Speakers at this year’s New England Newspaper Conference

This year’s New England Newspaper Conference will feature expert speakers and roundtable and panel discussions that will focus on topical issues on the news landscape. The other highlights of the conference, to be held Thursday, Oct. 12, at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Natick, Mass., are two key award events: the New England Newspaper Awards luncheon and the Yankee Quill Awards dinner.

Headlining the conference will be keynote speaker Tom Yunt and featured speakers David Woronoff and Glen Johnson. Each will discuss an area of interest for newspaper executives and other journalists

The conference’s morning session will begin with roundtable discussions.

The roundtable topics are:

• “Are carriers independent contractors or employees? How recent decisions may impact your newspaper.” The discussion will be led by publishers and lawyers.
• “How to handle the handlers: PR & public safety – Bridge or barrier to info?” sponsored and led by the New England Society of News Editors.

“You can read about initiatives that other newspapers are implementing, but when you get in a room and you hear firsthand from somebody what they’ve done, what made them successful in doing it, and you learn their strategy, it’s really helpful,” Linda Conway, NENPA’s executive director, said of the roundtables. “Having that back-and-forth discussion with a Q&A period allows people to get key tips and take it back to see how it applies to their market.”

Yunt, chief operating officer for United Communications Corporation, based in Kenosha, Wis., and owner of The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Mass., will speak later on how newspapers are changing. His topic is “The Newspaper Sur-THRIVAL Guide: Newspaper 101 in the 21st Century.”

“Tom is going to provide some insight and inspiration for the publishers and the executives who want to truly leverage the opportunities that they face in the contemporary news media landscape,” Conway said. “He’s going to be talking about the future of the industry and changes we must make to thrive.”

Yunt’s keynote speech will follow a talk by Woronoff, publisher of The Pilot of Southern Pines, N.C. His topic, “Break out of the familiar to increase your revenue and audience,” will provide insights into new ideas that newspapers can use to adapt to changing sources of revenue.

“David is going to talk about different ways that his newspaper has transformed (itself) and alternative products that they’ve come up with to try to generate new revenue streams for … newspapers. His group is working on some exciting things,” Conway said.

The New England Newspaper Awards luncheon will follow Yunt’s presentation, from 12:30 to 2 p.m. The awards luncheon will feature the following honors: the 2017 New England Newspapers of the Year; the Publick Occurrences Awards; the Allan B. Rogers Editorial Award; the Morley L. Piper First Amendment Award; the Bob Wallack Community Journalism Award; and the AP New England/Sevellon Brown Journalist of the Year.

The afternoon portion of the conference will kick off with Johnson’s talk on “From breaking the news to making the news.” Johnson is a longtime political reporter and former top aide to U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry.

After Johnson’s talk, a panel will discuss “Using analytics to drive newsroom decisions.”

The New England Society of News Editors’ annual meeting to elect new officers concludes the afternoon session. The evening program will begin with the New England Society of News Editors and Yankee Quill cocktail reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

The conference will conclude with the Yankee Quill Awards dinner.

Those being honored this year are Robert Ambrogi, founding editor of Lawyers USA, editor in chief of Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, and executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association; and Robin Young, a veteran television and radio journalist and co-host of National Public Radio’s “Here & Now” program on WBUR-FM in Boston. A posthumous award will be given to James Franklin, the older brother of Benjamin Franklin and a Colonial printer, publisher and author.

The price for the all-day conference, including the awards luncheon, is $109 a person. Admission for the luncheon only is $79 a person.

Tickets for the Yankee Quill Dinner are sold separately and are $85 a person.

Rooms at the Crowne Plaza are available at a discounted rate of $159 a night.

More details about the conference and registration information are available here.

‘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.”

Glen Johnson on a plane trip with Secretary of State John F. Kerry, wearing headphones in background.

When Glen Johnson began his career as a journalist, he never thought that one day he would be a top aide to the U.S. secretary of state.

He began his news career in Chicago, before becoming a city hall reporter at the then-Salem (Mass.) Evening News, now known as just the Salem News. After a time as a city hall reporter at The Sun of Lowell, Mass., Glen became a statehouse reporter at The Associated Press in Boston, before joining The Boston Globe. Johnson had long been on government beats at both the Globe and AP, but he never thought he’d get the call that changed his career.

“I got a call from John Kerry while working for the Globe, right before he was confirmed as secretary of state,” Johnson said. “He asked if I would work for him in a communications role. I thought about it overnight, and I was at a point in my career where I thought about new challenges, and I thought I’d never get this type of opportunity again.”

Johnson, who was Kerry’s deputy assistant secretary for strategic communication, had been a reporter for more than 27 years. During part of his time at the Globe and AP, Johnson had been stationed in Washington, D.C. While at the Globe, he was the politics editor of Boston.com, and had a column in The Sunday Globe called Political Intelligence. Johnson covered five presidential campaigns and eight national nominating conventions as a reporter.

Johnson will discuss his newspaper career and his time as an aide for John Kerry, as well as a book he is writing on his experiences, during his featured speech, “From breaking the news to making the news,” at the New England Newspaper Conference at 2:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 12, at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Natick, Mass.

“My job as a reporter was to try and gather as much information as I could about what was going on in government and explain it to the reader and the public,” Johnson said. “My job in the government was to learn as much as I could about what we were trying accomplish and what kind of things we were trying to highlight about my boss’ (John Kerry’s) activities and share them with the public.”

Johnson planned most of Kerry’s trips, and ended up becoming an official photographer for Kerry. By the time Kerry had left as secretary of state, Johnson had taken more than 100,000 photos of him. Together, Johnson and Kerry traveled more than 1.3 million miles to 91 countries and all seven continents.

Johnson said his experience in journalism helped him in his new role.

There were some common denominators even though one role was outside the government and one was inside it, Johnson said.

“I knew what would interest me as a reporter and I knew what would interest my former colleagues,” he said.

Join the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, the Digital Initiative at Harvard Business School and the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School on October 20 for an afternoon conference on The Future of Advertising and Publishing: Finding new revenue models for journalism in the digital age. Panels will feature academics, journalists, media executives and industry experts who will discuss the distribution and advertising challenges facing traditional publishers and present lessons learned from adjacent media spaces about digital revenue models.

Friday, October 20, 2017
Harvard Business School

This is the link to the Eventbrite (RSVP only) –> http://bit.ly/adv_pub