SIIA Education Case Studies

‘We Are Clear on Our Responsibility’; Publishers Set Course for Sustainability

by Media

“[Young people] want to align with brands that share a vision and a mission with them and they’re willing to pay more for that—and that’s where sustainability comes into play,” growth strategist Robyn Duda said last year. “If we don’t start doing it now, there’ll be a disrupter that comes in and turns things upside down.”

AI has been grabbing all the headlines lately, but a Washington Post front page this week surely caused eyes to widen: World Near Cataclysmic Threshold, U.N. Warns. “Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt.”

Coincidentally—or not perhaps—today Questex “unveiled its roadmap to reducing global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for both the company and its events.” Called Quest Zero, it will aim to “drive positive change across the communities it serves and live up to its mission to serve the communities that are helping people live longer and live better.” See their Quest Zero Visitor Tips here.

“Although we are a mid-market company in terms of overall revenue, we do have a significant business in the events industry,” Paul Miller, CEO, Questex, said in a statement. “We understand the economic and social benefits of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and at the same time, we are clear on our responsibility to minimize the climate impacts that the live events industry generates. Our team is passionate about this topic, we are proud of the strategies we have put in place and we are committed to transparent and accurate reporting.”

While AI users will have to ensure that diversity is accounted for, similar warnings have been sounded for sustainability. “We know that the journalism and information space as a whole is looking for spaces for sustainability, so if we don’t have unique and diverse voices in these rooms, how do we know what to solve for?” asked Sherrell Dorsey, founder and CEO of The Plug, last year. “How do we think creatively about the solutions on the table?”

Here are more sustainability initiatives among publishers:

Set goals. In 2021, Bauer Media published its Sustainability Playbook. Included are ways they are “Influencing Sustainability” in their Lifestyle, Outdoors, B2B Automotive, Fashion & Beauty, and Audio brands. “Sustainability has become a key strategic focus for us because we recognize the leadership role media plays in driving sustainable behaviors,” head of strategy Kaushala Ratnayake said. “Shifting towards a sustainable publishing industry is not something any company can do alone so we really invite this movement towards working with publishers that have clear sustainability goals and targets.”

Offer incentives. The American Chemical Society’s Scientific Advancement division is leading the ACS Campaign for a Sustainable Future Initiative. The multifaceted initiative will include a campaign promoting sustainability, increased advocacy for sustainability research funding, and expanded efforts to modernize the chemistry curriculum for 2- and 4-year colleges to include a focus on sustainability. There will also be a prize for international collaborations. “The impact that we’ll have is creating a future chemistry enterprise workforce that’s trained in sustainability concepts,” ACS COO LaTrease Garrison said.

Cut energy use in offices. Bloomberg Media has made the commitment to bring its Net Zero plans forward to 2025. Half of the firm’s existing energy already comes from renewable sources. Only 12.5% of its emissions come from publishing operations, but it is seeking a further 10% reduction in energy use across its offices and 5% in its data centers. The remote revolution may help this happen.

Assist journalists. The Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN) is a new program at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Its mission is to help journalists and editors develop their coverage of climate change, and support leaders in identifying the issues involved in reporting on the climate crisis. The network is free to join and is open to working journalists, employed or freelance, covering any beat, not just environment and climate.

Reinvent and reimagine. “Reduce, reuse, recycle is no longer enough,” said Pum Lefebure, co-founder of Design Army and jury president at Cannes LIONS—an event focusing on key advertising trends and innovations that publishers need to know about. “We have to rethink, repurpose, reinvent and reimagine. We have to constantly set new standards for creative solutions.”

Create specific jobs. Recurrent—their publications include Popular Science, Field & Stream, Saveur, etc.—has three pillars on their homepage: Editorial First, Audience Obsessed and Sustainability Focused. “Coverage across Recurrent brands emphasizes products, technologies, and policies that could shape a more sustainable future, for the longevity of the planet and its ecosystems.” Last June they established two new roles—VP of sustainability and sustainability commerce editor—to solidify the company’s commitment to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives.

Set ad guidelines. Conde Nast has new advertising guidelines in place as part of its sustainability commitments. It will now only accept ads from energy companies that promote renewable energy products. The company also aims to be entirely carbon neutral by 2030 and use only renewable energy in its offices globally by 2025.

 

hebbaspeaking

‘People Want to Get Back to In Person’; An All-Star Events Panel Lights Up the Path Back

by BIMSMedia

Jess Tyler of cannabis-niched MJBiz spoke about a couple that “decided to get married at our event this year. We did a whole feature on it, repurposed a lot of it for Valentine’s Day.” Marian Sandberg of Questex said it was “difficult to translate the way we produce our shows to a virtual event.” An all-star events panel at BIMS said that while the world certainly has changed, people’s desire to gather together has not.

A rock concert didn’t exactly break out during our recent Business Information & Media Summit (BIMS) in Orlando, but we got close. In the middle of an insightful panel discussion on events, Sandberg, VP/market leader at LDI, DSE, XLIVE, Questex, asked if “anybody happened to be at Madison Square Garden in New York in June 2021?” It had been closed for over a year, and the Foo Fighters reopened it in grand style.

Then she quoted the lyrics from their song, Times Like These. “’It’s times like these you learn to live again. It’s times like these you give and give again. It’s times like these you learn to love again.’ They took 20 minutes singing it,” she told us. “’All right New York, we’re back!’

“Okay, replicate that on Netflix!” Sandberg said. “You can’t replicate things a certain way. Don’t we all want to be together?”

That sentiment captured the spirit of this all-star events panel—and conference: Yes we can do virtual events, and we’ll continue to do them to some extent, but people want to get back to in person.

“The substantial difference is the yearning to come back together,” said George Yedinak, co-founder and executive vice president, Aging Media. “We’ve rethought a lot of our portfolio [focusing on] what matters most to attendees, supporters and sponsors.”

Here are seven takeaways from this great panel.

Patience is needed. “Things are not going to be the same,” Sandberg said. “Look at how you are delivering things. People may not want to buy [an event registration] a year in advance. Maybe 6 months. We’ll hit our numbers, but it takes more work from the sales team.” “The sponsor and exhibitor sides came back quicker than the attendee side,” said Kerry Smith, divisional president, Access Intelligence. “People are waiting longer to get things approved. Companies are looking harder at everything… It was a nail-biter before and even more of a nail-biter now.”

Marketing has to change. “People are adjusting to their normal lives again,” said Jess Tyler, senior vice president, events and sales, MJBiz, a division of Emerald. “Companies are sending fewer people, forcing audience acquisition teams to find new companies, go deeper. They can’t rely on mass marketing. We have to fight harder for our audience’s dollars. ‘Do I really need to go to that?’ they’re asking… How we’re generating new audience [is huge]. We do a lot of lead tracking, free newsletters, asking ‘how do we get them from that to that?’” Added Smith: “We have invested in a robust audience development department to work with brand leaders and content people. Who do we have? Who don’t we have? How do we find them?”

Virtual can be monetized. “We tried virtual trade show floors, and our audience hated it,” Yedinak recalled. “We rebranded our virtual events to a webinar series. The mind shift has been impactful. Now the webinars are a kind of petri dish for the live events. Our virtual event webinar platform is key to where we’re going next. We’re able to charge fees to our vendor community. So they’re a money maker for us which not everyone can say.” Added Smith: “Virtual created a new pipeline for us, a conduit for people to come to us until we went back in person.”

The events themselves might have to change. “At live events now, people don’t want to be talked at for 2½ days,” Smith said. (Indeed, in our post-BIMS survey, 1½ days seemed just right for most people.) “We’re building white space into programs. Jamming as much content between 8:30 and 4:30 as we can but leaving more time for attendee interaction, especially with first-time people coming. [It’s about] creating beautiful experiences… We might do a talk-show format interview keynote instead of a presentation just to mix things up and make it more digestible.”

There’s no business like “show” business. “A large percentage are coming for the show floor experience,” Tyler said. ”We’re thinking a lot about creating meaningful connections. What is going to drive them to get there? What is it that they can’t get somewhere else?” Added Yedinak: “When we got into events, we wanted people on stage to build relationships. Then we figured out how to make revenue. We look at it as an integrated experience. A balanced attack has been effective for us.”

Be intentional about diversity. “It’s super important,” said Sandberg. “We start with intention. It’s a responsibility. We have a DEI committee, 10 or 12 of us. It creates a safe space for us to ask difficult questions—addressing stuff that needs to go to HR. We can speak sensitively to each other. But we have to take it to the next step. We’re partnering with universities to get with people at that level and make our company more diverse. The bigger the pool, the better talent you’ll get… We’ve created scholarships to enter different verticals.”

Reach out further. “It’s definitely intentional,” Smith said. “At Access Intelligence, when an HR manager position opened, we went to Black Progress Matters to identify a candidate to fill that role. She’s fantastic. She’s the first person who interacts with the people we’re recruiting. It signals maybe I can fit in with this company. It translates into our events; people are expecting to see diversity reflected in our speakers. The world has expectations now. We need to work hard to reflect what’s going on.” Added Tyler: “We talk about diversity on my team every day, in every conversation of planning.”

 

Media Library (44)

SIIA Letter on Maryland HB 901

by Policy

I write today about HB 901. We appreciate the intent of sponsors to enact policies that protect Marylanders, especially children and teenagers but are concerned how the bill may impact Maryland schools and, more broadly, the rights of minors in the state. We are hopeful that policymakers will continue to work to refine language so all rights of Maryland children are protected.

Accessing educational information, along with things like news and entertainment, is a right established by Article 13 in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which is referenced in the preamble to HB 901. As the Convention states, a child “shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.”

We are concerned that certain provisions in this legislation, as currently written, may unnecessarily prevent access to critical information and harm the well-being of Maryland’s children. Requirements to choose the well-being as defined by the bill versus other interests such as the right to access information may lead to businesses taking steps to mitigate legal risk and aggressively block online content no matter the newsworthiness, appropriateness, or educational value of the information.

In a worst-case scenario, Maryland’s children may fall behind other children in the country if they are left without access to factual information online to develop critical skills and knowledge to become fully engaged citizens after they turn 18. Skills for adulthood and the workforce require access to the internet and, while this bill attempts to foster the growth of an internet that does that, it unfortunately misses the mark.

Read full letter here
Media Library (43)

Copyright Protections and Transparency

by Policy

Copyright protections are a strange thing to bring up in the same sentence as the push to help provide parents more transparency in education. And in some ways, it is. Most people in the federal and state legislatures that we talk to agree with and understand the need for robust intellectual property rights to incentivize both creativity and innovation. Those incentives are background assumptions for the business of information. 

Where the rubber’s more likely to meet the road is in cases where the policy goal has nothing to do with copyright.  Case in point are legislative proposals to establish a “Parents Bill Bill of Rights”. Introduced both at the state and federal levels, these proposals  — are designed to increase parental transparency into what kids study.  

Why this matters to copyright is that most of these proposals would require schools to make all textbooks publicly available on a website. The problem is that the states don’t own the IP in those materials: our members – the companies that develop and publish the materials – do. The Internet publication of those books without permission would be copyright infringement and a violation of federal law. Maryland tried something similar, and it ended in terrapin tears.

Existing law already permits parents to inspect “instructional materials,” which is defined as instructional content provided to a student, not including tests and other assessments. Federal proposals would amend a different part of the statute to provide that K-12 parents have “the right to review, and make copies of, at no cost, the curriculum of their child’s school.”  “Curriculum” is undefined.  So does that mean that states can just hand out textbooks?

That would be… unwise. In addition to the legitimate concerns of textbook copyright holders, who invest significant sums in developing content that can be used in curricula, this approach runs into core principles of statutory construction.  The first rule of thumb is that undefined terms are given their plain English (e.g., dictionary) meaning.  According to one source, the term “curriculum” means either the courses offered by an educational institution or a set of courses constituting an area of specialization.  The second rule of thumb is that statutes are supposed to be read to give each part meaning.  The federal proposal up for consideration on the House floor this week defines “instructional materials” in a manner differently from  “curriculum.”  And the third is the rule on implied repeal: you’re not supposed to infer that Congress intended to repeal the Copyright Act unless the new statute’s text is irreconcilable with it.  Here, both parts of the statute can be read harmoniously. .  Instructional materials may be inspected (and curricula could be copied) but in neither case is infringement  permitted; indeed, permitting copying would violate title 17.

Still, if these proposals become law, this is the kind of language we hope that the agency clarifies in regulations. If you read it in a hurry (like, say, an overextended school district’s lawyer), it’s easy to make that mistake. 

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SIIA Letter on Texas HB 18

by Policy

Texas was among the first in a wave of states to pass important legislation protecting student data privacy in 2017 which, among other things, bans the use of student data for targeted advertising and bans the sale of student data. Education technology tools used in schools and within the bounds of the existent student privacy laws often include things like parent messaging tools and email platforms, which are critical for timely communications between parents, school administrators, and teachers, as well as with students requesting after-school help from teachers, simple reading materials, and the required formative and summative assessments. This bill does not consider the current framework of strong laws in Texas protecting both student privacy and cybersecurity that may conflict with this proposed legislation. If passed without proper considerations, compliance with all may become impossible, leading to confusion for schools trying to uphold their obligations to protect student privacy. We believe changes need to be made to align with the laws already in place. We urge policymakers to refine language reflecting that data covered by Texas’s student privacy and certain cybersecurity laws to be exempt from this legislation.

We are grateful for your efforts to help parents, teachers, school administrators, and all Texas play a role in protecting kids. We urge lawmakers to work on bipartisan language that takes a risk-based, proportional approach, allowing for important protections for all Texans. Thank you for your time.

Read the full letter here