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Publisher challenges leaders to get out good news
By Rene Cizio
Photo by E.L. Conley
Mary Kramer, publisher of Crain’s Detroit Business, spoke at the
Southern Wayne County Regional Chamber’s Legislative Forum.
The publisher of Crain’s Detroit Business gave community leaders tips
recently on how to take advantage of the media and brighten the image of the
Detroit area.
Mary Kramer spoke during the Southern Wayne County Regional Chamber’s recent
Legislative Forum at Crystal Gardens.
“I’ve worked in media almost 35 years,” Kramer said. “I want to talk about
the (media) situation here in metro Detroit, how that might affect our
image, and leave a couple of suggestions for you to take away today on how
we can all help our own regional image.”
In order to bring more business in and help turn the economy around, leaders
need to polish that image she said.
Kramer said media representatives often are blamed for perpetuating a poor
image because of the “bad” news that tends to make the front pages.
“There’s a lot of economic pressure right now,” she said, adding that
newsroom cutbacks mean that media organizations can’t do all the things they
used to do.
That pressure might be why good news gets cut, she said.
“You have fewer people, still a lot of stuff going on, and it doesn’t all
get in the paper,” she said.
She suggested making it easy for media outlets to print the good news by
submitting detailed press releases.
“We need to communicate (the good) to ourselves and the outside world about
our region,” she said.
Kramer praised a Detroit Renaissance initiative that provides leadership to
hasten economic change in Detroit and southeastern Michigan.
“Detroit Renaissance decided to put together ‘Road to Renaissance,’” she
said.
Kramer said it is a six-point economic revival plan, with one point focusing
on image.
Kramer is co-chairwoman on the “image implementation task force.”
Kramer said members are working to get a small office together and call it “Dsource,”
with its function being an office of promotion.
“It will target specific things,” she said. “We have 6,000 automotive
journalists coming in for the auto show in January. I’d be happy if you got
10 or 12 of the most influential and created another experience outside of
the show for them to tell a different kind of story about southeast
Michigan.”
Kramer said that when reporters from around the world come to Detroit and
they have a slow day, they pick “the scandal d’jour” off page one of the
dailies and recap it for their papers.
“What if you cultivated those people and made it even easier to do a (good)
story?” Kramer asked. “Not just on the DIA (Detroit Institute of Arts)
reopening, but maybe you could talk about how many other museums there are
in southeast Michigan, including some of the newer ones like Museum of
Contemporary Art and Design, or the role that the College of Creative
Studies is having — art talent, design talent — or that southeast Michigan
is actually ranked in the top 10 of economic centers in North America for
design talent.”
Kramer said DSource would aggregate the good the stories and work to make
strategic connections with media and companies, such as the auto industry,
which has regular contact with out-of-town business people and media.
“What if there was an easy way for them to do it,” she said, “by calling
DSource and saying, ‘I’ve got this guy coming in from Tokyo. I think he’d be
interested in this. Can you help me set it up?’
“DSource could be a reference, a resource for all of these other companies
that are talking to media all over the world.”
Kramer said that for DSource to work, community leaders have to realize and
admit the region’s problems, such as a “very specific political problem in
the city of Detroit” and an economy that is “in tatters.”
“We have to acknowledge that, but at the same time we don’t have to ignore
that there are a lot of assets in southeast Michigan,” she said. “We have to
decide what we want to be known for, and we have to communicate it.”
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