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Last day to file ownership statement is tomorrow
Guest Column: The power of being specific By John Foust
Arkansas Press Association
Publisher Weekly Vol.17 | No. 39 | Thursday, September 29, 2022 | Serving Press and State Since 1873
Overbey moves home and brings a vision with her Rhonda Overbey is six weeks into her new position with Horizon Publications, and is already seeing positive changes. Overbey joined the company in August to serve as publisher for the Saline Courier and Malvern Daily Record, as well as regional advertising director for those two newspapers plus the Times-Herald and East Arkansas Advertiser in Forrest City, the Courier-Index in Marianna and two additional newspapers in Starkville and West Point, Mississippi. “The first month I was here, I started tracking online engagement at the Saline Courier in Benton and the Malvern Daily Record,” she said. “A digital reader is not someone who’s going to be one to say, ‘Oh, this is an interesting story. Let me drop what I’m doing and go buy a copy of the newspaper.’ Posting stories online and sharing them across our social media immediately is often considered counterintuitive to driving readers to pick up the print edition. However, in the first month when we started same-day posting of every story online, we gained 10,000 new unique visitors.” “Horizon has a smart approach, because the company stays in the background and puts the local leadership in charge of local decision-making,” she said. “However, a lot of times local leadership are so busy they don’t think about Continued on Page 2
Rhonda Overbey
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