20 Under 40 - 2006 Profile: Sharon Prill

PRESSTIME

By Presstime Magazine

First Published: December 2006

Vice President of Interactive Media & Marketing | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Bringing people together, encouraging collaboration and embracing cultural viewpoints defines the career of Sharon Prill, vice president of interactive media & marketing at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

After moving from the West Coast to the urban Midwest last year, Prill, 37, hit the ground running, conceiving and building community-oriented Web sites for the newspaper and simultaneously bringing collaboration and diversity into the newsroom.

Prill developed 18 Milwaukee community Web sites, 11 of which are paired with zoned weekly print editions. Prill's team also rolled out a local shopping Web site (MilwaukeeMarketplace.com) and the newspaper's first specialty Web site for parents (MilwaukeeMoms.com). Area residents use the Web sites to share experiences, opinions and photos.

"Together, [these Web sites] let us understand more about how to build community online," says Elizabeth Brenner, president and publisher of the Journal Sentinel.

Page views have increased 50 percent each month since March, while online retail advertising jumped 72 percent for the first eight months of 2006, compared with the same period a year ago, Brenner says.

Prill also is a collaborative leader. For example, she moved her online news producers into the newsroom where they now sit next to—and frequently collaborate with—Journal Sentinel reporters. She works closely with the Journal Broadcast Group to develop cross-media synergies, too.

"If you give smart people an opportunity to share in the vision and contribute ideas, you get far superior results," says Prill, who has served as treasurer, secretary and finance committee chairperson of the national Asian American Journalists Association since 1999. "Ultimately, you learn a lot more through collective brainpower."

Prill says she gained valuable sales and marketing experience as an online and print advertising manager at The Seattle Times, where she worked from 2001 to 2003. She later served as interactive media director at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash.

Sharon Prill
Vice President of Interactive Media & Marketing
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Q: In what ways do you think your current position will change over the next five years?
A: As once-separate media converge online, the delineation among print, broadcast and interactive will blur, and it will simply be all about audiences consuming media in the ways they find most appropriate to their lifestyles. My position will still be about strategy and reaching new market segments, but definitely platform-agnostic and focused on the jobs consumers want done.

What's the best career advice anyone ever gave you?
I've been very fortunate to be mentored by some of the most talented people in the business, and their words of wisdom have guided much of how I have approached challenges as well as opportunities. Four powerful messages I have been taught are:

• Learn to match your impact with your intent. With impact and intent in alignment, you are never misunderstood.
• If you hate sales, then you don't understand one of the basic fundamentals to success—everyone sells. Whether it is an advertising product, a story pitch or your ideas, you need to be able to communicate your vision and employ your skills of negotiation and persuasion to lead people.
• It takes great people to build great companies. Don't underestimate the impact one person can have.
• Taking risk is a part of life. If you always win, you don't learn how to take risk and be resilient. If you always lose, you don't gain self-confidence and learn to be bold. A balanced life is full of wins and losses, and in the end it really is about how you played the game.

• Stop thinking of ourselves as a newspaper and realign our resources around the areas that present the greatest opportunities for reinvention and innovation.
• Greater technology cooperation between regional companies in the industry to provide uniform and easy solutions for our advertising customers.
• Increase investment and emphasis in marketing and R&D. If we are to remain relevant to an increasingly fragmented audience with greater choices, we need to understand what their decision drivers are. We can't do that effectively without market intelligence and a healthy appetite for experimentation.