The Pew Research Center, which regularly tracks the ups and downs of the nation’s newspapers, recently offered some encouraging data. Americans are rediscovering their newspapers…on digital platforms. While print edition readership continues to dip, the traffic to newspapers’ websites has been growing considerably. Digital circulation is up a whopping 30% from 2019 to 2020. Since 2014, when Pew first started tracking online circulations, the average number of unique monthly visitors to local news websites is up 44%. At the same time, many online-only publications are…
Read MoreEditor’s Note: As part of the 20th anniversary of The Hodges Partnership, we are taking a more intimate look at the agency’s namesake and why co-founders Jon Newman and Josh Dare chose to honor Gil Hodges with the company’s name. Here is the latest installment. You can catch up on the previous piece here. Among the varied objectives for hiring a public relations agency, reputation management ranks among the foremost. Sure, clients want greater visibility and added exposure, and they want to turn the volume…
Read MoreFor the first several years of our agency’s life, we eschewed pursuing awards. Come award season, we’d casually brush aside suggestions that we put our best work up for industry honors. Given the time and effort it takes to nominate yourself, we reasoned our energy would be better spent promoting our clients rather than ourselves. But over time, this sense of modesty gave way to a real-world practicality: awards are a valuable tool for validating the quality of your work. We’ve been proud to have…
Read MoreThe Hodges Partnership marks the 20th year since our founding this year. I need a moment to let that sink in. The time has gone by almost as fast as a Tom Seaver fastball, and the world has changed so much over that time. We share a launch year with LinkedIn, and I recall back then thinking it would be a handy birthday reminder service. Google was just four years old in 2002, before long making Ask Jeeves a distant memory. It’d be another two…
Read MoreEarly in our conversations with prospective clients, we come to the inevitable question about their expectations, particularly in the area of media relations. Just where would they like to see stories placed about their company or work? Their answers can be enough to take the air out of the room. When a company that specializes in inventory management software, for example, starts ticking off media relations targets like the TODAY Show or The Wall Street Journal or even daily newspapers where they have neither offices…
Read MoreWhat is it about doing an on-camera interview that causes folks to have a kind of out-of-body experience? And not in a good way. Once the camera light goes on, suddenly interviewees become either void of personality or take on some other alternate persona that they think is a better version of themselves. I get it: you’re nervous, worried you’ll make a mistake, that embarrassing faux pas that winds up as a viral meme in your Nana’s inbox. I do a bunch of media training….
Read MoreWhen I was a new dad, a popular book among neophyte parents was Heidi Murkoff’s What to Expect Your First Year, a monthly guidepost that alternatively provided bouts of pride and anxiety, depending on how our babies fared against what was generally anticipated to be the norm. The truth was, there was really no preparing us for that scary, exhausting and magical year. As we celebrate the one-year anniversary of The Phil, the same can be said of those of us who have been along…
Read MoreIn the early days of our firm, we used to joke about how often clients wanted the “big three” – i.e. that trio of high-profile media placements that they thought would be their sure-fire path to fame and all that came with it. The actual three changed from year to year but typically involved a combination of the TODAY Show, The New York Times, the Associated Press, Parade, Time, Oprah, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal. Yeah, they set a high bar. Sometimes you make your…
Read MoreIt was the week before Christmas 2008, and to give you a sense of just how long ago that was… The Dow opened that day at 8,606. (If you haven’t checked lately, it’s above 34,000.) Facebook had a measly 100 million active users (vs. 2.9 billion today). Instagram, Uber, Groupon, Pinterest, Slack and Venmo (to name a few) had yet to be created. The Hodges Partnership launched its agency blog. While that last event may not measure up in historic significance to the others, for…
Read MoreLet’s start with a conversation I have more often than not with folks calling us about helping them raise their profile and enhance their expertise position in their industry. Caller: I want to raise my profile and enhance my expertise position in the industry [or something like that]. Josh: Well, that’s what we do, so let’s see if we can help. Let me ask you some questions. What kind of content marketing are you doing? Caller: Content marketing? You mean like using Facebook and LinkedIn?…
Read MoreDid you know Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app? That’s what its CEO declared in a move to push Instagram into a land that more resembles TikTok. Today, the social media platform has a whopping 1 billion active monthly users, a base that is second only to Facebook and about twice as large as LinkedIn and more than three times bigger than Twitter. And like TikTok, it tends to be a platform generally fueled by young people. Three in five Instagrammers are between 18 and…
Read MoreWhen The New York Times announced earlier this spring that it was changing the name of op-eds to guest essays – reflecting the fact that opinion pieces no longer necessarily occupied a physical space “opposite” the editorial page – it also offered guidance on the kind of pieces that it was looking to publish. It puts a premium, for example, on high standards of “cogent argument, logical thought and compelling rhetoric.” It desires essays “have intention” and confessed to being partial to submissions that are less…
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