Mr. Magazine

“I think the secret sauce for a digital publishing company to survive is to try and reinvent the game.” Robyn Peterson, Chief Technology Officer, Mashable

Tech start-ups and media companies; and never the two shall part, at least, not at Mashable where CTO Robyn Peterson has done some amazing things with the marriage of the duo. After leading the development of the new Mashable.com in 2012, which saw a 100% increase in mobile page views, pages-per-visit and ad engagement, and the development of Velocity, a technology that predicts and measures audience response of content across the web, Robyn is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to digital publishing and how to make it more accountable and successful.

I spoke with Robyn recently during a visit to Lisbon, Portugal where the two of us were keynote speakers at the WoodWing Xperience. Our conversation was about Mashable, the Velocity Platform and digital publishing in general. My main questions related to how to make digital much more than just a click of the mouse and bring engagement and connection to the audience. I even asked him if Mashable is going to follow other digital platforms that discovered print as a new outlet to their digital sites.

So sit back and discover Robyn Peterson’s answers in this lively Mr. Magazine™ conversation with Mashable’s Chief Technology Officer.

But first a Mr. Magazine™ minute with Robyn Peterson, CTO, Mashable on what makes a digital platform survive and thrive in today’s marketplace.

And now the sound-bites…

On why it’s hard for legacy media to achieve and do what some digital-only companies have done in the media world: I think to really excel on the digital side you have to really operate aggressively. You need to be OK with risk and really take some chances. It’s a different mindset.

On any similarities between legendary risk-taking journalism of yesterday and today’s digital entities: I would say there is something in common with companies that risked it all to succeed. And when you’re a digital-only company trying to make it in digital, you need that to survive; you need that success or you go away.

On the DNA that makes up Mashable: I would say the real secret to Mashable is that we listen to our readers as much as we talk to them and we have even from the very beginning.

On how the Velocity Platform works: The Velocity Platform is a platform that predicts the viral potential of a piece of content. It will watch a particular piece of content and listen across social networks and try to get a good figure of how viral a piece of content will become.

On his most challenging moment at Mashable: I would say it was actually developing this Velocity Platform. I’ve been in the media business and text startups before and it was fun to really merge those two pieces of my identity together.

On the secret sauce of Mashable’s digital staying power: I think the secret sauce for a digital publishing company to survive is to try and reinvent the game.

On what keeps him up at night: I would say that one thing we believe strongly in is that you need to make big bets. And in order to really get ahead of market, those big bets have to pay off at some percentage.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Robyn Petrson, Chief Technology Officer, Mashable…

Samir Husni: You’ve been involved with Mashable now for over three years; why do you think it’s so hard for legacy media to achieve and do what digital-only companies have been doing in our media world?

Robyn Peterson: I think to really excel on the digital side you have to really operate aggressively. You need to be OK with risk and really take some chances. And when you talk about legacy media, I’d have to assume you’re talking about companies that have been doing what they’ve been doing quite successfully for many years, but it’s been a very similar recipe. And the digital world requires a completely different mindset.

You really need to think about how your brand adapts to a different use case; a use case where your readers don’t come to you or you don’t go to your readers once a month or once a week. Your readers will actually come to you and you want them to come to you on a very regular basis, many times a day is ideal.

To get to that place, you need to rethink who you are. You need to step back to the core of your brand and say: OK, in print I publish this much and this is the use case whether I’m once a month and I want to be on coffee tables and be that flag of identity which helps so many brands or I now want to be the place that everyone goes to or this target market goes to in order to get XY and Z. It’s a different mindset.

Samir Husni: What’s amazing to me is if you look at the early 20th century and all the journalists who started magazines, they were risk takers and when they had an idea for a new magazine they weren’t thinking about the statistical analysis of that product or the money. Whether it was Henry Luce or DeWitt Wallace, they were journalists first and businessmen later. Do you see that there are any similarities between the new digital entities today and the historical others?

Robyn Peterson: I have to profess, first of all, that I’m not an expert on some of the earlier publishing history. But I would say there is something in common with companies that risked it all to succeed. And when you’re a digital-only company trying to make it in digital, you need that to survive; you need that success or you go away. And a lot of us like our jobs and don’t want them to go away.

When you’re in an existing business and trying to branch into a new business, it’s hard to have that level of aggression, for lack of a better word, the ability to take a risk. And in a new start-up, you need to take that risk in order to survive. And there’s no safety in staying still or in being conservative.

Samir Husni: Can you define the DNA of Mashable?

Robyn Peterson: I would say the real secret to Mashable is that we listen to our readers as much as we talk to them and we have even from the very beginning. When Peter Cashmore first started the blog, he was constantly on social networks like Twitter listening to how people were reacting to what he was saying or what other people were saying that they wanted to see written about. So he was always listening.

And as Mashable grew from a blog to a media company over the last few years, I would say that we’ve just accelerated that and continued to listen to what our readers are saying. And by doing that we’ve managed to build an audience of people that like to share. They share with us and more importantly than that, they share with each other and with new people who haven’t heard about us.

So I guess if you sort of dial back to what is Mashable’s DNA; it’s listening and talking to a connected audience.

Samir Husni: So you don’t think in those early stages that Pete Cashmore (Mashable founder and CEO) was sitting around looking at statistical analyses and seeing how much money he was going to make developing this blog?

Robyn Peterson: No, not then, although we are now. We run a lot of data stats out of Mashable. Within my engineering team I have an artificial intelligence team and a data science team, both of which are working on our Velocity Platform.

Samir Husni: Tell me a little bit more about the Velocity Platform and how you’re actually able to monetize digital?

Robyn Peterson: Sure. The Velocity Platform is a platform that predicts the viral potential of a piece of content. It will watch a particular piece of content and listen across social networks and try to get a good figure of how viral a piece of content will become. We’ll take all the data we get from listening and plug it through statistical models and make predictions some number of hours out.

And what that helps us to do is figure out which content is winners and the ones that we’ll want to promote more highly and aggressively. We’ve used the Velocity System internally for about a year.

Internally, we use it for a couple of different things. First, we’ve created an intelligence dashboard that our editorial team can look at and at any given second they can find out either the viral potential of our content, content that we’ve published, or the viral potential of content that’s out there at large on the Internet. And then that way they can make a decision on themes they want to cover.

Mashable.com itself has a large component of Velocity built into it. The System makes recommendations and moves content around dynamically; makes recommendations to editors who manage our home page and the editors can then decide which pieces of content to highlight in top positions and the algorithm can manage the rest of the page. The algorithm can manage the right side of articles and what comes below articles. And once again, it helps us promote the stories that are our winners.

We also use the Velocity Platform to inform our marketing team as to which pieces of content should be discussed on social networks, Facebook for instance. With social networks and a story, timing is critical. So knowing which piece of content to promote and exactly when to promote it is something that’s really critical knowledge for our marketing team and that’s what Velocity internally provides to them.

With this announcement that we’re partnering with 360i and giving them exclusive access to Velocity, we’re going to start exploring how Velocity can help an agency, especially an agency that’s so good at social already for the brands that are in their portfolio, from Oreo to HBO and many others; it’ll be interesting to see how our use cases apply to 360i and we’ll see how that evolves as our partnership goes on.

Samir Husni: As you were talking about this I was thinking why can’t the print magazine business have some kind of Velocity Platform to predict things about their covers? Like which ones will go viral? In this digital age; is it possible for print to learn from some of these techniques?

Robyn Peterson: It’s an interesting idea. To be honest, I haven’t thought about it before. If there’s data to collect, there’s velocity to be observed and predicted. If those components are there then there’s a recipe for print as well.

Samir Husni: What has been the most challenging moment in your career with Mashable?

Robyn Peterson: That’s a really good question. I would say it was actually developing this Velocity Platform. I’ve been in the media business and text startups before and it was fun to really merge those two pieces of my identity together, to try and evolve into this media company/technology company hybrid that Mashable is today.

And I think just the evolution of that created some challenges, but of course a lot of positives too. Then with respect to Velocity itself being the result of that sort of evolution, or one of the results, we didn’t know what we built with Velocity would be possible. We thought it would be in our heart of hearts. We thought we could predict, but we weren’t a 100% sure it would be as good as it is, let’s put it that way.

We spent some time developing out a proof of concept and got it out there and sure enough it actually worked and that was a pretty thrilling moment.

Samir Husni: And was that the most pleasant moment in your job?

Robyn Peterson: That was. It was a very fun moment, although we have a lot of exciting stuff in store for the next few years. I hope we beat that.

Samir Husni: Is there a recipe that can be duplicated from Mashable? We have some out there like Huffington Post, Media Post and others; is there some kind of secret ingredient that goes into all of these companies that are surviving? I think the death rate on digital is even higher than print, in terms of how many companies have started and are now gone. What’s the secret sauce?

Robyn Peterson: I think the secret sauce for a digital publishing company to survive is to try and reinvent the game. So it’s not to be exactly how the print media companies are bringing publishing to the web, but to actually step back and say: How should I create this digital business; what’s at the heart of my brand? A – what is my brand? B – what kind of operating model fits my brand? And then to execute on that plan.

For us at Mashable, we’re such a social company that if we were to follow classic media rules we wouldn’t have tried to develop a lot of product expertise in house, we wouldn’t have tried to build out an artificial intelligence team and a data science team and all those sorts of things to build platforms that listen and predict social behavior.

We stepped back and kind of flushed all the old media history out of our minds and asked: How can we do this differently? If we’re starting right now from scratch, and again that’s important for any company, to try and reinvent itself and we did that, I believe, at Mashable a couple years back, we feel like we’re a new company. How should we actually attack this problem and come to a solution? For us the thought was let’s build this technical expertise, this product expertise in house and A – not leave all the fun to the tech startups, but B – create something that’s completely differentiated and although it doesn’t fit nicely into this is just a media company or this is just a tech company, it’s a hybrid between those two, but it’s really shown great results for us.

Samir Husni: Can you imagine a mix between innovation and renovation or it must be all innovation?

Robyn Peterson: I guess to some degree innovation brings renovation, doesn’t it? If you’re trying to do something new, you have to mold the existing organization to fit that. So I think one brings the other.

Samir Husni: Any other words of wisdom?

Robyn Peterson: For media companies in particular, think about how you’re utilizing your technology team. In too many media companies, the technology team have been relegated to simply being assigned tickets and executing on those tickets and not really having a seat at the table to decide the strategy of the company.

And that’s where new media companies or digital-only media companies have a leg-up on some of the existing companies that made it to their prime during the print era; not that we’re out of the print era by any means. I think digital-only companies recognize the importance of technology and digital product and things that go along with that like user experience. And it’s so critical to not only keep that in mind, but to have the folks who actually run those groups at the table deciding where to go next. Because when you’re in a world dominated by engineering and technology, you need an engineer and a technologist at the table when you’re deciding where to go.

Samir Husni: Do you think there will ever be a print magazine from Mashable?

Robyn Peterson: I’m not sure. We have no imminent plans to launch one, I’ll say that.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Robyn Peterson: Too much caffeine. It’s a great question and I would say that one thing we believe strongly in is that you need to make big bets. And in order to really get ahead of market, those big bets have to pay off at some percentage. And I guess when you’re making big bets; sometimes you can lose some sleep over them. But when they pay off it’s fun. And I feel like a lot of our big bets have been paying off lately.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

© Samir “Mr. Magazine™” Husni, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved.
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“We did a reader survey last year and I was convinced that digital has been around for a long time, we have mobile apps, digital editions, social media; I thought for sure more of our membership was really going to express a preference for those digital platforms as a way to get their information. And it was almost 40% of the members who said that they really just wanted print.” Erin Pressley

Membership and content are two very important facets for the new president of Association Media & Publishing, Erin Pressley. The AM&P is the premier membership organization that serves the needs of association publishers, business operation executives, communications professionals, designers, and content generators and the media they create.

And while digital is an important part of their business, Erin is extremely pleased by the love and loyalty their members have for their print products, especially since she pleaded ink on paper’s case in front of her CEO and the board of directors.

And her entreaty for print has really paid off since a large part of their membership still revel at the feel of a magazine in their hand and the investment for that tangibility is proving most successful.

So get ready to learn a lot about association media and the points that make it tick as you enjoy the Mr. magazine™ interview with Erin Pressley – President of AM&P.

But first The Mr. Magazine™ Minute with the newly installed president of the Association Media & Publishing Erin Pressley and listen to her dream and mantra for AM&P.

And now the sound-bites:

On the current status of the Association Media & Publishing: Association Media right now I think is really undergoing an evolution. There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity that’s out there, but there’s also a lot of choices to be made.

On the platforms Associations prefer when it comes to their content: It depends on the association. I think some are a little more thoughtful and progressive than others. I know some have experimented by dropping print altogether. We still invest in our print and we still believe it’s a valuable member benefit.

On her most pleasant surprise when it comes to her career with the AM&P: I thought for sure more of our membership was really going to express a preference for our digital platforms as a way to get their information. And it was almost 40% of the members who said that they really just wanted print.

On her biggest stumbling block: A stumbling block? I think it’s the same with many associations; it’s resources. It’s financial resources to invest in new innovations and properties, it’s human resources to have the team to really execute on a lot of what we need to really get done.

On what keeps her up at night: I’m well aware of the resources that we have at our organization and that gap seems to be getting wider and wider. And so my struggle is to figure out how I can lessen that gap.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine interview with Erin Pressley, President of the Association Media & Publishing…

Samir Husni: You’re the new president of the AM&P and your background is in editorial. Can you briefly tell me about the current status of the Association Media?

Erin Pressley: Association Media right now I think, as I’ve heard many people speak today at the conference, is really undergoing an evolution. There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity that’s out there, but there’s also a lot of choices to be made. And I think that most associations are headed in the right direction, but there are too many tools to choose from and too many paths to go down and I think what most association publishers need to do is really sit back and think more strategically, develop a content eco-system, learn who their members are and what they want, do an audit of the communication resources that they have and really be more strategic before they continue to go down the road.

I think a lot of associations are just so used to doing the work, getting the work done, pumping the work out; it’s all tactics. And I think when you have few resources, whether it’s budget or human resources, you just get in this mode of status quo and whatever is the easiest. And it’s just hard to sit back and think more strategically about what you need to do. But I think that’s the only way associations are going to stay relevant in the years ahead.

Samir Husni: Is there a divide in the associations about whether they should go print, digital or both? Or is there a united front when it comes to platforms?

Erin Pressley: It depends on the association. I think some are a little more thoughtful and progressive than others. I know some have experimented by dropping print altogether. We still invest in our print and we still believe it’s a valuable member benefit, but I had to get up in front of our board of directors and in front of my CEO and really defend that proposition.

There are so many options out there and I think the breadth of membership that we have in our association and what we call the male-stale-and-pale, the old guys who have been around a long time and who still their love print, is strong. But we want to be in business for the next hundred years, if not more. So we want to make sure we’re bringing these millennials and these other folks in.

So there is a sense that you need to be on all platforms, be everything to all people and I think again it goes back to the strategy of really thinking through what your members want and where you want to go. It might mean a lot in print and a little in digital, it might mean a little more in digital and I think it’s different for every association.

Samir Husni: What has been the most pleasant surprise in your experience when it comes to Association Media?

Erin Pressley: For my association we did a reader survey last year and I was convinced that digital has been around for a long time, we have mobile apps, digital editions, social media; I thought for sure more of our membership was really going to express a preference for those digital platforms as a way to get their information. And it was almost 40% of the members who said that they really just wanted print. They knew that we had digital options; they knew we communicated that way, but they really loved having the magazine in their hands.

That’s very heartening to me and I’m also talking to advertisers, it’s good information to share with them. We’ve had advertising growth over the last few years, small, but it’s growing. And we’ve actually had circulation growth with our print publication too.

So there’s a lot of organic growth and loyalty around the print publication. And it’s really easy to fall prey to the myths that are out there or colleagues who are in the publishing sphere who talk about the death of print, advertisers who say they just want digital, but to have that kind of concrete numbers showing that our members still really love print, I think was really surprising. And I was very thankful to see that too.

Samir Husni: What has been the biggest stumbling block and how did you overcome it?

Erin Pressley: A stumbling block? I think it’s the same with many associations; it’s resources. It’s financial resources to invest in new innovations and properties, it’s human resources to have the team to really execute on a lot of what we need to really get done.

The way I’ve tried to overcome within the organization is just to really get more people to understand what we’re up against and the importance of content. And I think more and more if you can draw that content up to the strategic level: how it can help drive membership, how it can help influence events, how it can advance advocacy in legislative things that you’re doing; I think then more people in your organization see the value of that content and then they’re willing to kind of join you in the content crusade. So I’ve really tried to work on that internally.

Samir Husni: What is your Association? What is NACS?

Erin Pressley: NACS is formerly the National Association of Convenience Stores. But over the years we have developed an international presence and we’re also fuel as well, so we’re the Association for Convenience and Fuel Retailing and we’re also convenience stores and gas stations.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Erin Pressley: What keeps me up at night, again, is really resources. I know who my competitors are; I see them as these for-profit publications and websites that are out there and I know even though we’re an association publication that’s where I want to be. And that’s very far-off in the distance.

I’m also well aware of the resources that we have at our organization and that gap seems to be getting wider and wider. And so my struggle is to figure out how I can lessen that gap.

© Samir “Mr. Magazine™” Husni, 2014. All Rights Reserved.

The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Jeff Stoffer, American Legion Media & Communication Director and Editor of American Legion Magazine.

On Memorial Day we honor our veterans who have fought in the battles our country has faced to retain the wonderful freedoms we Americans enjoy. Their needs and priorities may have changed since they donned their uniforms, as many of them have aged with the passing of time. But there is one organization that continues to fight for their ever-changing concerns and remains a loud and clear voice for each and every one of them.

From the growing concerns of VA healthcare with the controversial 40 who died in the Phoenix VA Hospital due to delays in receiving care, to using every channel available to get that message and many others out; the American Legion Magazine stands strong for veteran’s everywhere.

I recently spoke with Jeff Stoffer, American Legion Media & Communication Director and Editor of American Legion Magazine, about the Phoenix controversy and the growing concerns of vets and what his organization is doing to help.

Passionate about his members, print and the many channels the American Legion uses to promote and be an advocate for veterans all over the country, Jeff has a deep and abiding affinity for the men and women who have and still are defending it.

I hope you enjoy this very moving and uplifting interview with Jeff Stoffer and to everyone out there: Happy Memorial Day!

But first for The Mr. Magazine™ Minute with Jeff Stoffer and how The American Legion engages with the members it serves:

And now for the sound-bites:

On the role the American Legion organization plays in controversies like the Phoenix tragedy: We recently reorganized our whole communications program to run the gamut between digital, from social media, from Intraday, social media messaging, all the way through to print product, every piece in between and we’re all driving at the same holes.

On whether the gamut of channels his organization uses adds to or detracts from their print product: They all drive to the print edition. The print edition brings, as a completely separate identity, in a use in these different media.

On his most pleasant surprise in his career with the American Legion: Media-wise, I would say that the most interesting phenomenon is that we started an E-newsletter with a very small Alpha population of 86,000 subscribers and now we’re at 509,000 subscribers.

On his biggest stumbling block: Certainly the issue of silos. We’re a multi-faceted, broad organization with many different divisions.

On what keeps him up at night: I think what keeps me up at night is the infinite nature of today’s media. It seems like whenever you open up a door, there is another door down the hall and another door. You never know what is going to happen next.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ conversation with Jim Stoffer…

Samir Husni: You are currently in the midst of one of the most newsworthy and controversial situations ever. Everyone is talking about the veterans; everyone is talking about the 40 who died. What role does The American Legion play in all of this and how do you differentiate from having a print magazine, a website, the blog; how are you integrating all of this and what is the benefit to the veterans?

Jeff Stoffer: As the nation’s largest veteran’s service organization, there is kind of an expectation that we would be the voice of the veteran stakeholder in VA healthcare. In this case, this is not an issue that is new to us. We have been tracking preventable deaths at VA Medical Centers for the past couple of years because a few have popped up. We’ve been following the VA since the 1930s when the American Legion was instrumental in its formation. Now comes the time when a lot of people have a stereotype or maybe even a negative stereotype or a misunderstanding of what the American Legion is and does.

We recently reorganized our whole communications program to run the gamut between digital, from social media, from Intraday, social media messaging, all the way through to print product, every piece in between and we’re all driving at the same holes.

This reorganization did not really complete until March, 2014 and a month later we have CNN breaking the news of at least 40 preventable deaths in Phoenix. So it turned out that this would be a good opportunity for us to see how our reorganization was going to work. And it began with our social media program, tweeting about it; it was followed by our Facebook messaging where we received a great deal of market response, our audience responded to it. We got a lot of activity, we had a press release and stories started going onto our website.

So we created a branded web platform that wasn’t just “here’s the story,” but was interactive, it asked veterans to step into that site and actually type in and tell us their stories of waiting for care at VA health centers.

So at the end of the day what we ended up doing was we were already engaging the market essentially by sort of interviewing veterans across the country about their experiences with this big issue, using social media and the website so now as the story unfolds and more people learn about it and network news becomes involved, we become part of a Senate committee hearing on veteran’s affairs that is nationally televised and aired.

And now as this arc of media sort of continues to flow, we have reconfigured our editorial land so that the American Legion Magazine’s cover story in July will bring perspective, interpretation and analysis to all of these different hits.

And think about this, it’s almost like a reporting tool because we were able to get so many people to respond to it, provide us their voices. We turned our writer on to voices that came through Facebook that came through our interactive web platform, and the national media: the NBC’s, the CNN’s and the Washington Posts’ of the world were coming to us and asking what were veterans saying.

So we fulfilled our tried and true role as the voice of the stakeholder in veteran’s advocacy on this issue. And this extends beyond, quote-unquote, media channels. We had a town hall meeting in Phoenix, Arizona which was actually a physical presence by our national commander to step up, we coordinated media and veterans, and we brought 200 people into one American Legion post and 60 veterans got up and talked about the problem and it was aired on local and national television and it was aired on our website.

So it’s not about so much the channel; channels have their unique identities and they have different purposes, but it’s about the message and how we use the different channels to deliver the message efficiently. And I think we have done so in this way.

What we’re trying to do now is find a way to measure what this whole gamut of media mean to the American Legion. We’re going to talk about how frequently our brand was delivered to our audience and to external audiences. And then what is the number of that audience; we’re talking about network news and tens of millions of people; if we’re talking about Twitter, we’re talking about 250 million Twitter followers. But what is real about that and how do we measure the media impact in this era. We know the magazine has a fundamental baseline audience, we have metrics on our readership, so we can put a number on our magazine, but what we can’t put a number on is what does a Facebook “like” really mean. What does a “retweet” really mean? Are those real numbers? What does it mean when NBC Nightly News says that they might have 8 million viewers a night, or whatever it might be; I just made that number up, but ultimately that doesn’t mean they all just jumped on the bandwagon for the American Legion. Or maybe they just tuned completely out on it.

But what we want to do is develop some sort of a model that would identify what all this experience, this issue, our coverage of this issue, using all of our multiple channels did in terms of total impact and we’ll measure impact by visits to our website, by membership, acquisition via online or not and donations; we have a fundraising program in merchandising, our four big revenue streams. And so our plan is to say what our coverage of this issue means to the association or the organizations.

Samir Husni: Are all these channels that you’ve used going to help the print edition or detract from it?

Jeff Stoffer: They all drive to the print edition. The print edition brings, as a completely separate identity, in a use in these different media. From Twitter, which is a 140 character message to a big cover story within a feature well of a magazine, to everything in between; all of these electronic media blasts are like little fireworks that shoot off and they go and filter out, landing on the ground, and then at the end of this experience somehow, some way we have to put it all into perspective and into one overarching analysis, even if it’s for posterity to say what this experience was, what it meant, what about it helps define our organization. That’s the purpose of a magazine feature in my opinion is to bring context to multiple issues perhaps.

So I think that they all have separate related interests, they all feed one into the other and they cross pollenate each other. We will have in our magazine feature a sidebar, a capsule sidebar to say, tell us about your experience waiting for your VA appointment or your VA community visit at legion.org.

And that’s not read more on legion.org; we’re saying act on legion.org and there’s a big difference. I’m with you when you say if you want to read more, go on legion.org and read more. I’m not going to go to the next movie theater to watch the rest of my movie.

But if they say I just watched a movie and now I want to go do something about it, I will go to that next building and do something about it. So it’s an idea of mobilizing our audience and activating our audience, because I think there is value when you’re a member of something. You want to feel that you’re not just a member in name only. You want to feel like you’re a part of something that’s happening and doing something and functioning to correct a problem, to be an advocate on behalf of your fellow veteran in our case.

Samir Husni: What has been the most pleasant surprise in your tenure with the American Legion?

Jeff Stoffer: It’s completely off base, since 2006, when I first went to Normandy, France I got to know many D-Day veterans and I wrote a magazine article about Sainte-Mère-Église , France and how that community rebuilds and reconstructs itself every first week of June, every year. And this is kind of a fun experience with media to, because I write a feature story and then a documentary filmmaker fights my story and he says, “Hey, I would like you to write a treatment for a documentary film.” So I wrote a treatment for a documentary film and a script and a screenplay and I get to meet and interview multiple World War II D-Day veterans and these were incredible people.

Then I ended up writing a book about a particular figure in Normandy that was really important. And now I take the national commander back and in two weeks I’ll be going back to Normandy with the national commander for my 8th straight year, this time for the 70th anniversary. And what makes me smile is I know that I’m going to meet some of these guys that I’ve known, even though many of them have passed since I was last there.

When I talk to these guys and I come to understand this important moment in world history, the Normandy Invasion, and to have actually helped tell their story and be a part of this developing and understanding of it brings me pleasure.

Media-wise, I would say that the most interesting phenomenon is that we started an E-newsletter with a very small Alpha population of 86,000 subscribers and now we’re at 509,000 subscribers and sometimes they’ll open this up at 56%. It is an email opening audience and it’s fun because every week we have the opportunity to kind of produce a best-of what’s in our digital media and a little bit to our print. It’s a weekly promotional thrust that has been just so successful that I get excited for Thursday to come. It’s fun.

Samir Husni: And what has been the biggest stumbling block that you’ve faced and how did you overcome it?

Jeff Stoffer: Certainly the issue of silos. We’re a multi-faceted, broad organization with many different divisions. We work in jobs and economics, business development for veterans. We work in healthcare and benefits; all of these different areas of Americanism, American Legion baseball is housed in the American Legion National Headquarters, we have Jr. Shooting Sports, Boy’s State, Boy’s Nation, oratorical and a big gamut of legislation.

So all of these things that were spread out across all of these multiple landscapes, we previously did not really treat in our media, or not much, it was just kind of what we did on the Hill or in the community. And the magazine was more of a general interest magazine.

So what communication that was done in support of those programs was usually done in each of those divisions. What we had to do as we got the website and we started to break down some of those silos was to try to move some of the divisions out of the kind of thinking like I’ve got be my own public relations person and my own media person when they’re really program managers or policy people, they aren’t communications people.

And through time, slowly and painfully, we have broken down the silos, integrated some divisions, gotten other divisions, other areas of the organization to work with us to best brand and deliver the American Legion’s message. So it’s been a multi-faceted breaking down and I know this is true of a lot of associations, but it’s a lot of different departments and a lot of different communications people. Now we’ve standardized our brand, made for a more coherent and cohesive message for the whole organization.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Jeff Stoffer: I think what keeps me up at night is the infinite nature of today’s media. It seems like whenever you open up a door, there is another door down the hall and another door. You never know what is going to happen next and you have choices and you are not confined by the amount of paper you can afford or the size of the sheet. You are only confined by the priority of the messaging. Because electronic media gives you infinite opportunities and that can be a lot; when there are no restrictions on the space that you can use.

What keeps me up at night right now is that I have many, many divisions because we have been very successful in our media program. Many interests in the organization are at the door knocking, saying hey, I need you to do this, or we need to develop this, can you help me with our social media program. You want to do it all.

Samir Husni: Thank you.
© Samir “Mr. Magazine™” Husni, 2014. All Rights Reserved.