As Monica and I entered into the world of print media I found myself outside of my comfortable daily life at the university. Although we begun the journey with a rough introduction, the experience turned out to be fun, interesting, and dare I say educational (as we were to avoid any business that focuses on education, but education should be embedded in any business, right?).
Our first point of contact was with my husband vetting the idea of us visiting through the CFO and a follow-up email from Monica and I. The CFO's response was terse and vague. He set-up two interviews for us but cancelled due to sickness our first the night before we expected to visit. My husband was encouraging and said we should go anyway and see what happens. He does computer work for this organization and knows the staff.
We entered the building nervous and worried about our reception. The woman at the front was temporary and I was talking with her discovering this and wondering what we should do next my husband found staff he felt comfortable introducing us to and set-up interviews for us. The next thing we knew we were in our first interview with one of the sales people.
Mark was incredibly friendly and informative. We learned that most employees were long term, he was one of the newest as of one year. He shared how he was trained and the philosophy of the sales/business department. There are two sides of the house in this world of print media. The business side and the creative/writing side. In many of organizations like these there is actually tension between the two sides of the house. This organization seems not have this problem as they know their places and respect the work of each other. Mark feels good about working at this establishment and has no trouble selling add space because of the strong reputation of this paper.
Our next interview was with Nick. He is an icon of this paper - well known and extremely respected. He has been with this organization since its beginning. He shared with us the nature of his business, dropped the F bomb a few times and continued to sprinkle his speech with colorful language. He spoke of some of the politics around a competitor in town and the transformation of this paper as the politics were heating up of the other paper and there were some majors events happening in SB - the fires. This paper then went on-line and started to provided much desired coverage of important events in Santa Barbara daily instead of just weekly. It was a perfect storm of events for this paper - one paper going through tough political stuff, disasters happening in town, and a new medium that added value was launched.
Our last interview of the day was with a manger of multi-media sales. Robby was talkative and shared many stories about the organization. He opened the organization to us for full disclosure and became our priestes. He came to this organization via a professional organization where he met the owner and editors and they swayed him to relocate. His office is full of artifacts such as buttons, memorabilia and pieces that represent how they once put together the paper. He was animated about sharing with us how they used to wax everything - he had a special shirt he would wear the day they put the paper together, and showed us how it was done.
We left that first day in awe and full of information. We saw chaos in offices with paper layered on desks, walls pasted with pictures, buttons of all kinds, dogs in offices who came over for a pet as we walked by, casual dress, and happy faces with smiles.
The trip began for us with some fear and regret and it ended with my headed spinning from the experience of viewing a new work environment as well as learning a new language and craft.
We will be going back again on Friday to get a tour and meet some more people!
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