006: Teresa Wippel – Founder & Publisher of My Edmonds News

Title: Teresa Wippel – Founder and Publisher of My Edmonds News

Guest: Teresa Wippel

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them. Today my guest is Teresa Whipple.

Teresa: Thanks for having me.

Peter: Well, we’re so excited to have you here. Teresa is the is it the publisher of My Edmonds News?

Teresa: That is correct.

Peter: Okay, and do you wanna just tell us a little bit about yourself?

Teresa: Yeah, well, I’ll try. So I have lived in Edmonds, which is where one of my three websites is based, for a little bit more than thirty years. Moved here after living a variety of places, but grew up in Eastern Washington, came over to the West Side Of The Mountains to go to college at Seattle U, where I was a journalism major, and started the website, myadmansnews.com, nine years ago, and then a few years later, acquired sites similar, online sites in Mountlake Terrace and Lynnwood, so South Snohomish County. We represent three communities covering the news.

Peter: I’ve just watched your publications flourish. You have quite a bit of a lot of folks, you know, pay attention to what you have online. Seems like you have a kind of an ever growing influence in the local community as online just continues to flourish. So it’s been just amazing to watch you and everything you’ve done. So the burning question here is, why did you start MyAdvanced News?

Teresa: It’s a interesting story, actually. Had, and I will start by saying I’ve kind of moved in and out of journalism as a career path my whole life. When I started MyAdmins News, since that time, I had done many other things. I was at a technology startup back, I date myself when I say this, but back when the internet was just being invented. I’m not sure if it was Al Gore or not, but nonetheless, I was there when we were trying to decide things like, should we put a hyphen in e commerce?

Those were the things that communicators were deciding.

Peter: I remember.

Teresa: Do you remember those Yeah,

Peter: ‘ninety four, I was right there. Yeah. And

Teresa: so I actually had replied to, and this was after I’d done some other communications related work, and I had ended up actually doing some freelance work for myself, working for myself, and had some clients that, as a writer and editor, I would do jobs for them. And I replied to a blind ad in a newspaper for an editor for an internet company, and this was in 1998. And the truth was is that they couldn’t find anybody with a skill set that was technology based because nobody had it yet. But they knew I was, they could tell that I was a good writer and editor, so they hired me as a part time person working from home. Turns out that turned into a full time job, of course, back in the day when everything was crazy with Internet startups, and we had 50 people at the time in a beautiful office in Downtown Seattle, and then immediately went to 500 people over the course of about a year, then merged with another company in Bellevue called InfoSpace, which is now called something else.

Yeah. But I was there for three years. I didn’t get in early enough on the stock options to become a millionaire. I did get, I think I joke with people, I made enough money off the stock options to I think landscape my front yard. That was okay, I was okay with that, but the learning experience I was learned so much, and I became very comfortable with working with technology.

It didn’t intimidate me. It was just something that was part of my professional DNA. So from there, I left after three years. Basically, we were working in Downtown Seattle, they moved us to Bellevue, which, living in Edmonds, Washington, going to Bellevue, Washington, as anybody who lives in this area knows, the traffic was even bad then, and nobody wanted to make that commute, so I finally just said, I’m done, and went back to freelance work, actually. And then I ended up doing a bunch of other things, and I moved back into journalism.

I was managing editor of a parenting magazine in the Seattle area for a couple years, and then I moved out of it again and did some more public information work, but getting back to your original question of how Maya Business News came about, I had left my latest job, wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next, and was kind of thinking about, I had already done, gone back to a little freelance work, and my husband said to me, Hey, there’s this, this was in what, thousand and nine years ago, 2009, my husband said to me, Hey, there’s this online news thing in Mountlake Terrace, which is right next to where Edmunds was, right across the lake from where we lived, he said, And I think you should start one in Edmunds, because if you don’t, somebody will. Well, and this was just kind of at the beginning of online news, really. That was starting to flourish, online only news sites, right around 2007 or so. And I thought, well, can do that. That’ll be a fun kind of hobby thing to do for a while until I figure out what I wanna do next, and I went, and they make it very easy for you now.

Anybody can be a publisher, and this is the irony. When I was just getting my start, and I remember the publishers putting air quotes around them were mostly wealthy white men who were sort of in their publisher mode, and you thought of them as being all powerful and having lots of money, and I would have thought, you know, then I could have ever been a publisher of anything would be crazy. But the truth is is that lots of people are publishers now. And when I started it, it was as simple as finding an online platform, which people who know the area of WordPress, a very simple way to be able to publish where you don’t need to know any coding. You just basically type it in, and it’s all done for you magically, and it appears.

And you insert photos, and you can do whatever you want, and you know all this because you do that work too. But it’s it was just amazing to me how simple it was. And that really helped, I think, open up the world for a lot of people to become their own publishers and to have blogs and all these other things that we have become so familiar with in the online world. But that was in 2009, and started out, it really was, in a lot of ways for me, of, I was thinking of it as like this, oh, this nice little thing I’m doing in this hobby. And then I realized after a few months that I was getting some real traction with readers and covering news in town.

There was a lot of competition in Edmonds at the time for other new you know, it was back before journalism was really starting to fall apart in terms of the financial demise, really, of the of newspapers, and there were still a lot of newspapers in Edmonds, a town of 40,000. I remember going to city council meetings, and there would be several media people there, which blows me away now because nine years later, I’m the only one who ever goes to those meetings, and several of the publications have closed, but I discovered that people were reading what I was writing. I was covering government, which I’d never gone to a government meeting until I started this website. I had grown up. I mean, my kids had grown up in Edmonds, gone to local schools, but the only involvement I had in my community was really school related, PTA meetings, that kind of thing, because I was working in Seattle, where I was working on the East Side.

Didn’t have time to go to a government meeting. I Yeah. Thought, well, if I’m gonna do this, I need to start going to city council meetings, and now I go to every single one for nine years straight.

Peter: I think you deserve a gold

Teresa: star for People have told me that more than one occasion, they think that I should have my mind examined.

Peter: So you started off by covering city council. Mhmm. What was your thought as you started to get traction? I mean, obvious thing to cover would be government, how did you decide what else to cover? I mean, there’s so many things you could cover, right?

Teresa: Yeah, and sometimes I think I try to do too much, and there are people who, there’s kind of a philosophy difference, guess, I would say, for folks who do the kind of work that I do. And there are, by the way, about 200 online publishers that are very active who have sites like mine across The United States, and a lot of them are laid off journalists, by the way, I just wanted to throw that in there, who kind of were forced to do that. But I think you have to decide what you’re going to be. Some people choose to be three or four issues, or they only cover politics, or they only cover the arts, or whatever, but I felt like the community is really where it’s at in terms of just being a resource for what’s going on. Now sometimes I think we could probably scale back a little bit, and people might not notice, but I feel like we need to really give as much coverage as we can, and provide a wide range of what’s going on.

And I think it’s been well received. I think there are some times when I wonder why we cover x or y, and maybe we shouldn’t because people don’t appear to be reading, but it’s hard to measure, and I think that’s one of the challenges that journalists really have these days. How do you decide what to cover, and also how do you decide what to stop? What do you use to make that decision? Is it how many rears you have?

Because if that was my guide, I would never go to another city council meeting, to be perfectly honest. Other than when they’re arguing with each other or there’s some hot button issue, a lot of those meetings are very boring.

Peter: But

Teresa: the reason why I do it, as an example, is because anybody who’s seen the recent movie called The Post about the history of the Washington Post and Watergate and all that, there was a quote that Katherine Graham, the publisher, had in that movie, and it was newspapers are the first draft of history. And I think that when you go to those meetings, and you’re basically writing a first draft of all of the actions that the city officials are taking so that what happens is, when an issue does get elevated and people are mad, and they do pack the council chambers, and they start talking about it, I have the background to be able to link back to three stories that I wrote. I’m not reinventing the wheel. I’m not just diving in the first time. It provides context, and if you don’t commit to going to all those meetings, you have no context, and I think that’s really the value.

So it’s kind of like, yeah, maybe only 50 people read my last city council meeting story, but at least I know that I’m doing the right thing when it elevates, if it does, and some things never do, by the way. Some things are boring forever. Yep. But it helps. Yeah.

And it’s it’s a commitment that you have to make, I believe, to do it right.

Peter: So when was the first time you realized I’m getting traction here? And I mean, maybe in a was there ever a time when you had like something like somebody wrote you a nasty gram or

Teresa: I had a few of those.

Peter: Yeah. What was the first time that you you realized, woah, I’ve got more influence around here than maybe I thought.

Teresa: Yeah. There there actually was a time, and it was back when, so this was probably 2010, might’ve even been late two thousand nine, but I think it was 2010, the city council at the time was considering purchasing a property across from the Edmunds Ferry Terminal. There’s now an Indian restaurant there, but at the time it was a Skipper’s restaurant, and it was for sale, and they were considering buying that property, and it was not cheap, but they had no plan for what they were gonna do with it. They just thought it would be a good idea to buy it. People were, the citizens, the readers, were not really happy with that thinking.

They didn’t feel like they had a good plan at the time, if I recall correctly. The city was having some financial struggles because that was around the time that things were, we were starting to come out of Great Recession, but it was still kind of crazy, and there was just a lot of concerns about that, so I decided to put a poll up on the site about whether they should buy the property, and I believe I’d have to look to confirm the numbers now because I don’t remember, but I know that it got hundreds of responses, and I think it shocked the city council members and the mayor that it was getting that much traction.

Peter: Right.

Teresa: Because, oh my gosh, people really are reading and paying attention and voting. Yeah. And that was when I realized that people were really engaging, satisfying because that was when I started the site, that was really my mission, was to make it interactive. And that’s frankly the value of an online site that cannot you can’t, do that with a newspaper. Yeah.

Somebody can write a letter to the editor, but you don’t have that back and forth engagement, and for better, for worse, it’s a good thing, I think, mostly.

Peter: So what are your, at least for the organization, what are the core values of the organization?

Teresa: You know, my tagline was to be a community gathering place, and that is at the forefront of everything that I do. I also am committed to trying to take, this is gonna sound a little cheesy in this day and age, but I really do am committed to it, to try to take not the high road, but making the community at the center of everything I do in terms of does this move the community forward? Does it help us to get to a better place? Because there’s a lot of different ways you can spin a story. You can always look at the negative.

You can always look at the thing that’s gonna get you the most clicks. You can always look at what is the worst of the two photos that I can run, and I could give you some examples, but I probably won’t at this point because I’ll start pointing fingers at how other people may not do it the way I would choose to. But nonetheless, I think that I try to always look at it through that lens of are we really doing the best job we can for the people who live here in terms of helping them to understand issues, making good decisions about issues, having their say, and where do we go from here? And it doesn’t mean that I don’t cover bad stories. It doesn’t mean that I don’t investigate things that need to be looked at, but it’s always with that community lens, if that makes sense.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, so hence the name MyEdmondsNews.

Teresa: Right, that was intentional. It’s yours, you know, it’s for everybody. I want you to make it yours.

Peter: It’s not Teresa’s Edmunds News.

Teresa: Right, exactly.

Peter: I wanna ask you about the business side of the

Teresa: Yeah, that’s always the challenging part.

Peter: You’re a for profit organization, right?

Teresa: As I always say in theory.

Peter: What has that journey been like? The business side.

Teresa: Very challenging for a lot of reasons, and when I started in 2009, there were a lot of journalism foundations that were becoming increasingly aware of what was happening in their industry. Newspapers, as I mentioned, closing, laying off staff, a lot of out of work journalists, and one of the things that I think folks at foundations like the Knight Foundation, for example, one, Knight Ridder Newspapers. They said, Okay, we’ve got all these out of work people who are trying to start websites, and guess what? They’re journalists, and they have no clue about business. They don’t understand what a business is and how to run one.

So let’s start training those people. Let’s start throwing some money at it and seeing what I we can was very fortunate to be able to attend a couple of those trainings, and it was a competitive process. You had to apply, you had to write some essays, you had explain what you thought you were gonna get out of it, all that kind of stuff. The first one was in May 2010, and it was a collaborative effort sponsored by the Knight Foundation. It was at USC in Southern California.

They put us up in a very nice hotel. I remember saying, Why are you treating us so well? And they were like, Well we want you to start thinking like business people, and this is what business people do, right? Not wearing your shabby clothes with a press pass hanging out of your pocket. So it was a very valuable experience in that they did bring in business people to help us, insist that we write a business plan, all that kind of stuff.

Over time, like I said, I’ve gone to another one or two of those. I’m now on the board of a national journalism organization for online publishers, where we’re really in the trenches trying to figure this out, and trying to help others try to figure it out. But the hardest part for all of us, I think, is that we love to write, we love to take pictures, we love to edit. Not all of us love to edit, but I do. But if we’re given a choice between, okay, I’m gonna go write this story, or okay, I’m gonna look at my books, guess what we’re gonna choose?

We’re gonna choose the first thing. And the hardest part has been to realize that if we don’t figure out how to make money, there’s not gonna be anything to write about, because we can’t, it’s not sustainable. And I’m still working really hard on that. I’m turning a little bit of a profit. I’m hoping to turn a much bigger profit over time, and after nine years you would think you would kind of be in a better place, but I can tell you that my story is not uncommon.

There’s a few exceptions, but all of us are kind of just trying to figure it out, and I think part of it is it’s the balance between how much news and what you do is good enough for the amount of expense you have versus the amount of revenue that you can generate to cover that, and advertising is what we do, but not everybody follows that model.

Peter: Okay, so advertising, and how have you found the reception among the folks who are likely advertisers in this market or even outside of

Teresa: the

Peter: What’s that been like?

Teresa: You know, it’s been an interesting journey, and part of the reason is that, again, not knowing really anything, and after I’d been in business for three or four months, it was, I think, the following January in 2010, when I realized I was starting to have enough readers that I could probably actually ask people to advertise, and that was when I hired my first salesperson to help me with that, and we got some good responses from people. It was a learning experience for everybody. Again, trying to find a salesperson, nobody had experience selling online news because it was all so new, but that’s been a journey over time, and I’ve had several good people, and have an amazing ad person right now who’s doing great work, but I think the biggest challenge is that people who were raised in a print world don’t really get the concept of online traffic, and who is looking at their ads, and how do you measure that, and all of those things. It’s like they couldn’t hold it in their hands, so is it really working? I’m not really sure.

So that was a big challenge.

Peter: It’s like when Microsoft used to sell software, they would give you a big thick book.

Teresa: Yeah.

Peter: And so there was thud factor when you bought the program. You were buying bits basically on a CD, but you pick up the big box, you’re like, wow, I understand why they’re charging me $195 for this thing. Yeah. This weighs so much.

Teresa: That’s right.

Peter: And what you’re doing doesn’t weigh anything.

Teresa: Yeah, no, it doesn’t. So that’s always been a real challenge for people. But I think now that online is such a reality, more people do understand it, but it’s definitely being online only is, there’s some definite competitive disadvantages to it. When I started, it was like, yes, I want people to be able to have this interactivity and two way dialogue, but the problem is is that you are invisible to people when they’re not on their phone or their computer. Right.

Don’t have a newspaper box on the corner.

Peter: Good news.

Teresa: Everybody’s on their phone now. True. That’s good. Yeah.

Peter: So this is kind of a loaded question. So if I could give you a big reset button and you could go back to when you started, is there anything you would do different? Like, what’s one thing you would maybe do different?

Teresa: That’s a really good question.

Peter: Only one?

Teresa: Only one. Probably put more emphasis on diversifying revenue streams early on, and we didn’t talk about this yet, and you may be getting to this at some point, but advertising is my main revenue source, but I’m really trying to move toward reader supported

Peter: subscriptions. Subscriptions,

Teresa: yeah. Because I believe that given the uncertain nature of journalism and websites, really, I don’t have any confidence that people will even be going to a website to get their news. They’re not doing that now to an extent. They’re looking at whatever happens to come through on their phone or in their social media feed, and making sure

Peter: Which that happens to be your articles

Teresa: as Yeah, yeah. So we’re always trying to figure out, number, I don’t think advertising is ever gonna completely go away,

Peter: but

Teresa: I do think it’s, every business owner will tell you that you don’t wanna have just one revenue source, because then what happens if it goes away? And I think that’s been one of the biggest problems for journalism, as the industry relied on advertising for so long, and now they’re really having to scramble and convince people that journalism isn’t free, they need to pay for it, and public television, public radio has been saying that for a long time. But it’s a hard sell because people don’t necessarily understand that it costs money, but it does.

Peter: Right. Well, I mean, for me personally, I look at New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post. I subscribe to all three of those online, right? Right. And I don’t even think twice.

I subscribed to you guys

Teresa: Yes you do, thank you

Peter: very And I don’t, you’re welcome. And I don’t think about it, so there’s probably a certain segment of the population that understands that, I would imagine, but we’re probably in the minority maybe, so you have to figure out is there something extra you do for subscribers, do you put up a paywall? I know you don’t do any of that.

Teresa: I don’t do a paywall. I’ve thought about it. I know people who do. Or a metered paywall where you can maybe access 10 stories

Peter: Right, match like your Seattle Times

Teresa: Yeah, does I am not saying I will never do it. There’s a lot of things I’ve said I will never do that I’ve ended up doing, so I feel like I’ve gotta be careful.

Peter: What’s one?

Teresa: No, I can tell you, charging for obituaries. I always said I would never I do said I would never do that, and was like, oh my god, I’m taking advantage of people’s grief, it was like that whole guilt trip of not charging, but of course everybody does now, they charge a lot. You try to place a large obituary with a photo in the Seattle Times, and it can run you 1,000 or And I finally got to the place where it was like, and I only charge $50 by the way, and that’s as long as you want with a photo, shameless plug. Wow. But I got to the point where I realized that, you know what, if you go to a funeral home, and you are working with someone for a service for your departed loved one, they’re not gonna do that for you for free.

No. And I finally got over myself on that. And it’s not like that makes me a lot of money, but it’s just part of that, I’m looking at that now. What’s the value? I mean, I know there are publishers like me in other parts of the country.

They won’t even run a press release from a company without a charge, you know, and that’s there’s just a lot of divergent opinions about how much should be free and how much shouldn’t. So I’m not sure where that’s gonna go, but I’ll tell you one thing. When you look at the fact that Google and Facebook alone bring in more advertising revenue every year than all of the newspapers in The United States combined, you realize that there’s a lot of competition out there for revenue. Mhmm. And what I’m trying to do, and I know I’m not alone, is to figure out how to make this a sustainable business because I believe it’s important.

Peter: Mhmm.

Teresa: And you’ve heard me say this before, but, you know, it’s something that our democracy, for all of the pew and cry about fake news and attacks on the media, both literally and figuratively lately, the truth is is that it’s so important for people to get the information they need to make informed choices. And if we all go away because we can’t afford to be in business, what are we left with? It’s pretty scary.

Peter: Right. What would you say is business done well?

Teresa: For me, it goes back to the core values of business reflecting what your community needs. Not necessarily what they want, because if it’s only what they want, then you’re giving them cat videos, from my perspective.

Peter: You don’t have a lot of cat videos?

Teresa: I don’t really have any. I’m not saying that we haven’t ever done any shamelessly silly things, but

Peter: I know you currently have a troll

Teresa: We have a troll, yes, which by the way, somebody just gave me grief on Facebook about. It’s like, I think you guys have really, you know, something along the lines of I think you guys have done too much with the troll, but that’s a whole other thing. We’ll probably have another troll story later today, just to be honest. But we’ve done some silly things, but I think that if you don’t operate your business within the framework of whatever your guiding principles are, whatever you feel your compass is for your community, you’re not gonna do it well, because your motivation is wrong. And I know when you get to the point where you’re a multinational corporation, I don’t really know how you figure that out.

You probably don’t anymore, except at the local level maybe, whoever the founder

Peter: You still have core values.

Teresa: You do, everybody does. But for me, being a community publication, those core values are very clear. And I feel grateful for that, because I don’t have any, nothing gets in my way in terms of diluting what my mission is because it’s so easy. I just know it when I am in the community, when we cover an event, when we have somebody thank us for taking photos of their kids at a school event, when we cover an issue that is important to people and they have a chance to comment. It’s there’s just really nothing that beats that.

It’s, you know, it’s the most fun job I’ve ever had. You know, it took me this long, my whole life, really, to find the most fun job I’ve ever had, but I’ve never had more fun. It’s a good thing because it’s all consuming. Did I just leave you for a follow-up question? Well,

Peter: it’s really fascinating because a lot of folks that I talk to, most of the folks we interview are business owners, and I hear from a lot of folks, except for one of our guests who was 24 when they started their own business.

Teresa: Oh, wow.

Peter: Most have had other business experience and that ability to call the shots and really act out, you know, you know, be the, you know, in charge of your own destiny is really a huge motivation, I think, for folks

Teresa: Yep.

Peter: To to be that business owner. So what brings you joy?

Teresa: I would say that the most rewarding things that I have done that really do make it a joyful experience are when I have somebody thank me for covering an issue that they really didn’t know anything about, for being able to understand it after they’ve read a story, or reacting to something after they’ve seen a photograph, and are able to participate more fully in their community because they learned something, or because they have a better understanding. It really is very rewarding to be able to communicate with people effectively, and to have them be able to take action, or just think more thoughtfully about something, because they learn something from it, and honestly, it really is just, there’s nothing quite like it to know that you’ve helped somebody understand something better.

Peter: You obviously have a rest of your life.

Teresa: I do.

Peter: Tell us about your family.

Teresa: You know, my husband and I had been married for, oh boy, I’m on the pressure’s on now. Thirty six years, and we have two kids, 30 and 26, who are, grew up in in the Edmonds area, but are now off doing their own professional things. And, fortunately, my son, who he and his wife just recently had a son who is now one and a half, live and close being a grandparent is the best ever, and I know that any of you out there who are too young to be grandparents, or have not been a grandparent yet, you will say, What can be so important about being a grandparent? And I said the same thing when friends told me, and I didn’t get it, but once you’ve had a grandchild, it’s an amazing experience. Makes you think more about your mortality, for one thing, because you realize you’re only gonna be around for a while longer with that child whenever they, you know, I think about that.

It’s like, Well, I’m X, and he’s X, and how old will I be when he graduates from high school? It kind of makes a reality check-in some ways. But yeah, so we, I’m loving being a grandparent, and really am grateful for how my kids turned out, the education they got in the Edmonds School District. They both turned out to be worthwhile citizens who are doing amazing things, and it’s great. And I don’t have a huge amount of hobbies outside of my life, because if you can imagine covering news in three communities, it’s sort of a seven day a week experience.

Yeah. But I do love to ride bikes, and I often will do that in the middle of the day, because I’m working till late in the night anyway, and it’s not something you can do at night. If you exercise,

Peter: you can

Teresa: go, I can go to the gym at 10:00. Well, what? If you’re riding a bike, you kinda have to do that.

Peter: Pretty dangerous. Yeah.

Teresa: Yeah. I will often go out for, well, at least a couple times a week in the rainy season. When I can find some dry weather, I’ll go out at least a couple times a week for two hours, and actually ride through all three of the cities I cover on the Interurban Trail, and take my camera along in case something pops out at me, my phone camera in case something pops But it clears my head, and anybody who owns a business, I think you need to have some release, some way to be able to, especially when you’re in technology. I really can’t use my phone when I’m riding a bike well, safely, So it keeps me, out of there for a little while.

Peter: Very dangerous. Yeah. That’s, that’s good advice. There’s just a certain fatigue, especially when you’re working in technology. Yeah.

Staring at a screen all day.

Teresa: Wow. It’s so true.

Peter: One of the tricks I just learned was on an iPhone, you can go into the accessibility settings, and you can change the color scheme to black and white, to grayscale.

Teresa: Oh, good.

Peter: So during the day, I flip my phone to grayscale, and so it’s just not as stimulating.

Teresa: Yeah, not as bright. Yeah. That’s a really good tip.

Peter: But it’s not as stimulating either, so I could flip through Instagram or something, and you know, it just doesn’t stimulate my brain as much, and it’s actually better, because at the end of the day, I am much more relaxed. So speaking of tips, it sounds like, you know, you have a good strategy for getting out, riding your bike, way to kinda clear your head. What other sort of routines or habits do you use, you know, in your daily life to kind of be productive and get things done?

Teresa: Probably one of the best things I’ve done recently is to get a standing desk. That’s really helped a lot. I wanted one for a long time. It’s actually adjustable, so that if I wanna sit, I can sit. Standing is great, except if you’ve been doing it for six hours

Peter: and

Teresa: then But sometimes you need to sit that was a great investment, and just taking breaks from time to time, because especially when you’re writing like I am, and dealing with content all the time, I have to remember that it’s okay sometimes to, number one, not work for a while, but also to get out away from the computer, take some photos from time to time and actually cover I do a lot of assignments. Busier I’ve gotten with the editing and publishing work and business development work, which is really important too. I do have people who go out and do a lot of assignments for me and will be taking photos and covering events, but I try to make myself do that too because number one, that’s really another source of joy for me is being out in the middle of things.

Peter: Mhmm.

Teresa: And it also gets me away from the computer, so that’s a good strategy. I also have been, for many years, very conscious about what I eat. It’s not that I don’t have fun when I eat, and I don’t ever eat candy or doing those other things, but I really do try to have a good diet. And that helps, I think, with brain function, and just keeping me, I don’t ever feel loaded down during the day because I’ve had a really heavy meal, or I’m just really trying to make sure that I eat for success, I guess, if that sounds kinda silly, but truthfully, it helps me a lot.

Peter: So favorite lunch. Favorite lunch. The hardest meal of the day to

Teresa: figure Yeah, out, yeah, in my Well, because it depends on where you are. I love salad, and it’s easy for me to throw one together that I can take with me anywhere, and I feel like that gives you a lot of your nutrients and your raw vegetables, and whatever you wanna throw in there for protein, or whatever, and that’s probably my go to meal for lunchtime, because then, if I make the mistake and decide to go out with a friend for a heavy sandwich, or Mexican food, or something like that, I always regret it, it because then I’m sleepy for the rest of the day.

Peter: You know how

Teresa: that is. Yep.

Peter: So do you have a deadline in your mind per day? Always. Because we’re always online here. Do you have a set like, okay, I’m not gonna do anything past this time, or

Teresa: You know, I could probably do that if I didn’t have high school sports coverage, but that kind of throws the kibosh into the works for, although I will say that’s only because we try to get things posted. Before, the driving force for us, I guess we didn’t talk about this, but we have a daily newsletter that goes out, and it’s an RSS feed, which basically means it pulls everything that’s been posted up until the time the newsletter goes out from the night before.

Peter: Yeah, at 4AM.

Teresa: At 4AM, yes. And so if we wanna get high school sports coverage in our publication for people to read, which by the way, I have obsessed readers who tell me they pull that up whenever they wake up, whether it’s 4AM or later, and will read on their phone while they’re shaving, while they’re eating breakfast, while they’re having coffee, while they’re laying in bed, to catch up on whatever was posted. Yeah. And if I don’t get the high school sports posted from the night before, then it’s late, and that drives me crazy. So sometimes it means I’m up late, but I also take a deep breath, and if a story comes in too late, kind of midnight is my cutoff most of the time, if a story doesn’t come in before midnight, or after midnight, if it comes in after midnight, I just say it can wait.

Peter: When do you sleep?

Teresa: I do sleep. Sometimes I sleep later, if I’m up later. I’m really more of a morning person, but I’ve learned to be a night person, because so much of what I do comes in at night, and when I’m at a city council meeting, I train my readers early, and I don’t think I’m ever going to untrain them, to expect the city council meeting story when they wake up the next day. And what that means is is that if I get home from a meeting at ten or 10:30, I write it before I go to bed, and often there are some other things that need to be edited and written at the same time. So usually on Tuesday nights, I don’t get to bed until about 2AM.

Woah. But you know, I try to sleep in till seven or eight, I don’t

Peter: Two till seven.

Teresa: Don’t advocate five hours a night of sleep. I prefer to get it longer, but you you do what you have to do, right, as a business owner.

Peter: You’re absolutely right. I couldn’t agree more. One of the things that’s fascinating is you do you have the video as well. I don’t know if we talked about that at all. No, don’t think we did.

What are the focuses of your video production that you’re all doing?

Teresa: You know, we are available for hire for video, of course, if people want. We have an actual studio with a variety of equipment and cameras and a desk and things for people to do their own videos if they want, but we do a few shows that we, one in particular that has gotten quite a following over the last couple years just because nobody else is doing it in our small kind of area, but we do a high school sports show, And so on Sundays, we have a guy, Steve Willets, who has been in the community for forever, and everybody knows him and loves him, and he knows sports, high school sports in particular, well, in general. He’s just amazing. He’s one of those people who remembers who scored a touchdown twelve years ago, and at what minute mark they Right, scored it,

Peter: for a high school game.

Teresa: For a high school game. And I’ve learned not to ever argue with him about a stat, because I will always lose. But in any case, he brings in, he figures out which athletes we need to bring in every week, and he balances it out between the sports, between boys and girls, and we do it year round through the school year, September to May, and it’s all for the Edmonds School District. There are four high schools that have comprehensive, what they call them, comprehensive high schools, meaning that they offer interscholastic sports programs. And we’re getting more and more traction all the time for it, and we love doing it, and the kids and the parents really appreciate it, because it gives them a chance to kind of, we don’t always pick the superstar athletes.

That’s not the point. I mean, we work with the coaches to get the kids that come in, but it may have just been some kid who just happened to have a really great game, and maybe it’s a team that’s not really doing that well. We try to get those people in early before the season really goes south, to be honest. But it’s more just about celebrating all the different accomplishments, and Steve spends a large amount of his time talking about other things, not just the sport itself, but what are your plans after school, and what kind of traditions does your team have, and what do you like to do? And I feel like we’re, again, in that lens of community service.

We’re really providing something that other folks can’t because of our local nature, and this is something that happens at election time too, and you know, because you helped me with a project a couple years ago related to a candidate forum we put on. But something else we do is we videotape interviews with local elections, mayoral and city council candidates, and school board candidates. Next year will be a big one for us again. It’s every other year with the way the election cycles run usually. We bring them all in.

We do usually about a half hour, forty five minute interview with each candidate, and if there are 20 candidates running, that adds up to a lot of

Peter: viewers. Lot of time.

Teresa: And the reason is we’re located 12 miles North Of Seattle. Seattle has a lot of television stations, and they’re never going to come up to our area and do interviews with our local candidates, and you can read about them in the voters’ pamphlet, and you might be able to read a Q and A in a print publication. Mhmm. That’s not the same as seeing them and hearing them and having them answer questions in a video format. I really do believe it’s helpful for voters, and that was I started doing that in 2011, and we’ve been doing it ever since.

And so we use the studio for that purpose. It gives us a way to be able to bring people in and, do those interviews.

Peter: And so you what really impresses me is that you do work with a lot of students, and I know some of your programs you’ve worked with some high school students as well. So what is it about these kids that inspires you?

Teresa: You know, so many things. It is something that I really value, and I think part of it is I remember how much it meant to me when I was in high school to have my high school journalism teacher, which by the way, this is a common story for most journalists. They were usually mentored by their high school journalism teacher, somebody who, they often had a high school newspaper that they worked on, which is why it saddens me when I know that some high schools don’t have newspapers anymore, and part of that is because it’s not a career path that a lot of people are

Peter: Oh, right,

Teresa: right, So there’s lots of STEM classes if you want to be an engineer, but there’s not a lot of that anymore. Anyway, I had a high school newspaper advisor and journalism teacher who did that for me, and I feel it’s really important to help these kids explore what they wanna do, and that I have a great working relationship with some of the local journalism programs, and they’ll let me know if they have a student that is maybe a junior or senior who’s really starting to hit their stride in terms of their skills, and if they wanted to do some writing for me, we work that out. I have people contact me out of the blue. It just happened, actually, last summer with a sophomore student at Edmunds Woodway High School who just, she isn’t even planning on going into journalism, but she really had a passion for it, and she wanted to get more experience, and she just contacted me and said, Hey, could I be an intern for you? And it was like, Sure, we’ll give it a try, which is always my answer, because you never know how they’re gonna end up being.

But she actually has been great, and the truth is, is they get into school, that was in the summer, they get into school and they get busy, and it’s harder for them to juggle, But whatever I can do to help them has been, it’s always, there’s been much value paid back to me just in seeing them figure stuff out, and also, guess what, they have very good contacts in their own schools that I would never be able to make

Peter: myself. Right.

Teresa: They’re great sources. Yeah. If nothing else, they know what’s going on, and they help me do a better job of covering the community.

Peter: What advice would you have for somebody who was a college age student or somebody that was just graduating?

Teresa: Who wants to do any

Peter: Well, particular advice for life. Advice for, this is a broad spectrum.

Teresa: Yeah, and you know, I would say take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way and figure out how to get as many different experiences as you can, because the truth is, and this is true in high school too, to an extent, you really don’t know what you don’t know. You think you have it all figured out, or you’ve kind of got a career path in mind, or your parents always thought you would be a good ex, or you’re influenced by that, but you don’t know until you try whether you might like something that you didn’t think you’d like. And that was true for me. I mean, I I started out, thinking I was gonna be a a drama major because I was in plays when I was in high school, and then I realized I couldn’t make any money whatsoever doing that, and then I got into journalism and really loved that. But then I also thought about law for a while, and I kind of was trying to keep an open mind about different things.

And I always did end up in a communications related career, but my path has been all over the map in terms of the different industries I’ve worked in. I mean, they’ve been so varied, always using those skills, but never any one, necessarily one narrow path, and I would just encourage people to be open. And yes, it’s really easy to say that you can make a lot of money, and I think that’s been one of the lures of the STEM careers. It’s like, yeah, you can go work for a technology company and you’ll probably make a pretty good salary, but will you be happy? And that comes to the other full circle point for me is, it took me this long to figure out what I really love to do, and I’m not really making very much money right now, but I am on a mission both to cover my community and also to figure out the sustainability of journalism piece, so that I can say to a 25 year old who just came to work for me and is maybe on his or her second job, there is a future in this profession for you, and the truth is that I don’t always feel like I can say that to journalism students.

So I could say to all those listening, yeah, if you’re thinking about journalism, don’t go there. That would be easy advice, because it is a tough career, but the truth is that people like me who’ve been in the industry for a while, we need to give future journalists hope because it is a national necessity for us to be able to cover our government and cover our community and educate people on what they need to know so that they can make informed choices. Democracy is really at stake here, and I think people forget about that.

Peter: Wise words. So I have a I have two more questions. So one of them, I phrase it in a weird way. What’s your rock and roll fantasy? And I don’t mean, like, an actual rock and roll fantasy, but anything you just really wanna do, sort of major bucket list type You

Teresa: know, I have been remiss in traveling the world, and I want to do that, and I don’t want to wait too long because I know, I don’t see myself retiring per se, but I definitely am hopeful that there will be more balance at some point so that I can kind of have more just time on my hands to be able to go off and see the world more. But that said, so that’s really my bucket list fantasy, but that said, I also have told people on more than one occasion that I really would have no problem with being the 90 year old little old lady sitting in front of the council chambers and waving my finger at council members so I could see myself doing this for a long time still. Because I love it, and as long as I’m still loving it and feel like I’m making a difference, then I’ll probably stay at it. But yeah, I think travel would be the one thing that I’d like to do more of.

Peter: Got it. Got it. So is there anything is there anything else you wanna add, or anything else that you just wanna say that we haven’t really talked about?

Teresa: I would leave people with one thought about the future of journalism, and that is, and I tell people this in presentations that I make about the topic, no matter what your source is for information, make sure you support it. Don’t assume it’s always gonna be there. It’s important to subscribe in some way to financially support those publications, whether they’re online or print or both, that you read regularly because they are incurring great expense to bring information to you. You have to pay reporters. You have to pay photographers.

You have to pay technology posting. You have to pay all those things. And advertising revenue is not gonna cut it forever. I don’t think it’s I think we’re at a crossroads in terms of how we fund our news. And so please support, and also be careful when you get caught up in the fake news kind of accusations that everybody’s throwing around these days.

I would just make a request to people to be thoughtful about that. Yes. There is a lot of craziness out there with misinformation and people kind of staying in their own little bubble point of view. Mhmm. But there is good journalism out there to be found.

So find it. Stay with those sources that you know you can trust, and support them so that they can be around.

Peter: That’s great advice. Well, thanks, Teresa. Thank I’m really happy to have you on today, and we’ll have links to MyAdmins news and the subscription link as well in Great. The show

Teresa: Thanks, Peter.

Peter: Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again.

We’ll see you soon.