How to manipulate the media

A good newspaper is a strange sort of animal. It's privately owned, but much of its success depends on how well it is able to operate as a public trust.

At Northern Nevada Business Weekly, we work hard to be a good newspaper with varying degrees of success from week to week. We always need the help of the business community to put out a publication that is not only useful but compelling.

For starters, we always welcome your thoughts about how we're doing and what we can do better. We really, really try to avoid getting defensive if you have some criticism, and we know that we learn a lot more from criticism than applause. We apply a process of continuous improvement to Northern Nevada Business Weekly, and some of the best ideas for improvement lately have come from readers.

We also rely heavily on our readers for suggestions about subjects we should cover.

By choice, we don't have a wire service no Associated Press articles from New York City for us and so we need to rely on our own wits and our own contacts to come up with articles about northern Nevada each week. We did a little internal study last week and found that we average 46 articles, large and small, in each edition of Northern Nevada Business Weekly all of them local, all of them involving some measure of reporting and writing by our news staff of four people.

We come up with some of our ideas the old-fashioned way by driving around. We try to take the back streets when we return to the office from assignments, and we keep our eyes open for new construction projects or new developments. In a good week, a quarter of our ideas for articles come from our own observations.

The rest of the articles arise from suggestions from readers. Some public relations agencies submit detailed and lengthy press releases that lead to articles. More often, our readers call to tell us about something interesting that's happening at their company. And once in a while, a reader will drop a note and ask that we track down the details of a new development somewhere around town. We appreciate all of these tips, no matter their source, and we track down nearly all of them.

So how do you get an article into Northern Nevada Business Weekly? It's fairly simple. Call us at 770-1173 or drop an e-mail to info@nnbw.biz. If you call, ask for me.

We always are looking for stories about companies in northern Nevada that are doing something. We seldom have much interest in nonprofits because our mission is to cover the profit-making sector of the

region.

As we do articles about companies, we generally want to talk about strategies, tactics, and ways the company is overcoming the challenges that it faces in its marketplace. We pay relatively little attention to products, and we don't want to do articles that simply promote products or services. We're not in the business of providing free advertising in our news pages.

We particularly welcome submissions for our People pages. These can be sent to info@nnbw.biz. Don't go to any trouble writing them. That's our job. What we ask is some basic information the name of the person, the job which the person has taken,

a little bit of professional background on the person and a little bit of educational background if it's appropriate. If you e-mail a photo, please send us a jpg of at least 300 dpi.

We welcome, too, submissions for the My Voice column that appears on this page. The columns run 950 words no more and are intended to provide specific information that our readers can put to use in their business. If you have an idea for a column, drop me a note at info@nnbw.biz or give me a call.

Usually, we get My Voice columns into print within two weeks after their receipt. We're not currently seeking

regular columnists, although we'll accept up to two submissions a year from any individual writer.

One other note: We've offered our free Daily Update of breaking business news via e-mail for several years now, and it's distributed to nearly 2,000 people each afternoon. We're now posting update items throughout the day to our Web site, nnbw.biz. Assuming there's any news worth your time, we're generally getting any fresh items posted around 8 a.m., right before lunch and again about 2 p.m.

We continue to have a marvelously good time doing this paper most days, at least and we're thankful for your help.

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