OCTOBER 2007 MID-MONTH UPDATE ARTICLES

Photoshop, Acrobat and InDesign Questions dominate e-mail this month

While traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast and back three times over the past three weeks, I’ve noticed a significant increase in the amount of e-mail I receive from readers of this column. Trying to answer the dozens of questions I get each day can become overwhelming, but I try. With this in mind, it seems like a good time to answer a few questions that come up the most:

Click Here for FULL story

With ‘lecture mode’ gone, here’s talking at you, kid
Kentucky daily unveils social network features in effort to envelop local community.

Subscription size doesn’t matter when it comes to becoming more social on the Web.

Case in point: the (Hopkinsville) Kentucky New Era, which became even more of a sounding board for its community when it added social media services from ThePort Network Inc.

The new features allowed the 12,000-subscriber evening newspaper to let readers post comments on stories, start blogs, upload video and collect local and national news based on their particular interest.

Click Here for FULL story

Numbers take on a (dysfunctional) life of their own

No number sprouts up out of nowhere.

Behind every number is one or more human beings. And, like human beings, numbers can be quite dysfunctional. It might represent money they spend, miles they have driven, a claim they profess, or an infinite variety of other items.

Properly gauge the integrity of that person or those persons, and how they arrived at the number, and you have done much to determine the integrity and relevance of the number itself.

Click Here for FULL story

The Digital Media Leadership Program

The Digital Media Fellowship is a year-long program that provides women and minority professionals with a thorough comprehension of the newspaper digital operation. Ten digital media professionals will participate in a series of workshops designed to assist them as they create a strategic business plan for a newspaper site within a mid-sized market. The goal of the program is to identify and develop women and people of color to become the next generation of digital media leaders. There is no charge to the fellow or their newspaper to participate.

The 2008 Digital Media Fellowship program will begin at the NAA Marketing/Connections Conference in Orlando, February 2008.

Click Here for FULL story

Success Strategies by Jerry Bellune October 2, 2007

Have you ever failed to come in first in anything and felt terrible about your performance? Have you beat yourself up about it rather than taking it in stride and learning from it? If you had it to do over again, how would you go about winning?

Click Here for FULL story

Use “reason why” bridges in sales presentations

“I found a helpful idea to tweak my sales presentations in an unlikely place,” Mack told me. “It was at a local community college – in a one-day class on how to use a particular computer program. There were about a dozen people in the class. And although we had different skill levels, the teacher did an excellent job of keeping everyone on track.”

“What was the teacher’s secret?” I asked.

Click Here for FULL story