"Simply the best newspaper executive I have had the pleasure of knowing" is how Black Press President David Black describes Rick O'Connor. Black's nomination along with supporting recommendations from nine of Rick's colleagues and staff pushed him to the top of a very impressive group of nominees for the 2009 Dean Lesher Award.

O'Connor's accomplishments are many as are his contributions to the community and the industry. He started out as an owner of a small newspaper company in a small British Columbia town and ultimately left to work for Black Press, eventually moving up to Chief Operating Officer overseeing 150 titles and 3,000 employees.

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Community Media Matters — Monthly Podcast to Provide Information and Perspective to Financial, Advertising and Newspaper Industries

Produced by Suburban Newspapers of America, first edition features interview with Valassis

The topics will range from the financial health of the industry to how advertising media buyers are using community media products. Designed to provide much needed information, Community Media Matters, will be offered monthly with a goal of 5-7 minutes in length. It will be produced by Suburban Newspapers of America and accessible from the trade association’s Web site.

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By Tanya Henderson, SNA

Craig Murray, Multimedia Editor, and Maureen Boyle, Reporter, weren’t kidding when they told the IMA Alliance webinar attendees that they like to use video regularly. If you visit their site (www.enterprisenews.com) , they have more than 700 videos posted. Murray and Boyle, recent winners of SNA’s Local Community Web Site contest joined Joe Michaud, senior consultant of the AIM Group to discuss “Grassroots Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Web Audience.”

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By Deb Shaw

I’d say the success of CapeCast is all about high energy. The team of Eric Williams and Jason Kolnos comprise the engine driving the 5 times a week webcast in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and these two seem to know only one speed — faster.

Considering they are conceiving, shooting, editing, producing and posting 5 webcasts each week, in addition to their other multimedia reporting duties, their feverish pace and quick wits are doubtless critical ingredients to their success. They are energetic, frenetic almost, and have taken videography into new realms with their weekday webcasts, a.k.a. CapeCasts (www.capecodonline.com/capecast), that have evolved into a daily, fun, newsy feature show shot on location with a regular host. Their efforts have given a whole new dimension to the daily newspaper and their audience’s online experience.

While it’s probably a good bet that these two have unique personalities and ambition that would be impossible to replicate, there are some excellent lessons in their experience with webcasts so far and they were good enough to share them and the wisdom gained along the road so far. They were also featured speakers in a recent SNA Foundation sponsored webinar about Telling Stories Differently On The Web.

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By Deb Shaw

Ray Marcano made it abundantly clear that his company, Cox Ohio Publishing, has adopted a very different philosophy about what they post on their website and he believes that difference is helping to drive advertising revenue.

“It’s not about content,” says Marcano. “It’s about information that our users want. And we don’t care who produces it. Newsrooms, marketing department, circulation, even advertisers.” Marcano is the Internet General Manager at Cox Ohio and was a featured speaker at a recent SNA hosted Webinar that revolved around Online Revenue Tools That Make Money Now.

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