Catherine Nelson

Publisher, Piedmont Media

Catherine Nelson is Publisher of Piedmont Media, which produces the Fauquier Times, Gainesville Times and Prince William Times in northern Virginia. Previously, she was publisher of the Rutland Herald in Vermont.

Quotes

I’m all about video right now and they have to be short. And we know everybody’s mobile, right? They have to be short and they have to, again, involve community.

We have our editors do a video the night before the paper comes out to do a recap. One of our videos that we did, it was at a meeting that was controversial, had over 15,000 views. And 15,000 in a market that is only 10,000 is considerable.

We have the PATH Foundation here and it’s a nonprofit that gives to local nonprofits and it’s very successful. We approached them to do a program where we would ... make 30 videos integrated into a specialized publication, doing 10-second videos with each one of them in the community to build awareness. Now that’s a new revenue stream and it’s very cost-effective, and they’ll have those videos. Our videos, they own. We did a marketing campaign with a local furniture place where we redesigned his website, we … did five videos for him and put them into a specialized publication.

I think you can look at it as a hybrid situation. If you have a talented production staff that’s multifaceted, somebody in the production staff who understands social media, somebody who’s a photographer, videographer and graphic artist. … You’ll find one of those because I did.