My public/business life has involved "communications" for almost 50 years up to this point. And one would think that longevity itself (indicative of my age) should disqualify me from starting a blog. At least, I believed that to be true, until persuaded otherwise by younger members of our Business Examiner team. (Cajoled into submission might be a more accurate description of what occurred.)
Like many others of my generation, I was a newspaper carrier, lugging copies of Billings Gazette around my hometown in eastern Montana before dawn, through 4-foot snow drifts and minus-30 degree temperatures. It seemed much more reasonable (to say nothing of a whole lot warmer) to move indoors as the anonymous programming operator at KGCX Radio 1480 AM in that same community while I was still in high school.
Four years (and three more radio stations) spent at WSU provided the credential to share the messages of the United States Air Force to some of its own members, as well as to the general public. That globe-trotting adventure was but a prelude to a decade in my first civilian career as a television news journeyman.
It was in a small farm area of south-central Idaho, where I was leading a team of 4 other journalists in producing some 20 local news reports each week at the only television station in the market, that I experienced the gratification of providing useful, interesting information to neighbors who valued that service.
Subsequent opportunities to learn from and telecast to communities on the Oregon Coast, in the Biggest Little City in the World, and near the shores of Lake Whatcom eventually brought me (and our then-growing family) to Tacoma. Five moves in six years were enough to convince me that the "bright lights" life of a TV news nomad would not sustain us long-term.
The opportunity to study business at Pacific Lutheran University in the evenings with the GI Bill covering tuition seemed a promising way to qualify for "a real job" along with a graduate degree that might someday come in handy. I imagined that my future might be found in Corporate America -- perhaps Weyerhaeuser or Boeing would be the Promised Land. At least, it seemed so in the mid-1980s.
Instead, I stumbled across the concept of creating a media resource to serve exclusively local business owners and operators. Without intending to do so, I was infected with the entrepreneurial bug in 1985 and have been carrying it now for going on 24 years.
Blog or not, I am not convinced that anyone cares about the foregoing chronicle. But it is, apparently, the kind of rambling rhetoric that clogs up the Internet nowadays. And your team of Business Examiner professional journalists -- and business content providers -- are striving to deliver what you want in whatever format your desire.
That is the commitment that caused us to expand from our Tacoma origins to the state capital region in 1989. We first coined the phrase "South Sound" that December and the regional geographic designator certainly seems to have taken hold. Few of us really understood how a facsimile machine worked, when they arrived on the business scene in the mid-1990s. But it wasn't too many years later that BE began to use the new technology to share daily local business news with our subscribers each weekday afternoon.
Later, this mystery World Wide Web and its related electronic messaging came upon the landscape. We followed you (OK, we were leading many others) into the e-mail world with BE Daily going by request to the early adopters. We also posted on our Web site local articles and other content we had written for and delivered by the ink-on-paper tabloid business journal.
It wasn't too many years later that we secured our dozen years of archived content for viewing by BE subscribers only. Perhaps, if the mainstream media publishers had followed a similar practice, they wouldn't be in such a struggle for survival today.
A return to my broadcast roots five years ago created the monthly “South Sound Business Report,” a program focused on the local business scene that lights up cable TV channels (and CW-11 KSTW) each month.
It is this whole menu of content directed exclusively to you – the South Sound business community – that was cited by judges, when earlier this month they named Business Examiner the “Small Business Journalist of the Year” for Oregon, Idaho, Alaska and Washington.
All of us on the BE team are proud, humbled and, yes, challenged by this recognition to continue what we do for you. And to expand our services, as in this blog.
Please let us know whether it has any value in your world.
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