Fresh out of journalism grad school and six months into the launch of this magazine, I attended NEXPO for the first time. The year was 1995; the city, Atlanta.
My jaw just about hit the floor. Scanning the rows of computers, the flashing AGVs, and the gripper-conveyors swirling overhead, I thought to myself, “How the [bleep] am I ever going to cover this thing?” There was a potential story in every booth, every new widget, every attendee.
The answer: with much difficulty. NEXPO’95 generated more work than I had ever attempted. When I finally delivered the July/August issue to the printer, I had slaved away for 27 straight days and evenings.
During the same period, NAA was suffering from a different problem: NEXPO’s official show-daily newspaper, then called the NEXPO News, was not meeting reader expectations. This was not really the fault of our contractor, Atwood Convention Publishing of Overland Park, Kan. Atwood produces show dailies for all manner of trade shows, from aerospace to golf. Ours is the only show where the readers are people who themselves produce daily newspapers—a discriminating audience.
It’s not often that two wrongs make a right, but in this case, they did.
We were able to solve TechNews’ coverage problem and Atwood’s credibility problem by merging our two operations, along with that of Presstime. Atwood had strong writers, and production and distribution capabilities at convention sites, but lacked in-depth knowledge of our industry. TechNews and Presstime had that knowledge, but lacked the remote production and distribution skills. Our approach played to everyone’s strengths, covered everyone’s weaknesses and avoided duplication.
With four NEXPOs under the “joint operating agreement,” our three staffs now work together quite well. This year, the process went like this: Atwood sent a broadcast fax to all exhibitors asking them to send information on the products they planned to show. Atwood logged this data into a file that eventually became the “On the Floor” column in the TechNews NEXPO Show Daily. They also forwarded the press releases to NAA.
Mark Toner, who splits his time between TechNews and Presstime, suggested story ideas for the show daily; Presstime’s Elise Burroughs tracked the times of all sessions, meetings, press conferences and major product demos; and I created story budgets and story-assignment sheets for the three issues.
Once NEXPO’99 began; TechNews, Presstime and Atwood reporters were prepared to cover all major events and product launches. NAA Vice President of Editorial Services Terry Poltrack (who is also Presstime’s editor) and I edited stories and moved them to Atwood’s Greg Sackuvich, who flowed them into QuarkXPress. Atwood then handled the printing arrangements (using a local printer) and distribution at the Las Vegas Hilton and the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Toward the end of the show, we convened an “Expert Panel” to help us shape our magazine coverage. This panel comprised some of the brightest, most knowledgeable people in our industry: Wayne Bean of Tucson (Ariz.) Newspapers, Chuck Blevins of Chuck Blevins & Associates, Jeff Carpenter and Jo Ann Froelich of Digital Technology International, David Cole of The Cole Group, Gary Cosimini of Adobe, Martha Reichold of The Huntsville (Ala.) Times, Tom Shafer of Thomson Newspapers, Robin Shank of the Los Angeles Times, Elizabeth Sholar of The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Warren Skipper of The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, and Jeff Turner of AdOut.
When we returned home to Virginia, the TechNews and Presstime staffs used the information gathered for the show daily and generated by the expert panel, along with some good old-fashioned editorial analysis, to produce the NEXPO Review, included in this issue of TechNews and the July/August issue of Presstime. We hope you enjoy it.
Despite our best efforts at improving the process, some bugs remain, and they tend to rear their ugly heads in the worst possible places. This year, we seemed to have a copy-editing problem with the show daily. We even got the titles of two NAA executives wrong in the cutline of a page-one photo. We inadvertently demoted Eric Wolferman from senior vice president of technology to merely vice president of technology, and Dawn Rhine from NEXPO director to NEXPO coordinator. Not what you’d call career-enhancing moves on our part.
Even so, I think it’s fair to say our NEXPO coverage has come a long way. We’ve made some mistakes, to be sure. But judging by the way readers pore over our pages and exhibitors clamor to be in them, I think we’re on the right path.
Clark Robinson
Editor, TechNews