Growing up in a family business that was advertising and a community paper was and is a mixed blessing.
Our lives revolved around the work. The people and the product and the communities that we were responsible for serving.
Often our thoughts our needs took second fiddle to the jobs we needed to perform for our communities.
We provided an alternative affordable place for people to advertise business, things, events and whatever other information our community wanted to communicate to others in a large way.
While in school at a young age learning about the science of advertising and marketing, I connected with the phrase consider the force.
As my teacher taught about manipulation of delivery of advertising I took paused contemplating what I was learning to what role my family and our business took in the world of information and influence.
My evaluation of our business and product continued to be of service for many years within our communities.
In 2005 I went to an interactive media conference. There I learned so much more about the business geared around information. It was both fascinating and frightening to absorb what was happening and changing in the information highway. People from around the world where there learning discussing and planning their evolution regarding information in their communities.
At some point I learned about how the intervention of the printing press changed the world is so many ways. Gone were the days of stories getting lost in translation due to the natural evolution when information was shared verbally. Man has always used each other to share and pass along information to each other to the world at large and to keep the stories alive.
At the interactive media conference we learned how business were and would be using the newer platforms within their business. For me most of it was fascinating and I absorbed as much as I could to try to understand what our business needed to do to stay relevant. Though the ethics discussion that spoke of a time when we would not know where or information would be coming from scared me.
At the time I attempted to bring back some of the recommendations back into our business. Some of the recommendations I was able to bring into our business though at the time the mentality of our staff, our owners limited what we choose to take on as services to provide.
We had the relationships the resources and the right to consider it all.
Instead we continued to stay our lane and our mission that was consistent from the start.
Since the begins our focus was to Provide an alternative option for our communities to share their information with others.
In time staff, customers and our communities moved on to other jobs and other businesses other resources to share and get their information in methods that seemed more prevalent.
In our current time in history I have become prouder and more aware of the service our company provided. Often working with a wide range of our communities. we interacted and represented a wide array of demographics. Our customers and readers represented most of our communities population ranging from some of the most finically desperate to some of the most affluent.
We prided ourselves on our price sheet and the fact that it was not variable. Consistently was clear for decades and decades.
We priced our products appropriately to cover our expenditures but not so high that it wasn’t available to some who had financial limitations.
Our business also was a consistency that our communities came to trust for information.
As our business our communities and census of the data determined it was time to pivot to additional services and discontinue others became clear that the world changed.
Our original mission method and madness that we had done for decades of deadlines decisions and determination that we too could not carry on in the current atmosphere of information sharing.
Over the years we have watched our peers and products evolve drastically.
Some of the changes are very frightening and continue to disappoint me in what we must all do to consider the source differently.
The masters of information have been manipulating for some time now.
Our founders recognized the needs of a community. We consistency showed up to provide products and services that were reliable and we could recommend based on our knowledge of information.
our founders, our leaders recognized the responsibility of carrying others information to others.
Consistently Share information and that is respectable, responsible and reliable.
Everyday seems like we learn of business centered around sharing of information and the people responsible for this task speaking up standing up and sharing behind the curtain that they can’t carry on anymore.
The ethics the blurred lines and the means and methods of manipulating targeting and driving the information and messaging continues to be complicated. Money influences the message.
Many people have fought for our freedoms in many ways. Many people have had to stop reporting and sharing information like they did in the past due to data and money and their inability to be able to stand by and allow it to happen.
Food deserts, news deserts, medical care deserts, and information deserts are things that affect people.
Somedays I miss snail mail, rotary phones and being able to read news and papers from around the world in my local library. I felt at ease when I could read a newspaper from our region, other areas of America even other areas of the world and the stories seemed consistent.
I didn’t have to use my valuable time to consider the source. I could connect with information, check a couple sources and form my own thoughts regarding the information.
Day after day I am reminded of how much has changed and how difficult it is to connect to people and resources of capable information and people ready to serve. Portals and problems have replaced people. Whether you are paying a utility bill, watching a movie, going to the doctor or just trying to watch some tv or read a book the methods to doing all of these things is different. Many are frustrated by all of it. Many are pushed daily by the difficulties they face to navigate the changing times.
Reliable sources are becoming harder to find as day after day the institutions and the people in them are raising the flags to say the change has happened. It happened before our eyes a long time ago.
