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Free ArkLaMiss conference set for November 5-6 Guest Column: Pandemic no excuse for lazy reporting By Jim Pumarlo
Arkansas Press Association
Publisher Weekly Vol. 15 | No. 43 | Thursday, October 22, 2020 | Serving Press and State Since 1873
Wagner delivers experience, love for newspapers With at least 1,600 ideas in his pocket and 30 years under his belt, it’s no wonder Peter Wagner is a must-have on the newspaper industry speaking circuit. Wagner got his start as a presenter at newspaper association conferences in the early 1990s, when he asked the then-director of the Wyoming Press Association whether she needed a speaker at the association’s upcoming convention. After Wagner’s seminar, the association director wrote to her counterparts in every other state imploring them to consider Wagner. At one point, Wagner was handling 300-plus speaking engagements a year. The longtime weekly newspaper publisher from Iowa will be the keynote speaker for this year’s ArkLaMiss Audience Development and Marketing Conference. He’s no stranger to the tri-state conference or to Arkansas Press Association members, as Wagner has been a guest speaker at APA events before, and his monthly column on advertising sales appears in Arkansas Publisher Weekly. Earlier this week, Wagner was organizing a file of more than 1,600 promotional projects he’s used to grow advertising and audience in Iowa. He said he would touch on some of those revenue-generating ideas during ArkLaMiss, and he emphasized that he plans to exhort newspaper managers to believe in themselves and their products. “We let other media tell us so often that we are dead and nobody reads us anymore, and we are believing that crap ourselves, so we keep pulling back and pulling back instead of doing better jobs of selling ourselves and making it easy for people to use us,” Wagner said in a telephone interview. While other newspapers struggle to retain readers and advertisers, Wagner said his weekly newspapers are thriving because of an aggressive sales approach. Salespeople in Wagner’s company are more like “advertising advisors” who approach Continued on Page 2
Photo courtesy Nevada Press Association