Member News: President’s speech to AWNA convention
By George A. Brown
I would first like to thank past president Scott Fitzpatrick for his leadership on our board of directors. His dedication to our association and to our industry helped guide the AWNA through some exciting and challenging times.
With his collection of argyle sweaters and his quiet leadership, Scott gave us a kind of Mr. Rogers’ style of leadership.
His experience and wisdom will not leave with him now that he is off the board. I expect it will remain and be reflected in the careful decisions we will make as a board.
Thank you to you, our members, for your faith in me as your president and as well in our board of directors. We will face many challenges in the next term but knowing we have your confidence will give us the courage to make difficult decisions.
We are the caretakers of our association and the stewards of our industry. You have entrusted your industry to us and we will repay you with the creativity and innovation necessary to guide the AWNA and to advance the community newspaper industry.
Over the last 10 years or so, we have come to the gradual, painful conclusion that our communities don’t need newspapers. They still want and need news mind you— they just don’t need to have it in their hands in the printed form.
Our future success still lies in providing quality content to our readers — ads and news — in a convenient, appealing format.
We have lost ground to our online competitors and community online bulletin boards because we have spent too much time and effort focused on the “paper” instead of the “news.”
To ensure we survive, we need to loosen our ties to the printing press and concentrate on providing news to our readers online. In whatever form they want it.
The premier and his cabinet ministers reminded us of the important role we play in democracy and in our communities. We are the elephant in the room. Our community leaders act differently when we are at events, notebook in hand. Imagine how your community would be different if you weren’t watching and reporting every week.
I was relieved to hear in my conversations with our members that unlike our cousins in the daily press, most of us have not eliminated reporters in our newsrooms or reduced news coverage in our communities. Print media will remain the backbone of journalism for the foreseeable future, presenting information that is vital to the growth of our communities — and stories to be plagiarized by our competitors.
As I’ve travelled across Canada as your president,
I have re-iterated the remarks that I made to you here one year ago:
“We are no longer newspaper companies.
We are news companies.”
“The Internet is the greatest thing to ever happen to journalism. When more journalists and publishers recognize that, we’ll be creating news products that really matter and work for people.”
I maintain that to improve our products and to maintain our dominance in the marketplace, we need to continue providing good community journalism.
Former Time magazine editor Thomas Griffith once said: “Journalism, is in fact, history on the run.”
This summer I spent some time flipping through dusty, brittle copies of the Ponoka News and Advertiser to create a 60th anniversary special section. It was a great way to learn what has been important to the community, to see the successes and tragedies that have been stitched together to form the community’s fabric.
Thanks to our staff and our members’ volunteerism, we can now use the AWSOM Archive to flip through digital copies of our papers.
During this next term we may see our history book published. It’s been a goal of the association for about five years now and we’re close to approving the draft and arranging a deal with a publisher.
We have an interesting and proud history to preserve.
And we have an exciting future to prepare for.
If we can remain relevant.
Our newspapers clippings are used by everyone from teachers to politicians to lawyers to businesspeople to radio talk show hosts to opinion bloggers on the Internet. Our photos are clipped and stuck to fridges by moms and grandparents. Our editorials are coffee shop talk for a week.
But we are in danger of allowing our relevancy to erode.
Our association and our industry must act quickly and decisively to re-assert our dominance as the medium of choice among advertisers on Main Street and the agencies on Bloor Street.
We need to make sure our sales co-ordinator in central office and the staff of AdWest share our vision for the future and have the tools to market our newspapers effectively.
Our future depends on building upon the relationships we have with developed over decades with our readers and advertisers.
Our board of directors will be working to boost blanket classified and online advertising revenues to help you to turn your newspaper websites into profitable business ventures.
And we need to be more aggressive in leveraging our historical strengths and our hard-built reputation to reclaim the market for classifieds, adding online classifieds to our portfolio of services.
These are challenging times for the newspaper industry and I pledge that your new AWNA board of directors will be out in front —building a brighter future for our industry.
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