Marketing Begins At Home

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle’s C.W. Nevius, Dave Barry talks about blogs

“About five years ago, I went to the Herald and I told them, ‘I’ve got this blog and maybe you’d like to run it,’ ” Barry said. “And they said, ‘It’s a what?’ But then they had a committee meeting or something and now they want everybody to have a blog. They want the security guard to have a blog.”

podcasting,

Barry says his wife, Michelle Kaufman, a sportswriter at the Miami Herald, is covering the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. She’s been asked to podcast the Games. That doesn’t seem like a bright idea. “Explain it to them,” Barry remembered telling his wife. “THE OLYMPICS WILL BE ON TELEVISION! You’ve got people saying, ‘Let’s see, I can watch this on my 57-inch TV in living color, or I can download this thing from the speed-skating rink.”

and the future of the newspaper business,

“It has to start with the kids,” he said. “My son is 25. He’s been around newspaper people all of his life. He doesn’t get the paper. That’s the first problem. The second problem is: We can no longer compel people to pay attention. We used to be able to say, there’s this really important story in Poland. You should read this. Now people say, I just look up what I’m interested in on the Internet.”

Barry, who recently retired from his 20+ year gig with the Miami Herald, clearly gets it. The kicker - when Nevius showed up at Barry’s hotel room for the interview, he had just finished another interview… with a podcaster.

Read the whole thing, it’s worth it.