John Corcoran: 13:29
All right. Let’s go through that decision. So COVID’s going on. No one’s traveling. And you’re like let’s buy a travel magazine.
Josh Dunn: 13:38
Yeah I think what I did Covid caught us off guard. Certainly. And it really broke in our community. Coming out of Asia right in the Pacific was the first.
John Corcoran: 13:48
Yeah.
Josh Dunn: 13:49
And we quickly I mean, I went hardcore, looked at every line item where we could cut, cut, cut and whether there was a major potential storm. And I read everything I could on how to handle chaos. And I remember Churchill has this amazing quote like, never let a good chaos go to waste. And I thought, man, I’m going to do everything I can to stay alive. Or sales were in half.
I mean, people aren’t advertising as much. But we picked up new audiences and there’s new little verticals of communication that had to be communicated in that season. And we just hunkered down, saved our money. And right in the middle of Covid, I had a colleague that was in the travel space and they were in deep soup. They were struggling, and I made a run at it.
I thought, man, this is the time to acquire something when it’s been hit pretty hard. There’s some headwinds there.
John Corcoran: 14:44
So what did you see in that asset during that time? Did you just kind of have positive vibes that you felt like this would eventually get through and, you know, people would be. Then there’d be a yearning to travel again and we’d be able to turn this around.
Josh Dunn: 14:59
Yeah. By the time we actually acquired it, the pendulum had already shifted towards local travel. We can travel. You can start to see when lockdowns were being lifted, there was a high demand. So just as we’re negotiating a deal, sales had already doubled since the down low of the 22 2122 curve of Covid.
But yeah, I had been following the brand very closely. I had a colleague that was running it and had done very well with it, so I was very in tune to the brand. What they’re doing, what they’re not doing and where we could come alongside and leverage scale. So we use scale with our systems and processes and people relationships. And I saw that as a chance to get accelerated growth.
John Corcoran: 15:48
And I imagine you have certain teams like an advertising sales team that work across different publications. So is that one example of a way you make it work?
Josh Dunn: 15:58
Yeah. And with the acquisition, there were two incredible rock star sales executives. They’re in there currently with us. There’s an amazing editor in chief that we’ve known for 25 years. There was an incredible designer.
So when we brought that brand in-house, we acquired the talent to go with it. And it was set. It was anchored. And then man John, we doubled that thing up in 18 months.
John Corcoran: 16:22
How did you do when you acquired that company? That sounds like a lot of value was in this human capital, these people. How did you ensure that they didn’t jump ship? Did you, like, go call them up immediately or what did you do?
Josh Dunn: 16:37
Yeah. As soon as the deal was done, I personally met with them and wanted to find out what their vision and goals are. They were well aware of who we are, they’re well aware of our style. And there’s also some things that they wanted to see change, and I could be that change agent for them when it comes to loving them, serving them, accommodating them, honoring them, respecting them, praising them. So yeah, they’re still with us today.
John Corcoran: 17:05
And did it take a while, though, for you to convince them? Because, you know, everyone’s normally apprehensive at first, right?
Josh Dunn: 17:11
Yeah. I mean, I guess I’m pretty confident that they would love our culture and I just use our culture, use our colleagues that they know in the industry. And by that I mean, our team, we have just a great team that’s been with us for a long time. So there’s trust. There’s loyalty.
Yeah, there’s going to be apprehension for sure. But as long as I can keep proving value and trust and loving them, serving them and surprise and delight them, yeah, that’s been an overwhelming success with this talent.
John Corcoran: 17:46
So I get the sense that you’re a bit of a contrarian. You dropout of college. You go into local media. At a time when a lot of companies have fled from that area, and a lot of businesses have gone out of business. What do I ask you?
Is has there ever been a time where you have had your faith shaken, where you’ve doubted it, where you’ve doubted yourself, where you’ve been like, man, I don’t know if I can go on in this anymore, given the kind of macro economic winds that have been against local media publications.
Josh Dunn: 18:20
Yeah, it’s a very normal feeling. I know to me, John, I think it’s every 2 or 3 years you just start hitting some headwinds. You start seeing some constraints on sales constraints, on the trends or headwinds in certain verticals, certain markets. Yeah. I mean, you look at nine over 11, you look at the downturn of the housing crisis in 0609.
You look at certainly Covid wrecked us pretty good. But I know that I have to take care of my mind and my spirit and my body. And if I can focus on trying to keep that strong and be surrounded with amazing entrepreneurs and amazing folks, that I can have a healthy conversation with, I’m struggling. I feel hopeless, I’m overwhelmed. It’s a safe place.
You know, your spouse and folks in your life that you can be honest and truthful, and then they can help pick you up when you know you can’t do it today.
John Corcoran: 19:20
Yeah. Are there particular communities that you’ve utilized for other entrepreneurs or other support networks?
Josh Dunn: 19:26
I mean, mostly there are communities that I’ve created, whether it’s a band of brothers, whether it’s an advisory board, a CEO roundtable. Yeah. All of that. Yeah. For sure.
John Corcoran: 19:37
We have an interesting local publication in my community. And to give you context, a very small community, 9000, you know, town, two towns kind of together, about 9000, maybe 12,000 residents, something like that. And there’s a newspaper that’s been around for, I don’t know, 40 years or something like that. They have a great editor and they’ve actually won national awards. And it’s interesting to see them like they’ve experimented with sharing content on Nextdoor, which in some ways could be viewed as a threat because some people get their news from there.
But they have a very forward thinking editor who’s utilized that. So I want to ask you a little bit about new media platforms that could be a threat or that could be a benefit to you. You know, one of them might be like podcasting, like we’re doing here today, or social media platforms or next door. You know, what’s your view towards those other channels?
Josh Dunn: 20:33
Yeah, I mean, incredible question because those channels are changing every week, I feel like. And I love to help other folks be successful. I also love how we can elevate our brand. How can I elevate our thought leadership around that. So I embrace colab partnerships, other platforms all day long.
Now, the platforms don’t treat us with respect or they’re stealing and not crediting. That’s another issue. But we have great relationships with media partners, whether they’re national NBC affiliates, CBS affiliates, radio partnerships, content, RSS feeds, you know. In fact, it’s funny you mentioned Nextdoor. They just approached us about using our content on some of their platforms.
And yeah, I’m open to exploring all of it.
John Corcoran: 21:20
Is that like a licensing kind of arrangement?
Josh Dunn: 21:23
Yeah, we’re still trying to figure it out, but they’re looking for local content and even our large media Seattle broadcast affiliates, they’re so stretched financially that they don’t have a lot of local great content anymore that’s inspiring or encouraging. So they’re loving pulling our RSS feeds and working with our editorial team to pull in local. We do a northwest house idea every year. They can’t wait to shoot it, to write it too. They want local, great content.
And so we’re finding this little sweet spot working with radio and TV partners. The other thing, too, you know, you have your social media platforms. You have to be careful around those. Those algorithms are changing. And as long as I get to own and lead our core brands, so we own our website, we own our E newsletter platform, and we own our media.
As long as we own it, we’re guiding light. I’m okay with that, leveraging it on other platforms. But if we start seeing these other platforms as being the new savior to gain an audience or gaining growth, we’re in deep soup. And you see a lot of our colleagues have done that. They’ve leveraged themselves so far.
There’s nothing left that they own anymore.
John Corcoran: 22:33
Right. And there’s you know, it’s interesting because OpenAI has I believe they’ve done some licensing deals with the Associated Press and with The New York Times. Do you see that, you know, setting the stage for them doing licensing deals with more regional and local publications as well. Or how do you see that playing out for you?
Josh Dunn: 22:55
It’s a big question because, you know, we’re allowing those bots to be on our sites to scrub data. We felt that we’re better off joining them than blocking them. At the same time, we want credit. That doesn’t always happen. Licensing is something that I think will eventually happen on more regional, smaller media companies at some point.
But if we just stay focused on being great at human generated content and partner with AI to be a steward of technology that can take our human content, make it super human, I’m okay with that. But our value right now bullies. Everywhere I talk, everywhere we communicate, we create a human generated logo like we’re investing in hundreds of freelance writers, not AI bots, where you have editorial staff. We have staff writers, editors. We invest in humans first and foremost.
Where do you go? I don’t know, but I do know that A.I. has some nice complimentary tools that we’re exploring to make it superhuman.
John Corcoran: 24:03
Yeah. So where do you enable or utilize A.I.? Right. I mean, is it a fact checker? Is it an editor?
Is it making sure that your articles are compliant with AP style, which is something that it could do very quickly? Is it over the line for you to, like, have one of your reporters go and interview someone, do an hour long interview and then take the transcript and have AI turn it into an article. Is that like over the line? Like where do you draw the line?
Josh Dunn: 24:29
It’s a good question. It’s moving a little bit, but we’re very focused on making sure human generated is first and foremost. Now we’ll use Otter AI to capture content.
John Corcoran: 24:42
In AI transcription tools.
Josh Dunn: 24:43
Yeah yeah yeah it’s a great tool. Yeah. You know, co-pilot with Microsoft Chat. You’re looking for a headline. You’re stumped on some headlines.
You just wrote a great story. You interviewed a CEO looking for a good headline. I have no problem with our team and freelancers looking for tools to enhance or to help facilitate a great story, but it’s not going to write it for you. We’re not going to do an interview with the CEO with a bot or an AI generator, right?
John Corcoran: 25:09
Right, right.
Josh Dunn: 25:10
So it’s changing, though, John. It’s interesting.
John Corcoran: 25:13
I mean, it’s changing every day, right? It’s crazy. And, you know, I’m looking at one of your websites here For25 Business.com. And you know, we’ve got an events tab on here. You mentioned that events were early on in kind of the roadmap.
What role does events play now in, you know, in 2025 after Covid? You know, is that still a part of the model?
Josh Dunn: 25:34
For sure. Yeah. Human human engagement is at an all time high. The key we have to be very careful with is everybody wants to be in the event space. And so now you’re having an event again after It’s only been a couple of years having events, now we have them, so we have to be careful to make sure they’re extraordinarily top performing, high engagement, great return on time investment.
So yeah, events are a big piece. Yeah. So yeah, in fact we have a travel and words conference. So we’re all about honoring travel writers. And we throw a conference for them and give them 30 different destination speed dates so they can have access to pitch and to tell stories all across the Pacific Northwest.
So generated content by humans in events, high CEO roundtables, just to have a space with 1020 leaders, to have a quiet space to talk through all these headwinds that we’re facing and where’s our economy going? Where’s labor and where’s this tariff, you know, footprint look like for our organizations right now. So yeah, those are high value meetups.
John Corcoran: 26:41
Yeah. And those are things that can’t be replaced by bots and can’t be replaced by humans. We’re always going to want human connection like this, even if we have AI in our lives. And so that’s something that if it’s part of your business, then it’s not going to be, you know, going to be displaced anytime soon.
Josh Dunn: 26:59
Correct? Yeah I agree.
John Corcoran: 27:02
I wanted to ask you about a new media platform that’s going to be coming out Southwest Travel Life. It’s across five different states, regional travel magazines and digital platforms. How do you look at a new area to go into?
Josh Dunn: 27:17
Yeah, this is something that’s a bit it’s not like I’m starting a new wedding magazine in a local hyper local region. This is a big, big get. But we’re using the northwest travel model that’s been proven for 30 years. Five states in Canada. We feel like there’s a market in the southwest region.
And in our due diligence, we don’t see anything that really is being done very well in that regional space. Each state, each city has great journalism. But where is that? When it comes to a travel engagement from Albuquerque to San Diego or Vegas to El Paso, right. So I think there’s something there.
Well, I do know there’s something there. And I’m investing into that market. And I just believe in the fact that you do a great brand, great editorial work on, you know, impactful distribution. You will attract great partners. We’ll have prints.
We’ll have a website, e-newsletter, and social media. We’ll have some events. I believe in this space quite a bit. I think it’s going to be a good opportunity.
John Corcoran: 28:26
And you mentioned distribution. What is the ideal distribution today? Is it printed? Is it an e-newsletter. So it’s an email basically people get is it a website.
You know, I guess 25 years ago it was easy to understand what distribution was. It was a physical magazine, but increasingly that is changing. So what? What is it exactly now?
Josh Dunn: 28:52
It’s all of the above.
John Corcoran: 28:54
All of it?
Josh Dunn: 28:54
Yeah. And it’s requiring talent and time and finances on every one of those platforms. You know, print is still the dominant anchoring brand, but it’s highly complementary. Digital assets that we own are where we have control. We build it.
It’s all about audience development, right? Yeah. Just getting really good traction on e-newsletter. So you communicate well. You deliver with excellence a website landing, you know, landing pages and guides and just beautiful editorial on travel the Grand Canyon, for example.
And then you use social platforms or other media outlets to drive traffic to the ones that you own. Yeah, we believe in feeding all those platforms.
John Corcoran: 29:42
And by the way, I feel like I’m jumping around a little bit here, but it’s just because there’s so many different things you’re involved in that I’m curious about. So another question I have is about you’ve acquired a couple of platforms which are for publications, historic publications, which is different from, you know, building one from scratch. How do you know when you acquire one of these existing long time publications that you can bring it into the 21st century?
Josh Dunn: 30:08
Yeah, and maybe that’s assuming it wasn’t a 21st century, but I do think yeah.
John Corcoran: 30:12
So maybe it already had, you know, developed some of these things. But I imagine you have some vision for ways in which you can, you know, create greater digital distribution or something like that.
Josh Dunn: 30:22
Yeah, I believe I believe in our team and I believe that we can enhance what was already there. We’ve already increased print distribution. We’ve increased subscribers in print. We’ve increased web traffic, e-newsletter signups, and social media. We’re we’re we’re feeding all those platforms.
I trust that we can do that. Well, now it’s unproven. Are they going to come even with this new brand? Will they come? I’m betting on it, but it’s unproven.
Yeah. However, I trust us. I trust our quality. I trust the excellence of how we do it. It’s been done already, and I’m pretty sure we can do it again.
John Corcoran: 31:01
Yeah. Yeah, I know that one of the things you’re really interested in is leadership. And also, you know, cultivating a community of you have many freelance journalists who contribute to your publications. I’ve always been a writer. In fact, my first job after college was working.
At first, my real job was working in the Clinton White House as a writer of presidential letters and messages. And my joke to people now is that they probably think it’s ChatGPT, which is serious, right? You know, and how, you know, I imagine there are people that are leaving this, this profession. You know, what do you have to say for people that are still passionate about writing, that want to go into this industry that is really experiencing even more disruption than it had over the last 25 years, and it had already experienced a ton of disruption.
Josh Dunn: 31:48
Yeah, I mean, I’m writing a little bit myself and it’s a tough space. It’s a digital competition trying to beat you out. There’s not a lot of money being made in journalism, unfortunately.
John Corcoran: 32:04
No, it’s the kind where the price has gone down and down.
Josh Dunn: 32:06
Yeah, yeah. And so it’s sad and we try to pay fairly. I’m not going to pay over the top so I won’t be in business. But we do pay fairly. We pay every journalist on time.
That’s one big thing a lot of our colleagues have failed to do. But if they can build great content and sell it over and over, or sell their chops over and over and build their own influential platform, their own book, their own guide, they can author something that has a little more significance. How can I promote their book for them? How can I promote their channel or their platform? So we are always looking for ways.
They’ve been a tremendous blessing to our organization. How can we honor them not just paying for their services, but how can we honor them in their profession? And there are great universities cranking out some beautiful, talented new bright minds around storytelling. It is a tough space though, John. It’s.
John Corcoran: 33:06
Yeah.
Josh Dunn: 33:07
The path forward is not easy, but there’s new verticals constantly evolving. Look at 1440. There’s an email platform or Morning Brew is an email platform.
John Corcoran: 33:19
Yeah.
Josh Dunn: 33:19
Or Substack. Great talented writers that those brands are suddenly just a small platform now a big platform, and they’re highly valued.
John Corcoran: 33:29
Yeah. Interesting. It’s an interesting model because, for example, my best friend growing up in high school, his dad was an investigative journalist for the L.A. times, and the LA times could afford to pay for him to work on work on an article for six months and then publish this big exposé that would get a ton of attention. Now that model has really largely gone away. However, there’s other platforms like Twitter X, you know, stuff like that.
Yeah. You know, YouTube where people can build their own platform around different things that people are interested in. Yeah. And in some ways, some of you know, I haven’t. I’m not an academic on this. But you know, if the goal is for information to get out, for knowledge to get out.
I mean, there’s more knowledge than ever now. So in some ways, you know, there’s been other opportunities for writers and for people that are curating and gathering information for people that are interested in a specific area.
Josh Dunn: 34:26
Yeah, it’s funny you mention that because I know what we need. What we want is good content, but how can I help them? And so we have this new mission. We want to include their LinkedIn bio on their byline. How can we get a professional photo for their byline?
They have a new book or what’s their Twitter handle? You know, things like that where I’m thinking, wow, this is a good way, where we can help build their channel and build their voice, and we’re going to be one of maybe 25 companies that they freelance for. Yeah. Or if you want to make a handsome income, average wage guaranteed, so to speak, and be a staff writer, staff editor, there’s a decent lifestyle with that. It’s not over the top, but you do have some level of being honored for your talent.
That’s a great platform as well.
John Corcoran: 35:14
Yeah, yeah. Josh, I think I could talk to you all day long, but in the interest of time, I think we’ve given people enough of a teaser so they can go check out some of the stuff that you do. But before I wrap up, I want to ask my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of practicing gratitude and also giving my guests a little bit of space at the end here to acknowledge especially peers or contemporaries or mentors who’ve been there for them. You mentioned your grandfather.
I imagine there are others. Who would you want to acknowledge?
Josh Dunn: 35:42
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for this chance to just share. You know, my story. And like you, gratitude. We have to go forward. We have to be grateful for what we have and grateful to those around us.
And my grandfather George by far has been on my advisory board. A big, big, big family. My parents for sure. My wife most importantly. Additionally, there’s great colleagues like Craig Dickens.
He’s been on my advisory board and has helped me with systems and processes. He’s an Excel nerd. He sees things differently, has a different lens. So another brother of Kristen Ascii, he’s just a big vision guy. So yeah, there’s been a lot of amazing people to this day that rally around.
My simple mind just loves people, loves journalism, loves the media, and telling great stories. So grateful for you, John. Thank you for doing this and to your audience I appreciate it.
John Corcoran: 36:38
My pleasure. I mean, I’m a bit of a nerd about this, but I, you know, have just grown up. Or, you know what? Putting food on the table for me when I was growing up was journalism. My father was a local journalist. And, you know, without them we don’t know what’s going on.
So I think it’s such an, you know, it’s such an important role to play in society. So I appreciate that you have found a way to evolve your platforms to, to make them still viable in today’s day and age. Josh, where can people go to learn more about you and Premier Media Group?
Josh Dunn: 37:10
Yeah, I’d say premiermedia.net is a good landing page for the organization, and feel free to look me up on LinkedIn as well. It’s a good platform for business development and leadership. So here to serve, here to help wherever we can.
John Corcoran: 37:22
Excellent. Thanks so much.
Josh Dunn: 37:23
Thanks, John.
Outro: 37:27
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.