Arkansas Publisher Weekly: May 10, 2018 Edition

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Annual Election Ballots readied for Friday mail

Guest Column:

A new look at an old sales technique By John Foust

ARKANSAS

PRESS

Ar kansas

Publisher Weekly

ASSOCIATION

Serving Press and State Since 1873

Vol. 13 | No. 19 | Thursday, May 10, 2018

Mike and Karen Brown are sold on the Arkansas newspaper family Mike Brown was the band director and his wife Karen was teaching elementary school in her hometown of Gravette when they decided to make a change. Karen wanted to spend more time with their young son, and Mike thought he might try sales. He got a job selling advertising at the Benton County Daily Democrat in 1983. “It was new territory for me. After a couple of days riding around with someone, I was handed a rate card and told to go find some accounts and sell something,” Mike said. Two years later he was ad manager at the Daily Democrat, the first of the Community Publishers, Inc., papers. Soon Steve Trolinger and Jim Walton of Community Publishers, Inc. (CPI) recruited Mike to become publisher of the Siloam Springs

Herald-Leader. Making the new weekly a success in the competitive Northwest Arkansas newspaper environment was a challenge. “I learned more in that first year at Siloam than I could have learned in 15 years at a daily,” Mike said. “We had an editor, sales manager and circulation manager, but at a start-up weekly everyone does everything. That experience helped me throughout my career.” Karen continued teaching for a few years, then became the family magazine editor for the Herald-Leader. Later she put her background to work for the Arkansas Press Association running the Newspapers in Education program. She traveled around the state holding workshops for teachers on how to use newspapers in their classrooms. Karen

Karen and Mike Brown

loved visiting different newspapers, meeting teachers in their towns, and making it possible for kids use their community newspapers to learn reading, history, math and science. Continued on Page 2

Rex Nelson to identify “News and Fake News” at APA SuperConvention

Rex Nelson’s talk on “News and Fake News” from 4-5 p.m. June 29 at the APA SuperConvention at Inn of the Ozarks in Eureka Springs will have something for everyone. “In addition to my definitions of news and fake news, I’m going to give my thoughts on the future of our industry,” said Nelson, senior editor at the Arkansas DemocratGazette. “I’ll talk about where I see news in America heading and where I think it needs to go.”

Whether they’re a publisher, ad salesperson, editor or all three, APA members will enjoy this discussion of how to meet the immediate challenges of the

industry and come back stronger than ever in the years ahead.

Ever the optimist, Nelson has a reputation for speeches that are both informative and fun. Expect his talk to be peppered with experiences from his early years as a sports writer and editor at the Arkadelphia Siftings Herald and Southern Standard, his tenure at the Democrat In the state and in Washington, D.C., his experiences in politics and government, his almost four decades as the voice of Ouachita Baptist Tiger football, plus his favorite places to eat pie in the Natural State. In his current job at the DemocratGazette, Nelson writes three opinion

columns a week and a couple of Perspectives Section cover stories each month. His mission for the statewide daily, he said, is to seek out good stories to tell and Rex Nelson speak to audiences throughout the state about the history, places and people of Arkansas. Full registration packets for the APA SuperConvention to be held on June 2730 will be mailed in the coming weeks.


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