By Alison Berstein, Bulletin Correspondent
‘Attitude plays a huge role in your audience, employees, and customers. As long as we’ve got a positive attitude and feel that there’s a true future in these industries, it helps you prepare and develop the future of media.’
— Tom Yunt,
Chief operating officer,
United Communications Corporation,
Kenosha, Wis.
Tom Yunt lives by simple advice: “There’s an old saying: The world revolves around aptitude and attitude.”
Yunt is chief operating officer of United Communications Corporation, a multimedia company based in Kenosha, Wis., that owns The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Mass. He thinks that a positive attitude can help a workplace thrive, particularly in news companies.
“Attitude plays a huge role in your audience, employees, and customers,” Yunt said. “As long as we’ve got a positive attitude and feel that there’s a true future in these industries, it helps you prepare and develop the future of media.”
Yunt is scheduled to discuss those ideals during his keynote speech at the 2017 New England Newspaper Conference. The speech will be at 11 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 12, at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Natick, Mass.
His working title for his talk is “The Newspaper Sur-THRIVAL Guide: Newspaper 101 in the 21st Century.”
“The really good cutting-edge companies learn how to balance survival and thrival,” Yunt said, referring to his working title. “A lot of smaller or medium-sized media companies are maybe focusing on survival and not enough on how do they go forward.”
Today’s news environment is one whose future and even whose present is unsure, he said.
“It changes every single day and that’s what makes it fun and challenging,” Yunt said. “It keeps you awake at night.”
Besides the Sun Chronicle and The Foxboro (Mass.) Reporter, United Communications Corporation owns daily newspapers in Wisconsin, weeklies in Illinois and Wisconsin, and television stations in Minnesota and New York.
On its website, the company lists “spreading good cheer” as one of its core values. Yunt thinks that spreading good cheer shows people involved in all elements of a company that they are valued.
“It’s all about telling both internal and external customers ‘thank you,’ and being appreciative of our history and culture and ownership,” he said.
Expressing appreciation for the various communities in a company “reinforces our commitments in work-life balance,” he said.
“We want people to work hard and have fun at work,” he said. “If you don’t enjoy work and your co-workers and the mission of the company, that can be a pretty miserable existence.”
Valuing its audience is crucial for a company to reach that audience effectively, Yunt said.
“We thrive because we’re reaching more people than we ever have before,” he said. “Media companies have multiple and evolving platforms – traditional or nontraditional. How do you connect to that growing audience?”
Audience outreach starts at the local level, Yunt said.
“What’s in my backyard?” he said, quoting another old saying.
Local news is an irreplaceable asset in a world of information overload, Yunt said.
“I hope the next generation of media consumers steps back and thinks about where information is coming from. Is it from somewhere they can trust; is it accurate?” he said.
“So much information is claimed by six-second videos and 140-character tweets that I’m not sure that the quality they’re receiving and the depth they’re consuming is really the full picture to form an opinion,” he said. “I hope (news consumers) really come to understand the importance of local news to a community.”
Reaching out to an audience more effectively – and thus with any luck, functioning as a company more effectively – also involves letting go of traditional practices that are no longer working, Yunt said.
“Completely vanquish the statement you hear in a lot of companies: ‘This is the way we’ve always done things in the past’,” he said. “Truly adopt and come to grips with traditional media and digital social media platform execution. Get prepared for a new generation of employees.
“It’s a very deliberate balancing act,” he said.
Yunt has his eye on the future of the news industry, because that industry is “fragmented but opportunistic,” he said.
“What are we doing to prepare the next generation, the succession of our business models?” he asked.
“Sur-Thrival” in the news environment is not an issue with a one-size-fits-all solution, Yunt said.
Instead, it is “a mystery that many in this business – broadcast, print, and digital – are trying to figure out,” he said.
To home in on a solution to that mystery, today’s journalists need to keep an open mind, Yunt said.
“Be aware and have your finger on the pulse of what’s going on at this moment,” he said. “Garner that knowledge, watch your competitors. It’s an evolving process.”
Farewell to two free spirit, free speech icons
Gene Policinski
Inside the First Amendment
Gene Policinski is
chief operating officer
of the
Newseum Institute and
senior vice president
of the Institute’s
First Amendment Center.
He can be reached at
gpolicinski@newseum.org.
Follow him
on Twitter: @genefac
The twin icons of “hip” and “hippies” are no more. Hugh Hefner, who died Sept. 27 at age 91, taught the Beat and boomer generations provocative lessons about sex, jazz and a lifestyle free from guilt — fueling, if not founding, a sexual revolution that would shake the nation and overturn social taboos through his Playboy magazine and his own free-wheeling lifestyle. In his later years and up to the day of his death, Hefner lived in the nation’s mind as a silk-pajama-clad swinger who enjoyed a taboo-shattering, hedonistic lifestyle that he both created and promoted.
Rolling Stone magazine, first published in 1967, followed Hefner into the nation’s psyche and onto its newsstands, no less an arbiter of music, film, politics and art. It was the must-read of the counterculture.
Earlier this month, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner announced that he would sell his controlling interest in the publication.
Playboy and Rolling Stone magazines might well continue publishing for years, but without Hefner and Wenner — two free spirits who helped shape American culture for more than 50 years — it won’t be the same.
First, on Playboy and its larger-than-life founder: To play on an old joke, yes, there really were articles to read along with eyeing the nude centerfolds. Hefner used his magazine to give voice to the leading writers, pop philosophers and artists of the latter half of the 20th century, and to promote his views on civil rights, sexual freedom and social tolerance.
Writers Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, music superstars Miles Davis, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, activist Martin Luther King Jr. and athlete Muhammad Ali were just a few of the hundreds who found a home in Playboy’s pages. In the magazine’s early years, it serialized Ray Bradbury’s landmark novel and screed against censorship, the futuristic “Fahrenheit 451.”
Earlier this year Hefner and his daughter Christie, who was for many years his successor at Playboy Enterprises, were honored with the Newseum’s Free Expression Award for their combined support of free expression, social justice and equality.
Even as the fortunes of the Playboy empire shifted and waned, “Hef” created the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation that remains committed, in part through its annual First Amendment Awards, to honoring and inspiring the kind of commitment to free speech he so passionately embraced and exemplified.
There will be those who will mark his death with criticism of the “Playboy Philosophy” — Hefner’s declaration of freedom from what he saw as the straight-laced, suffocating social standards of post-World War II life. And there will be many people who will not forgive him for what they saw as the vulgar depiction of women as little more than bare-breasted, adolescent sex toys.
But those critics will once again fall short of taking the full measure of a publisher who put his passion for free speech ahead of his business and fortune. Through the decades, Hefner’s company fought multiple legal battles against self-appointed cultural censors and pandering politicians who tried to impose limits on the press.
Those critics will also gloss over Hefner’s early, innovative use of television with the shows “Playboy Penthouse” and “Playboy After Dark,” which presented a racially diverse set of musicians, comedians and other artists, comfortable in one another’s company at a time when, in many parts of the nation, they could not even have been seated in the same room.
And, lest we forget, there also was “The Playboy Interview” — the front-of-book, Q&A feature that provided newsmakers of the time a place to speak their minds to a mass audience in a personal manner not seen elsewhere. From Steve Jobs to Billie Jean King, from “Roots” author Alex Haley to futurist Marshall McLuhan, from Frank Sinatra to Snoop Dog, Playboy showed celebrities in a more personal, authentic light, which was markedly different from the celebrity profiles in other publications.
This oh-so-personal icon of “hip” was preceded into pop history only days earlier by the end of Rolling Stone magazine as we knew it — a singular, sometimes spectacular, “hippie” troubadour extolling the virtues of rock ‘n’ roll, celebrity lifestyles and pop lit.
A 1972 hit song said it best, and with more than a tinge of irony, when it described Rolling Stone at its pinnacle in the “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” era:
“Well, we’re big rock singers
We got golden fingers
And we’re loved everywhere we go (that sounds like us)
We sing about beauty and we sing about truth
At ten thousand dollars a show (right)
We take all kinds of pills that give us all kind of thrills
But the thrill we’ve never known
Is the thrill that’ll gitcha when you get your picture
On the cover of the Rollin’ Stone”
— “Cover of Rolling Stone,” by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, released November 1972
Today’s hipsters are more likely to get music news, and perhaps all news, scrolling through social media feeds on their iPhones. Still, the magazine’s cover image retained some power. As late as July, Rolling Stone showed signs of its old counterculture spunk when it featured a soulful photo of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with the headline, “Why can’t he be our president?”
The magazine was both incubator and home to the best American writers of the last half-century, being the first to feature landmark literary works by Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. It also published some of the best investigative and political reporting of the time. Rolling Stone took readers behind the scenes of the music, film and TV industries; its highly personal style shattering the “who, what, when, where and why” approach of mainstream media.
From takes on a national pension scandal to invasive, critical looks at Wall Street shenanigans, to a devastatingly-detailed profile of then-Gen. Stanley McChrystal, it was Rolling Stones’s willingness and ability to tackle major social issues along with celebrity coverage that gave the magazine its cultural swagger and impact.
Still, the magazine staggered ungracefully into its last years under Wenner. In 2014 it was forced to retract a feature story on an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia, and was dragged into court for multiple libel lawsuits. A meticulous report that followed the well-publicized scandal slammed the magazine’s lack of editorial oversight on the discredited story.
There is good argument to be made that by 2017, Hefner and Wenner and their respective publications had become modest, if not anachronistic, shells of their former selves. The brand loyalty each created and on which each depended is now diffused by easy access to a glut of information on the Web.
But they remain champions of free expression; having shown us all the power of free speech to drive social introspection and spark cultural change. And, in the main, we are all the better for that.