Akron Life October 2022

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F R O M T H E P U B L I S H E R

[ Publisher | Colin Baker | cbaker@bakermediagroup.com ]

Growth Spurt

Throughout the years, Akron Life has changed and improved.

At Akron Life , we’ve been celebrating 20 years, and next month during our official anniversary, we will do a lot more. For me, October is significant because I started my publishing journey in October 1996 — 26 years is a long time to be in a business. My first published magazine was a project called Akron Business Values . I sure hope no one remembers it. I believe the only ones who knew about it were my brother, my dad and me. We sent it to 10,000 businesses, and based on the mar ket silence, I wouldn’t say it caught on in our business community. We could only afford to print the maga zine in two colors, so we chose orange and yellow for Halloween. I think we printed eight pages and had ads on every page. My dad taught me early that you must make ends meet from the beginning. One of the advertisers was Regal Cinemas, and they didn’t give us money for the ads; they gave us movie tickets. So part of my pay that year was seeing a lot of movies. What we thought was going to make us different than the competition was that we were going to write articles about the advertisers, like trade magazines. That was my dad’s background. He was in the auto motive trade magazine business. He worked for several years at Babcox Media in Akron, which is a business-to-business automotive aftermarket magazine publisher. My dad’s boss at Babcox was Tom Babcox, and Tom told my dad that

whatever you do with a magazine, just keep publishing, because that market will come around. I never met Tom, but my dad passed that lesson on to me, and that’s what we have done. Akron Business Values turned into Akron Life . That all came from the simple lesson of “just keep publishing.” Along the way, especially early on, Akron Business Values had some lousy issues. One issue was so bad that someone called me and canceled their meeting about advertising when they got the copy in the mail. But we just kept publishing and making changes. We learned that something our audience loves is content about local food and entertainment. This month, check out our fall guide to dishes with classic autumn ingredients and fun activities on pg. 22.

Learning about your audience is key. I recently read an article about a YouTuber who goes by “MrBeast” — if you haven’t heard of him, I’m sure your kids have. I had to look him up, but supposedly when he first started his channel, he was so bad and cringeworthy that he was hard to watch. But he kept working at it, learning how the business worked, changing and creating content. He has grown his audience to over 104 million subscribers, one of the largest audiences on YouTube. It all came down to “just keep publishing.” Sure, we are many zeros below the MrBeast audience, but we will just keep publishing, trying to figure things out along the way to make a better magazine for you, our readers.

[ Publisher Colin Baker is a retired racing driver and gearhead. ] Comments? Email them to Kelly Petryszyn [kpetryszyn@bakermediagroup.com].

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