in the journal.

And that's all in print. That's totally different than digital. because I have an idea who I go to on the reach side and the demographic for Town Magazine in the journal and at home in UBJ. But we dive into digital, John, and we've got analytics that can tell you exactly what you're, you know, not, they have to figure out ROI. I can't tell you how many times a print advertiser. I've got to tell my boss, you know, I got it. What's the ROI on that? You can't determine that.

You can in digital. So the burden that is on us right now, the challenge is that we have to be really good in print. I mean, that's a point of differentiation on all of our products. We have to have really good writing, really good photography, really good content, really good reproduction, really good on time delivery. It goes on and on and on. Content mostly. But then we've got to do it all again digital. I remember an advertiser asked me, they go, I've got a question.

They said, you know, you've got an upstate business product, which we really enjoy reading. You also put that content online. And by the time it gets to my house, I've read most of that online. and what's what's up with that? Well, the issue with that is I don't know who's reading me in print and who's reading me online. So I've got to be good both in print and online. And that's tough. And when you start talking about online, it's just not a website.

We have newsletters that come out three times a week on the journal, twice a week on UVJ, and we deliver the products. So, you know, and in the early days, when we were just figuring all this stuff out, we take our print product and just put it online. You can't do that. I mean, because you can't rate with Google. It's got all the headlines have to be rewritten and all. It has to be different source and has to. But on the flip side, online gives us a chance to append links to the city's budget. to, you know, we're in an event we take, you know, a hundred photos, but I'm going to only run

10 in the paper. Hey, you can push you. It's kind of like the jump. It's almost like a digital jump now from what you put in print to what you put online. So there's a significant amount of benefits, but we're a little group. You know, we've got, we outsource a lot, but we've got maybe 30 full-time employees trying to do all this stuff. Well, I like, I like looking at the math.

magazines, UBJ, the different ones. I like them because it is local. I might see something in here that could be an opportunity for me. It might be something about a friend of mine. Hell, I might be in there. And everyone wants to see themselves, you know, in the magazine. So I think that's great. But my question is, do you think or do you see a point in the future

where even those local magazines will be just digital? Oh, oh. It was just an awakening for me. me. I was, I've just concluded the DLI program at Furman, the Riley Institute. We've sent our editors through it before. I wanted to see what it was all, this DEI was all about from different perspectives. So everybody gets a team project. Well, our team project, we were going to go out, this diverse group of talent that was on the team, go out to Greer Middle School and present. So I go out there and I have my newspapers and I put them on all the students' desks getting ready for my presentation.

Those guys came in and looked at that newspaper. This is like they probably look at yellow pages today. And it struck me that this might be the first time these guys have ever seen a newspaper. Now they were seventh graders and they were about 13, 14 years old, but they had no clue. So, but I still have some runway. My average reader is probably 45, 50. Yeah. Even if they're 55, I still have, I still have maybe 20 years with these guys.

Well, they're still going to want to open it up. Absolutely. And, you know, and there's just so much proliferation of content and places to find all this stuff digitally, that there's something to be said about sitting down and reading a newspaper. I mean, it is. But you can't tell a, you know, an 18-year-old that. I mean, it's just, it doesn't even register, you know. So I'm still, you know, fishing in that pond,

and it's still a very attractive group to the advertisers. Now, Dailies have been trying to figure out how to bring a reader in forever. And we do do better at that younger reader with how we edit our products. So we're trying, you know, with at-home magazine, you know, we kind of backed away from putting multi-million dollar homes in there and started to make it more relevant to maybe a first-time home buyer. So, you know, I can grab that young married couple maybe. You know, when we do, when we, on the move, how we edit at UBJ, that magazine that comes out once a month,

we try to edit that so that we can bring some of these guys that are just starting their careers and information about those instead of being way up in the C-suite content. So we do edit all of our products and also on the web, too. I mean, these, you know, even though our reader tends to be older, you know, we give them opportunity to consume that content digitally, too. So I think that helps us. Okay. So you're already doing both sides of it.

I guess you'll just adjust as time goes on. Yeah, but it's going to be a time. It's like the yellow pay. It's like, remember the MLS books in the real estate? You try to grab, keep, grab one of those from a real estate agent and kind of look through those. I mean, I just got hundreds of examples of this. And I think eventually, well, first of all, you go back to the significance of local news.

The challenge there is, it's expensive. I mean, that's why, you know, daily newspapers, it made sense at the time to report a national, international news is because that was fed in. And you just, you know, put it on the page, no editing necessarily. I mean, really, you know, no photography. You know, it was all plug and play. Well, we can't do that. I mean, even some of your questions on the list were about, you know, AI generated stuff. Well, if you've, it's just fascinating, but if you run it, we've run stories through there.

That almost defeats the purpose. I mean, I need to interview. My people need to interview you. They need to take pictures of the studio. You can just get, you get 80%. but it's that last 20% that differentiates us. You know, local news can throw a story on and give it a minute and a half. No, I mean, we can't do that.

Well, backing up just one second, I'm sure, based on knowing you, that you're an outstanding salesperson, among other things. But can you remember back when you got your basic sales training, did you get that in Kansas City? sure did. What kind of training it was and what you learned? Well, again, it was an interesting time because we were, like I said earlier, you were making this transition from selling literally with a letter opener to selling more with market research and ad design and concepts. But I remember when I first started, I didn't start working with selling the daily newspaper. It was a zone. It was called the Wednesday Extra. And I had a boss, Mack Tully, and he came from a long line of really talented newspaper publishers and his family. So it was kind of in his blood, wasn't necessarily mine. And his first job was, or with the paper, he managed the salespeople that sold all these zones.

And I came in there fresh out of KU, worked with Mac, great experience. I'll never read. He took me out to Nolan Road, which would be kind of like Woodruff Road. And we started on one end of Nolan Road and called on every single business for miles. And I don't care if they sold ball bearings, and they were no way in hell would they ever see the benefit of advertising in the Wednesday extra. But man, we went and called on them. and all the way up, you know, for miles up there, it's over three or four days, and all the way back down. And John, by the time we got down to the last one, I mean, it was rote. I mean, but now that was one product, but I had heard every objection.

Mack was really good. And I was off of the races. And it just taught me so much about, you kind of make, first of all, you kind of make a whole, have a lot of calls. I mean, and it's like on foot, park, get out, go down, calling this guy, calling this guy in the middle, make sure you call on this guy, call on this guy. And I think that it was just, it was intense, but it was so gratifying because it was, it was, it was like any training session.

It wasn't in a classroom, and even to this day, I'm not a big fan of somebody coming in and saying, hey, this is how you should do it. I'm just not. It's like, just go out there. This isn't, it's not really rocket science. It's like you learn what to say when. You learn what the closing clues are. But if you don't get out and just march through it,

and if you do march through it, you just get better and better. And your closing ratio goes up and you make more money. And if you don't do it, then it just doesn't work. You know, and if you don't, and if you're not, if you don't enjoy it too, I think if you don't find pleasure in the pursuit and the kill, it's, it's not going to work either, you know. That's a wonderful way to do it. I mean, that's on-the-job training with a mentor with you, so you're, you're not making the same mistake twice.

Right. Right. And, and you develop a friendship so that the, the, the, the, the, the, you know, the, you're not, you're when you walk out the door and say, hey, what did you think? It's pretty candid, constructive criticism. And it's balanced. I learned balance too. It's like, okay, you blew it here, but oh, man, you had him when you said this.

So I've learned that working with salespeople, too, is that it gives me an opportunity to just lay it on the line and go, don't ever say that again. or, but you kind of balance it. It's like, because they learn. And again, it's not just what you learn on the call. You come out of that call, and if you're candid with one another, and you don't get your feelings hurt. And initially it stings a little bit.

Yeah, it does. But you learn that it's beneficial to hear it. Yeah, I agree. And I think a lot of people do get their feelings hurt, but, you know, the manager's job is to get permission, is to say, I'm going to help you get better, but I need your permission to correct you along the way. That's great.

That's wonderful. I love the way you learn. Up and down Woodruff Road. God can't even hardly imagine. So we haven't covered one thing. So your career is actually, I can see it in my head. I mean, you majored in journalism. You got a job with a good company, Kansas City Star,

and then you got recruited to go run some weekly newspapers. and you got recruited to come work for the Greenville News, right? And then at some point you left there to start Community Journal. Yeah, so let's talk about that. Yeah, let's talk about that. This is the first time you've been an entrepreneur, really, because of your own business. Well, you kind of, but I was kind of a product guy anyway. You know, when, you know, business, like I had a chance to work with, at the Kansas City store on the business side,

it was called the business special. They came out with a tab on Tuesday. So I was part of that development. Newspapers in the old days, John, they had 100 special sections every year. So you're always kind of developing products and doing some things. But what happened in Greenville was that the multi-media went up for sale. And so it was it was,

you know, I think I wasn't that close to it, but my understanding was is that, you know, the stock was sitting at whatever, $35 a share. At that time, the holdings were with institutional investors, and they, it was kind of sitting it, and they put it into play. And it was common knowledge. It was any big secret. There was sound reasoning behind it. and almost sold, I think, to a teacher's union in Alabama, which would have been great because we would have just, and, you know, again, can't say enough about the leadership of Steve Brandt. I mean, it was, we were rocking. Greenville was growing. Steve was one of the best in the business. I mean, it was just a great time.

We were the flagship of all the multimedia newspapers. Burr, you know, Byr Mevin was still here. It was just, it was just great. Well, put it up for sale, and Gannett buys multimedia. And it was like, oh gosh, the antithesis of how multimedia was run.

And it was like, and everybody knew it. I mean, it was just not a good situation. And so, and then they took Steve, and send him to Rochester to do a couple things up there. And I'm in Greenville with Byrne, who's another great legacy newspaper person. But I thought, oh, man, it was a highly centralized company as opposed to Cap Cities ABC. Cap Cities ABC that owned a star was significantly decentralized. I mean, they had their statement of decentralization on the inside cover of their annual report,

which was a great environment for talented people to work in. It was just different. It went from decentralization management structure to highly centralized with Gannett. And that's when I started thinking, wow, do I want to move for me and my family? we'd have to move to Chicago, handle national sales or something, uproot my kids, and leave Greenville. I mean, Greenville's just gotten better and better, better. It was great even then. And said, no, you can't go to work for another daily newspaper in Greenville, South Carolina. And they wanted to move me out. And so that's when it started to bubble up on most markets.

this size do have, we had like the easily, you had the easily progress in the career system, but they had something a little bit more substantial, saw the opportunity to do that. And, you know, one thing led to the other and saw the opportunity to say, okay, we're going to take all this market research. We're going to say, listen, we know some things

about what readers want. They want, obviously, more local news and information. They want it, you know, instead of Broadchise's form a little more compact, full color, you know, every page. And so we gave the readers what we wanted. The advertisers said, listen, I want them more targeted. I don't, at that time it was on the cover,

it was fortuitous on the cover of Business Week magazine. It was called the death of the mass market. They needed a, that was targeting, you know, 25 years ago, literally this month. The national business press was saying, look, these advertisers are going to start targeting their message. The ad dollars are so precious. They're not going to keep blowing them. They need to know where the money is going.

And again, this is before the Internet, targeting everything that goes on, the opportunities to exist with them now. And so we, the question was, could we charge enough money to make this thing, this model, work because like I said earlier, it's not cheap. I mean, to do this, you have to have journalistic professionals, writers, to have the quality to engage this demo that advertisers want to pay for and talk to. Well, here we jumped in with the journal, literally 25, we're selling it by our 25th year anniversary this month, jumped in with the journal. And then, and And it's had different iterations over time, but it's pretty much, its mission is pretty much Because you buy something and just started from scratch?

Started from scratch. Wow. So you had to raise money and? Yep. Yeah. We sure did. And it's so cool. We, Doug Greenlaw, not at the time, he had been the CEO.

or see is this operating officer, the main guy running multimedia. And he had left multimedia. And I went to Doug with this idea, this concept. Never forget it. He sat out on his, he'd never, he had met me casually. He'd been, he'd presented in some of our sales meetings from a kind of a much bigger standpoint, But he was a broadcast guy, background with MTV, Channel 1, put Channel 1 in the classrooms, you know, out of New York, you know, and we're down here in Greenville, South Carolina.

But he was a, I met, called him up, met him on his patio, and gave him the pitch, and he was in. And, you know, that was kind of the catalyst of the whole thing, because I needed somebody. with me, you know, they could, because I was, you know, people still ask me what I do. I sell advertising. You know, that's just what I do. Well, it's good that you don't forget that. Oh, no, because it's, it's, A, what I enjoy doing. I'm not, you know, I guess I could do the numbers in detail if I had to, but that's not, A, what I'm good at, and that's not the best contribution I can make the company. But anyway, so Doug was in, and then, but we needed, we needed, we needed, a couple more people and got latent cubbage jumped in. He was fresh off of his selling his

mobile phone company. And he was, he was, he's a character. And it's exactly what we need. I mean, just fired it up and let's go do it. Be the best journal one in the whole country. Oh yeah, he keep coming. I love him. He's been on the podcast. Yeah. And so, and he's, and he's, and he, and he, If he's been on the podcast recently, that is a tempered down, laden cubbage. I mean, in the old days, we were just bouncing off the walls, and that's exactly what we needed back then. And Doug was there with me, and I'll never forget. He goes, I'm in.

He goes, listen, I'm going to be there as much or as little as you need me. And to this day, he's honored up to that. I remember when we were going through the recession, and it was awful because our bank at the time, you know, we're trying to keep the boat afloat, but our bank at the time was jamming us to make these massive principal payments or they wouldn't renew us. And they were jamming us because we could pull it off. It was miserable. we could pull it off, whereas they had some other clients down on the beach that regardless amount of pressure they put on him. But Doug was right there, you know, and he was like, he was a Vietnam lieutenant in Vietnam,

and he was definitely a calming force in the whole thing. I'll never forget. I told this story many times. It was the darkest day during the recession. The banks are on us. And he goes, well, look at this way. He goes, at least they're not shooting at you. And it was like, it was really help me because it's like, listen, we'll get through this.

It's not, we're not going to die on this, taking this hill. We'll figure this thing out. And we did. But it was, it was brutal, you know. But our, you know, and they had a great thing about Greenville, South Carolina. Man, our advertisers, they hung in there with us. I mean, it was, it was, it was. And then, but we've taken.

don't forget those guys that hung in there with us. So they still get, you know, as much attention as we can give them. And if an advertiser falls on tough times, you know, we're probably a lot more forgiving than we would have been if we hadn't gone through that experience, you know, especially with small businesses. And most of our clients, we have 400, I mean, through all of our products, we probably have 400 plus active, different advertisers. They're running one or more of our products. And they're all little guys that are sometimes fighting for their lives. And, you know, it's still, it's very gratifying to have those type of partnerships.

And all that came out of the recession, you know. Well, just to summarize real quick, I mean, for the listeners, I think one of the things that challenges me that I try to unlock is we see someone like yourself running this great enterprise, helping out so many people in Greenville, over 400 advertisers, multiple weekly magazines. They're all good. And they think, I want to be like that guy. But just to back it up and figure out how you did it,

it really wasn't that complicated. I mean, you majored in journalism, at a good school, you picked a career. Most people struggled with that. You went to the first good job you could get in the area, Kansas City. You got recruited to another good place. you got recruited to Greenville. It seems to me you probably would be very happy continuing being the boss of Greenville

or national sales manager or whatever had things stayed the same. But they changed. They changed for the worse, for anyone who worked there because of who bought them. So what you could have done is you could have complained about it

and you could have whined about it. It could have been an unhappy man for the rest of your life. But you decided to make a change and do something different, to have your own business, to raise money, to get, you know, take all those chances and now what you've built. Well, you know, listening to you put it that way, thinking it through, the daily newspapers at the time weren't very innovative because they didn't have to be.

That's all changed. But at the time, it's like, hey, but how about this? Oh, we don't need to do that. Or how about this? We don't need to do that. It's like, you know, why? You know, we've got this reader base, this advertiser. We don't need to do it.

They got so complacent that because it was just, it happened over a period of time, but it was like, no, this is changing. We've got to do different stuff or try different stuff. And even if we still had the market position, I just would get antsy. It's like, look, I'm coming down here's, and I'm leaving for the holidays, I'm going to walk down this hall, and then on the 5th of January, I'm going to walk down. walk back down this hall and do the same thing. I didn't want to do that.

But I think the biggest thing here that separates it is the degree you can handle risk. And I think for a lot of people, no way. I mean, you know, those big corporate jobs were very good. These were big, seven, at the time, Gannett was like $6, $7 billion. I mean, it was a big, big company. Cap Cities ABC, very successful, rock solid, you know, had capital budgets. every year. If you needed new delivery trucks or new PC, it was no, it was, it was, it was, it would just, it went in the budget, you know, but for us, this model to, we thought that it made sense

based on the day, the research that this is what the readers wanted, this is what the advertisers wanted, this is how much we have to charge for, will this work? And so it's like, hey, my wife has have been with me, come hell or high water regardless. And, you know, and that's where the excitement comes. I mean, you got to have something that drives you to get up every day and look forward to and get out there and go after. And I don't care if you're selling an established medium or not, or it's your own new product.

But, again, I had, I had my family behind me. You're going to talk to Ryan at some point. point. He was the biggest critic. So I had Ryan. I had Doug and Lynn Greenlaw behind me. I had Lenton behind me. And it was just a really good, the market was continued. It has never stopped since that. So there were a lot. And Greville is a very benevolent community. I mean, we spent some time in Charleston because 6am City has a product down, a newsletter down there. And the people that in the ad agencies and the client base were comparing and contrasting the, again, the benevolence of a Charleston base versus Greenville. And it's not even compared.

You can't even comparison. That has experience in both. How supportive Greenville is. And I think that helps people like me. That helps me get off the ground. It helps 60M City get off the ground. All these, the new companies that are starting up at next in some of these areas. is it's the environment. So a lot of things John went right for us, you know, and today I don't know,

given, I don't know if we could ever pull that off. Well, let me just try to summarize one more time after what you just said. Then we can move on and we can finish up. But, you know, most of the people that watch this show would like to be entrepreneurs, CEOs, build nice companies. They want to do that. And one of the things that you, did that I recommend to people is you picked a craft, you learned it, you got some experience in it, and then you launched the company. But also, that's what I enjoy doing. I think a lot of times, which you got to figure out is, if I'm talking to classrooms,

it had a great opportunity for a few years ago to speak of the MBA class at Clemson's. It's like, start with whatever the hell you enjoy doing and go for, I mean, if you got to go in and work for free and pour the coffee. Do it. I mean, especially if you're young. I mean, you know, what do you got to learn? I mean, and that's nothing. I wanted to get into advertising and marketing, and this was my way to do it.

I didn't want a boss my whole career. I wanted to call the shots myself. I didn't want to bring ideas and go, you know, necessarily do that because we're in a really strong marketing position that you might not be in forever. I like the way things. walk and talk, you know. So I had created that for myself. And that would be my advice. It's like, whatever. I mean, if you like making skateboards, go make skateboards. I mean, why not, you know? And then find talent that if you're the guy making the skateboard, find somebody that can sell them.

Or find somebody that can handle your books or find out some investors that want to get into music, that want to invest in recording studios or whatever it is. And we talk about the interview with Edwin McCain in this most recent issue of town. It's fantastic, fantastic. And he talks a little bit about that. He wanted to be a musician. Dad didn't want him to. It's like, hey, see what happened.

So he didn't go do something he didn't want to do. Well, Dr. McCain made the mistake of teaching Edwin how to play the guitar. And that was, that was, that was, got it going. So let me ask you this. I know you probably read a lot of books. What's your all-time favorite book? Well, I like historical nonfiction. And I read all, just about anything that Tom Wolfe writes,

just anything that Richard Russo writes, I'm reading a book right now. I wrote it down. It's really, it just came out and it's called all Eric Larson's stuff. It's called the demon of the, it's called the, what's it? The demon of the unrest. It's about, I'm about two-thirds through it. It's about how the Civil War started.

And actually, I had no idea how big a role South Carolina played in it. But devil, you know, all these books, devil in the white city, all that stuff, bonfires of the vanity. I read that one now. I mean, all of those books by Tom Wolfe I really enjoy. So, and, but I'll throw something else in there. But, you know, when I grew up in a rural high school, the education was, you know, history, not that much of it. And then I went to journalism school, no history. You know, it was all writing and especially when I got into the advertising side.

So I'm kind of trying to make up for, you know, what I probably should have learned in high school and college. Well, I don't like you like reading it too. What about your favorite word? Well, this has been a good experience for me. So I think it's passion, and I would throw enthusiasm in with that to kind of go. And I've seen that with momentum. Many salespeople, just people doing their jobs. If they're coming to work, you know, and they're just trying to make a little bit of money.

If they don't have the drive, a certain level of fire in their gut, and if they can't get enthusiastic about whether they're not going to sell anything. Right. I mean, and so it's kind of like, you know, I've relied on that myself. that if I can get really enthusiastic about something and I'm passionate about it and I can communicate that, I mean, but on the opposite side, you better be damn good at organization and process and all this stuff. And there's benefits of that too. So there's kind of a give and take that, you know, passion and enthusiasm for whatever you're doing.

I mean, it could be whatever. It could be, but I relay it directly to selling. You know, that's not the end all, but that can carry you a long way. It can. I consider it almost the ante to get in the game. Right. You better be excited about what you're doing. And after that, learn the product, learn the R-O-Y, learn everything else.

What about music-wise? Who's your favorite band? You know, it's, again, back to my upbringing, I grew up with, you know, out in the country, with Marshall Tucker band and Willie Nuff. Nelson and all those guys, but I'm kind of stuck in, you know, the radio stations, the country music stations, or NPR. And I have a fairly young team I work with, and I have, I'm not, I've, I've, I've, I've, I haven't grown out of the, the oldies that I, and I, and I, it's pretty diverse. I grew up with a, uh, basically a, basically a hippie at KU that was amusing nut.

So he kind of all over the place, all over the different genres. So I couldn't say that, you know, I have any favorite band or a save, but I would probably say country music, you know, it's probably my... Old school country music. Now, does you know, I think this is right, that Marshall Tucker is a local band? Absolutely, yeah. And that they named the band after their science teaching. That's right.

It was Marshall Tucker just as a joke. They named it after. Yeah. Yeah. But then again you've got, I also grew up in a time of kind of auditorium or arena rock. So you'd have heart and bad company and all these guys roll into these, like Arrowhead in Kansas City. I remember we were at like some, some.

crazy concert, Head East, remember all those guys? I remember that one, but... So, I was sitting there, and this is no exaggeration. It was just packed. And this watermelon comes flying out... I mean, a whole waterman, like, crash.

I'm thinking... But at the time, we said Arrowhead, we saw the Eagles were there, Jackson, Michael Jackson was there. That's all... I guess they're still doing that. The big guys are still selling out arenas, but that was kind of the go-to at the time. That's fun. Well, we've talked a lot about your different magazines.

Is there anything you want to specifically promote today? Any specific magazine or any cause you're working on? No. I mean, I think after 25 years, you know, the challenge of Greenville is that we basically fish in Greenville, you know. And I think at this stage the game, And a lot of the folks that we want advertising with us are advertising with us. And that's good news, and it's also kind of a challenge because what do you do? Now, digital offers us an opportunity to, I mean, we could handle an advertiser anywhere in the world on the digital platforms. And we do. two of our largest advertising or digital marketing service clients that don't even have properties here.

So thank God for digital because we're maintaining revenue and readership in the journal in our products, but we have to. We launched two new products this year and that both were hits. Sometimes they're not. We launched a nonprofit magazine that turned out great. A lot of really a lot of recognition from the nonprofit community. and we're actually, I think we're helping them get their word out. We also, another advertiser organization-driven product, we launched Arts Upstate.

That was in response to a lot of these performing visual arts organizations that said, listen, we need to get our schedules out. We can run display ads and say, okay, we've got Jasper John's running at this time, but we need to let them know for the next six months as they're planning what's going on. So we came out with a magazine. We're going to do that twice a year. But another thing, just information that some of your viewers don't know

is that a lot of what we do, you'll never see. I mean, some of our best work is with our Cliffs publications. We published twice a year the magazine for the membership of the Cliffs communities. Beautiful, top of the line. magazine. We also, for all the McConnell Golf properties around the country, we published their magazine. Friends of Lake Kiwi, we published their magazine. I mean, it's just, the school district, we published their class acts, and we just published the teacher of the year type of stuff. So that's in addition to 52 journals and 12 towns and 12 UBJs and four at home magazines

and it goes on and on and on. It's to keep the boat afloat, you know, because it takes. that amount of talent, I mean we're delivering the journal anyway, so UBJ rides along with it. So no, I just, I don't necessarily have anything I want to pitch because I have to restrain myself in interviews like this. So the whole conversation isn't one big pitch. You know, that's why I told my team. I said, I'm going to talk to John, and I've got to have a dialogue with him, and it can't be all, Hey, this is why you need to advertise in the Greenville Journal. Well, you did a pretty good job, I don't know.

But you did promote the journal very well. Well, let me ask you a question. Sure. So, you know, there are some aha moments for me in selling, and I'll share one with you. You can share one with me. Sure. With me.

I was just starting selling advertising, and these are these aha moments, you know. And I found myself in front of Jim Salerno in Kansas City. guy probably had five located, did lion's share of the flooring business in Kansas City. And I didn't know anything. And so I'm in there sitting in his office, talking to this Salerno guy, you know, and I'm pitching him and he's listening to me. I'm pitching him, he's listening to me. And he goes, well, what do you think I should do? And he goes, before you answer that, he goes, I'm going to take it into serious consideration. And if it doesn't work for me, then I'm not going to do anything else. So whatever you're going to recommend, better be your

best thought in concepts because, and you know what? That happened. I learned a lesson, and he was huge advertiser. And I scored some brownie points because I brought in this monster client to the newspaper and became a very good friend. I took care of them. But on the flip side of that coin, I learned that if I go in and I'm talking to you and you're blowing me off, then you know, you lose because, you know,

I could say all kinds of things. I found the smartest people would listen to me to rant and rave and take bits and pieces of that of what they could learn. But if somebody just, you know, listens to me and says, see you later, I'll give you a call. I learned a lesson too.

So, Mike, back to you, what in your career on the sales side of things, or any, or customer relation side, what were a couple of your aha moments? Well, one big one that every new sales rep ought to know, and I went through it, is when you start out, unless you have a really, really good training program,

which I did not, your tendency is to be a little nervous and to start the conversation by saying, let me tell you what we do. Let me show you who we are. Let me show you some slides of how long we've been in business. And I know now there's this glaze people having their eyes. They're trying to be polite, but you can just see them just kind of drifting off quietly because they could care less.

What they want, what they want, and what I learned was they want you to say, before we get into all that, I really came to hear what's going on with you and your company, why you'd want to talk to me. What is the situation here? Where are you trying to take it? What's that gap look like? Let's see if we can uncover something where I might be able to help.

I don't know if I can or not. So completely save all the stuff about me until the end, if at all. I want to find out about them first. Well, that's my big thing. That's one of the hardest things to train anybody to do is to find the hurt, the parts of where they need some help

because if you can't, you're just blowing smoke. But that's hard. That's hard to do when you're in there. You want to tell them about what you're doing. But I think a lot of that is habit and training. I mean, it still happens to this day. I was on a call with a new potential vendor yesterday. And they said, well, we usually like to start by telling you about who we are.

And I'm like, well, if you want to lose the sale, I'll go right ahead. Why don't you ask me about who I am? What am I looking for? And, you know, I've worked with your salespeople before, and they've done a good job of it, at least starting out with, What's your situation? What are you looking to accomplish? Well, and that's another thing.

We didn't get into it, but I noticed in your notes is that, you know, what are some of the challenges? I tell you what, and I'm getting to believe that we're a dying breed. I don't know what's going on, but it's the, and it's, and it's coming, we're rolling out of the Gen Z's into the alphas. And I don't know what we're going to do. I cannot find the talent that guys like me, rolling in, bright-eyed bushy tail, ready to do whatever it takes. It's just, it's, hey, no, I'm not going to do that. You know, you have wellness days, and, you know, you've got to really try to drag people to,

you know, all these culture-building situations and organizations that we relied on in the past, they're not going to do it. I mean, they just, and it's not necessarily a criticism. It's a reality. They're going to go home to their families. They're not going to go. I remember there was a bar. right across the street from the Kansas City Star was called the pub, like original.

I mean, we'd go over there, yeah, we'd get out, 5.30, go over there, all that come on, come on, it just doesn't exist anymore. And it's a challenge for, and kind of the work at home thing. It's like, that's where all, and that critical piece of building culture and communication and collaboration, it's hard. Maybe it's just, you know, my age and at this stage of my career, but it's... I think it's... We can finish on this, but I think that it's different, okay? It's a different group of people.

They get information so much faster than we do. I mean, than we did. We were kind of counting on being together, doing stuff together, being in the office, working hard. They can kind of gather about 80% of it online somehow. And then in terms of finding the people that you want to be go-getters, I just think it's going to be a little harder. You have to work harder than we're used to working to find them, meaning you have to go to the places where they are, like the colleges or wherever, out of a school of 20

journalism majors that are about to graduate, talk to the class, find the two that you like and bring them in. Yeah, we don't do. We could do a better job. You could. You could. But anyway, I'm so glad. I'm so glad you carved some time out for us today and for the listeners because you have a great story.

You stuck with kind of the main thing the whole time through, which is great. And almost whenever I interview or even know someone who picked something that they love to do early on, got trained up in it, worked for a couple of good managers, and then went on their own. They're all successful. So anyway, there's one way to do it. It doesn't, it's not overnight, but it is wanting to do it. But thank you for being here and maybe come back in a year or so and give us an update. My pleasure.

Thanks, John. Thank you, Matt. I appreciate it.