A number of customers have started asking about my background in media and where I intend to go with it. I have also shared some terrific conversations with many publishers about their own stories, why they got into media and how they continue to address the challenges of a rapidly changing media landscape. I thought a blog might go some way to sharing these stories with other professional and would-be publishers. Questions and comments are welcomed.
I started in Media 7 years ago as a management consultant to a community newspaper. I had just returned from a year in Nepal with AusAID and had absolutely no media experience. Suddenly I was in charge of a team of ten. I enjoyed the experience so much that a year later I launched my own community newspaper in another town. Unfortunately this was not quite the ‘romance’ I had anticipated and very quickly I was neck deep in one of the most stressful and high-touch enterprises I had ever engaged. This was hard work!
So I buried myself in the business, working 70 hour weeks for 18 months. We were a 32 page full colour free tabloid monthly. I sold all the ads, shared ad design and layout with my partner Leonie, wrote 90% of the articles and distributed 20,000 of our 40,000 copies. We would go to press at 4am and a truck would arrive at 9am with our papers. I wanted, needed the community to get behind this venture – the world’s first newspaper written entirely by its readers!
As momentum started building a good mate of mine Peter stepped in for a few months. He is a business systems analyst and together we set about streamlining the publishing process. We joked over a couple of reds one night that we were going to design a model and build a system that received content and ads and at the push of a button produced a newspaper. Since then I have met with over 200 independent newspaper publishers through Australia, Europe, UK and the USA, to learn how they do business and what they want.
EzyMedia was founded on the knowledge gained through these early meetings and is driven today by professional and highly experienced publishers with wide-ranging skills in all aspects of newspapers and magazine publishing.
So why media? Because it is a powerful tool for information sharing and is one of the fastest morphing industries in the world – I like that. My professional background is in social services, business and microfinance. If I can help connect ordinary everyday people via worthy, community content, then I’m doing my bit.
I forsee farmers in remote lands knowing which grain of rice will endure the changing climate; a family in South Africa readily accessing information on family planning beyond politics; companies that want to sell more products putting making a greater effort to help the world move beyond hunger so that its people can buy their products. I don’t have the answers, but media in the hands of more will get information flowing and answers will become more and more accessible to all.
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