Episode 12 | Interview with Greg Grisolano of Land Line Media

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Hi, I'm Pete from Zine 101. Welcome to episode 12 of the Paywall podcast. I am here with Greg Grizzolano. He's the digital content editor for Landline Media magazine and podcast and XM Radio. Landline is the largest publication for independent truckers in the United States. We went through a. And what we're going to talk a lot about today is a website rebuild. A lot of changes. So welcome, Greg.

Hey, Pete. Thanks so much for having me, man.

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I think we were overdue for this conversation.

For sure. For sure.

Yeah. We spent a lot of time together, didn't we? Probably a solid year of working on taking what you had previously and rebuilding it into what you have now. And so we're going to go through that whole experience and touch on.

I can't wait to relive it for all the folks listening in podcast land.

Okay, super. So before we get into that, though, now, when I first met you, the one thing I know about you is you like ice cream.

I like to eat many things. Pete. Yes.

We got together at the Word Camp for Publishers, Right?

The inaugural Word Camp for Publishers in Denver in 2017.

That's right. We got to experience good food trucks and all that Denver had to offer. It was super fun. And so that's where the story started with you and Landline and ice cream. I'd like to hear a little bit about your audience and what, what you guys, you know, who your audience is specifically, you know, why are you the leader? What do you, you know, what sort of benefits do you provide to your audience?

Yeah, so our audience primarily is truck drivers or people that are allied with the trucking industry. And we write as. As the official publication of the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association. You know, we represent Oida's opinions and views on a variety of legislative and regulatory affairs that affect state and federal legislation. So, like, kind of our big. Our big job is really to be sort of the voice of the truck driver's perspective, because most of the trucking and transportation related media sites, certainly a lot of the bigger established magazines, they come at it more from a Perspective of kind of the C suite, the fleet owner, the. You know, the big business side of it. And there's nobody. There's really not a voice for that truck driver, which. The individual behind the wheel, which is really the biggest. I mean, like, that's the biggest segment of the industry. So we're really trying to fill that space. We also, you know, because a lot of our coverage is focused on legislative and regulatory affairs, you know, we have. We have a lot of readers that are in politics, whether they're elected officials or certainly they're senior staff people that are aligned with the transportation industry in general. And so that's really kind of where we are. And our role, like I said, is to be that voice for the driver. Because often their perspective is. I mean, you know, is unheard.

So your drivers, they. In terms of benefits that you provide. I seem to recall that the Oida, which is your. Your parent company, provides insurance and does.

Yeah.

Lobbying.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oida has a host of. Of different things that they do for. It's. It's funny, man. We've been. We've been trying to get them to get all of the various benefits and services that we provide kind of organized and listed on a single page because there's just so many, man. Like, no one person can keep track of all of the stuff that we do. Certainly there's the lobbying. The Oida foundation does a lot of research and white papers and different perspectives on things affecting the industry. Commercial truck insurance, certainly very important drug testing, which is something that's. That's kind of unique for that segment of the industry. It's really hard if you're, you know, if you're Pete's trucking business and it's just you, Pete with a truck. How can you be randomly drug tested when there's only one. One driver? Right. So one of the things that Oida has done is it's formed a consortium of a lot of smaller independent truck drivers, and you can get true random drug testing and be DOT compliant. And there's a whole bunch of other, you know, like business services, permits and licensing, different things like that. And one of the things that. Probably the most important thing that OIDA does for the individual truck driver. Yeah. So one of the things that OIDA does in addition to their lobbying and different stuff like that is they also will often file lawsuits on behalf of truck drivers for things that they find unjust or whatever the case may be. One example in federal court recently was the. Oh, Ida sued the state of New York over its highway use tax and you know, challenging that it was unconstitutional under the commerce clause because out of state truckers had to pay it and it was a burden on interstate commerce. This is my not a lawyer recap of a story that I didn't actually write but was pretty, pretty important.

Yeah.

For our readers. Anyways, long story short, they end up getting. OID won the case and there was a $44 million judgment that the state of the state of New York had to pay out. And the drivers who had paid that hut ended up getting. Getting back their money out of that 44 million dollar judgment, which is pretty cool. But the big thing that OIDA does is any driver basically out there on the road can call and if they've got a question about something, they, or something's going on in the industry or they want to report some sort of injustice or whatever, there's somebody at OIDA generally that will pick up the phone and talk to them. And sometimes, sometimes all they need is to just to just vent and get some things off their chest. But other times they have a legitimate grievance and the association will get involved or sometimes Landline will get involved in covering those issues. One of the things that, one of the things that when, when all of the COVID 19 started happening, you know, we had a lot of people calling in asking like, do I, do I have to wear a mask in this state? Do I have to, you know, where, where can I, where can I go to the bathroom in Pennsylvania? Pennsylvania shut down all of the, all of the rest areas and they closed all, they closed all the restrooms. There was literally nowhere for a truck driver to go to the bathroom in the street State of Pennsylvania.

There's a requirement to be a member right there.

Yeah.

I mean, how do you say no to membership with that kind of information? Yeah.

Yeah, but. And so it's like, like that's, I mean, like sometimes we will get, you know, we'll get, we'll get some of those stories fed to us from the folks that. On the phones and we can, and that can influence our reporting and we can kind of draw attention to some of the, some of the larger injustices that the drivers face out there, the things that people don't consider. And of course, like, you know, the folks in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the, of the COVID 19 shutdowns last year, you remember what it was like, everybody was terrified of everything.

Yeah.

And people started trying to react in whatever ways they could, but nobody considered the consequences because. And that's really Again, where Landline and Oida are so important, because without, you know, drivers don't have any representation.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's exactly why a state like Pennsylvania can say, oh, well, we're gonna close every freaking rest area on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And where are all those drivers who are bringing. Or bringing the toilet paper.

Right.

Or bring the food or bring the gasoline or bringing literally everything that you can buy on the shelves?

Yeah.

What are they supposed to, you know, how are they supposed to. To get somewhere safely and without that basic human consideration, man, that's really the space that we're trying to occupy. We're trying to be that voice for drivers, and we want to make sure that they are represented fairly and equitably in the media.

Yeah, they're one of the hero chain in the COVID pandemic, know.

Pretty freaking essential, man. Pretty, pretty essential.

Yeah. Yeah. So let's. So what I want to do is dive into a little bit of the website rebuild and how that. How that, you know, what we went through and decisions made. And, you know, if you look at the. If you go to Landline Media now, now you'll see a website that has a lot of news on. On it. It has the Landline magazine on it in web format and PDF format, and it has a big focus on your Sirius radio station and podcasts, which are kind of that. And it's all very cohesive.

Yes. And that was one of the things that, like, when we were thinking about what a redesigned Landline website needed to look like, we needed to integrate all those things much more cohesively.

Yeah. So as far as I remember, you had three separate websites running. You had a. You had a news blog, you had a magazine site, and you had the podcast slash radio station site all running.

And all three in different buckets. All the traffic in disparate places. All of them formatted differently. None of them. None them of. None of them really running the same CMS either, which made, like, transferring information between. I mean, it was just a nightmare, man. It was like everything not to do. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what was the big motivation? If you can put yourself back, then, what was the final push? Because I think we talked about, if I recall, we talked about doing something like this, and then it took about a year for us to actually start to break ground on the project.

Yeah. So the big thing was we noticed when we first started using WordPress and we were really dissatisfied with our existing CMS, which was something that was kind of bespoke. Makes it sound a Lot more elegant than it was. But our existing CMS built in house was really difficult to work with and very wonky and not user friendly on the front or back end and not very, I mean, it wasn't optimized for mobile. It was really just a pain to work with on a number of levels. So we kind of gently started a foray into WordPress with our news blog Tandem Thoughts. And we noticed immediately from the analytics we were getting that a huge percentage of our traffic was mobile, which makes sense especially for us because of who our audience is. Our audience is primarily long haul truck drivers. They don't pack a desktop PC in the back of the Peterbilt.

Right. Right.

Unless they're hauling like thousands of them to Best Buy.

Right.

You know, like, so that's, that was the thing, man. And we really, so we really recognized pretty quickly that, look, four out of five of our readers are coming to us on a mobile device. And the way our existing website works with mobile is, it's very unfriendly. It's really more of a hindrance. And we think that, you know, we think that the WordPress is the way to go. And so that's, that's why I was able to go to our first, that first Word camp. And when I saw, Honestly, man, when I saw your guys's presentation, I saw Zine101's presentation of what they had done for Modern Drummer and the way you guys had kind of transformed their site and put all their legacy content out there on display, I was like, I was like, shit, these are the people that, these are the people that I want to talk to. That's why I wanted to go have ice cream with you and talk about, because I saw immediately what we could do with an updated, modern looking site that combined all this great content that we're doing that was in all these different little buckets that nobody was paying attention to.

Yep. Let's talk a little bit about the legacy content because that's something that a lot of publishers are still struggling with today. Some might be like local regional news publishers or weeklies that are publishing editions. Some are magazines that are, you know, making the decision you made a couple years ago. Hey, we need to, we need to do a better job getting our content on the web.

Yeah. And for us the big thing was, so we've got this, you know, Landline is celebrating its 46th anniversary of a print publication. We've been doing it for a long, long time. We do nine issues a year, you know, some, some double issues. I mean there's great, there's some really great content over the years. We've done, you know, we've, we've been at this a while and we've got some, some veterans on our staff who've really been, really know the industry and, and have, and have done some, some important and good work. Mm. And nobody could see it, you know, nobody could find it. And it was very difficult to, to get it out there online and certain. And certainly the other thing that was missing too was being able to present it in the way like it's presented in the magazine where it's beautifully designed and there's a lot of illustration and stuff like that. I mean our old CMS just was not built for that. It was, you had to like copy. We had a file on our internal server that had all of like the little code shortcuts that you had to copy, like just to put a picture in the article. You had to like had like copy the HTML and put it in there. And then you couldn't even, you couldn't even like, you didn't even have the option of. I want to, I want to center this, I want to put it left or right. It was just like, you just, you just pop it in there and there it is, there's, there's the one photo. And it was such, man, it was such a pain. So many hours wasted, man, hours wasted on trying to get this.

And was the, the, the magazine site was that. Were you just producing PDFs alongside or how I even forget.

Primarily, yeah, primarily as a PDF flip book. You know, like the old version of the site was. A lot of the content was what we're doing now was what our daily news posts on landline media are now. But we also had a separate section on that site that we would, we would try, we would try and we would try and copy, you know, the best, the important original magazine pieces. But they weren't, like I said man, they weren't displayed very well. It was really hard to get to and it was just, it was not the most effective way to get that, to get that content out. And we weren't, we weren't sharing, it wasn't easy to share on social. It was not, like I said, man, it just really wasn't the thing. And then, and what we found out, like I said, when we started, when we started Tandem Thoughts, we were kind of doing more feature content and kind of more like, you know, some of our more opinion driven stuff. A lot of, a lot of op ed material there and we, and we found out, you know, with WordPress, hey, this is, it's really easy to design this content up and to make it look fun and it's easy to share on social media.

Yeah.

And we just felt like, man, like, like those were, those were the things that we were looking at and in fact there for a while, tandem thoughts. The blog became, it ended up feeding the magazine a little bit. It became a standing, a standing department in our magazine where we would take the best, the best content or the most, you know, the content that got the most reaction from that, from that month or whatever. And we, we would repackage that in the magazine and that became, you know, we started to see some real value in that too. You know, like this is, this is helping to feed. There's a symbiotic relationship there that we hadn't because we had everything so, so siloed right. And spread out that it wasn't really, it was really hard to work with. And that's another thing too, man, like with this, with, with the news site, it seems like, it seems like now in the, in the past two years where we've had the news site when, when our podcast has like a big in depth, in depth feature. You know, we certainly, we promote that on, on the, on the site and we share that too. But it's also become something where it's easier for us to kind of, kind of transition that into, into something that can go in our, in our legacy print product. And again, that's like, it's that symbiotic relationship. It's all parts of it kind of feeding together and kind of helping, helping each other, you know, that's interesting.

So let me just, I'm going to back up and just sort of clarify the structure. The listeners. So your, your magazine is now published by issue on the website, but the issues are actual, you know, regular web articles that are shareable and searchable and.

Yes.

So you have the PDF attached to those issues.

Right. And our, and our wet and our, our magazine content on the web is what's behind our leaky paywall.

Yeah, the paywall. Right, exactly. And then what I'm hearing though is that now that the blog is essentially running on the homepage alongside the magazine content, which is also running alongside your podcast.

Correct?

Is that. And what's interesting to me is you're finding that, yes, you're pulling the articles out of your magazine onto the website, but the blog is a generator for articles, as is the podcast is also a generator.

Yeah, yeah. And it and it's like I said, it's really kind of, it's made it easier for us to visualize and to really kind of see the symbiotic relationship between all three of them.

Yeah. So let me ask you this. You had three separate sites. Essentially, we combined them into one site. We even changed the domain name. You went from Landline Magazine and Tandem Thoughts and I don't remember the podcast site.

Landlinenow.com okay, landline now.

And then when it was relaunched, it was kind of rebranded a little bit too because you went to Landline Media. And I remember going through a lot of discussions about the magazine versus the, the podcast and the, you know, the Sirius radio station and sort of the equal weighting and how to present all that on the, on the, on the site that all of a sudden had all three, you know, components to it.

Well, and for us, the decision to call it media was really simple. That's a more accurate reflection of what we are. And with this new platform that we, that you had developed for us, that we developed on WordPress, we could become a true multimedia site.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, that was a, that was a no brainer, man, like right there. Boom.

So now, you know, when there is a transition to a new build, there's always a lot of concern about SEO traffic and making sure Google indexes all the new content and all that. And going to a brand new domain name is even one step harder because now you're retraining Google to say, hey, no, no, all our content's here. And of course you got to redirect stuff to bring it to the new site. But what happened, I guess is the question I'm asking. You guys launched a new site on, you know, day one versus day 30 versus one year down the road.

So our first year was kind of interesting. We, there was a lot, you know, and this, and this ties into a question that I'm sure you'll ask later about you. Like what, what do you wish you, what do you wish you had known before you did it? So many things. And really like the site migration thing is probably the biggest thing. The biggest thing that we, that, that I, that I didn't have my arms fully around of, of how big a job that would be and what we needed to do. And if I, if I could go back and do it all again today, I mean, the first thing I would do is, is really, really make an argument for migrating more of our content over, particularly our like legacy magazine content. Omer. I mean, yeah, because I can't say, like, we. And we kind of picked. We made the decision for budgetary reasons and for some other reasons because, again, we had, you know, like I said, we got 46 years of magazines at that time, too. Our old website had been up for, like, 20 years. And the idea of migrating 20 years worth of content over, particularly when some of it would have been just. It was very daunting to think about, what are we gonna do with all of that stuff and how are we going to organize it? And it just seemed the idea of starting perhaps a little bit fresher than that, not. Not putting it all over was. Was good. Was appealed to us.

Right.

I think we probably should. Like, I. I probably should have had a better understanding and brought more of it over because I think that especially the legacy magazine content would really have given us more Google likes, more stuff to crawl, more stuff to share. And there have been some things, too. Even in just my career at Landline, which is in its eighth year now, there are some things that I wrote earlier on in my career that I wish were online in this new and delightful format where it's easy to share and it looks nice and everything like that. And I think that we can still. We can still go back and bring some of that stuff over. It's just a matter of marshaling the resources and the wherewithal to do it. So that's one thing that I would definitely, definitely do different in our first year, too, man. Like, it was kind of. It was kind of crazy. We started to see some. Some pretty positive, immediate results. And then we had, like, that, you know, you remember that epic server crash?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Labor Day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that.

That. Yeah.

That just left us kind of feeling like. Like we. Like we had to start over again from scratch. But ultimately, man, like, we, you know, we saw some very, you know, some very positive results. And I still think. And I still think, man, we're scratching the surface in a lot of ways, particularly in the last. I mean, in the last year. And I'm talking, like, calendar year March 2020 to March 2021. It's. It's been. It's been a great year for Landline. Of course, there's been a lot of news.

Right.

In the last.

Right.

12, 15 months. A lot of news.

Right? Yeah. Covid certainly bumped the news news feed by a ton. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's. And it's. What's crazy is, like, probably the big. The biggest. One of the biggest story for us in the last. In the last calendar Year was a story. And right, right around. It didn't have anything to do with COVID but it was right around the time of COVID And again you have this issue where restaurants are shut down, people can't go in to eat. Most trucks, commercial tractors can't fit through the standard drive through at a McDonald's or a Wendy's or whatever, Bob's Big Boy, whatever you got where you're at, you know. So again, it's like these drivers like, man, where do we go to eat? And we just so happened to have been, been working on a story, a feature story about a, a Sonic drive in in Fordyce, Arkansas. Those of you that don't know on the coast Sonic is kind of this Midwestern drive in type chain burgers, shakes, that sort of thing. But it's, it's, it's a drive in. Although they do because it's 2021, they do also have a drive through now. But it's kind of like, you know, I can remember being a kid and that the car hops used to actually, some of the car hops would actually skate to your car. Yeah. Like roller skate to your car and drop off your. That's cool. I made or whatever.

Oh, that's cool.

Yeah. Anyways, so this, this Sonic, they had built a purpose, a purpose built drive through lane for commercial tractors. And it had, you know, so we had a picture, we saw it on Facebook, thought it was pretty cool. Called them up, did, did a story about it because that's again, like, that's one of the ways that Landline is, is trying to, you know, humanize drivers and make people think. Oh yeah, of course. How are these truck drivers supposed to get in there? I never considered that.

Right, right, right, right. That's very.

So yeah, we got, got the picture of the little, the little car hop in her ponytail walking up these, this, these large metal stairs to take the order of the, of the truck driver and to deliver his, you know, cheeseburgers and tater tots and whatever.

I gotta go look that one up. That sounds good.

Yeah, it's pretty cool, man. But I mean that just. Man, that just blew up. And that was just totally a case of timing is everything. Right, right. Like we couldn't have planned that better. And it just, it just blew up pretty, pretty wild. People were like, yeah, why can't, why can't more places take, take the needs of drivers into consideration? One of the, another thing that pops up on social media all the time where we get phone calls about is, you know, Drivers will be like, I delivered a load at this Walmart and then I drove around to the, to the front and parked my truck and I went in to do some shopping and I got, I got booted. Like, I, like, like somebody, like somebody called the, the tow company and they put a, they put a parking boot on my, on my truck.

Nice.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, it's like I, you know, I, I just, I just dropped off all of your, all of your cleaning products and all of your toilet paper and stuff like that, and I can't get any for myself really.

Right.

You know, really touchy subject.

Wow. Yeah, that's rough. That's rough. Really?

But yeah, so like.

All that, that crap, essentially. Yeah.

Yeah.

That's interesting. So after if, could you put your finger like after a year of, the year of launch, if I remember correctly, we, we started with a dip in terms of traffic, but after about a year or so, where were you at?

Do you remember? So, yeah, I actually, I thought, I thought I had it pulled up and I freaking screen locked up because I wanted to, I wanted to be, be accurate about it. But yeah.

Yeah, well, we're not gonna, we're not gonna, you know, there won't be a test later or anything. So.

Yeah, after about a year we were, we were pretty, we were pretty consistent with where we were before the launch. And since then, man, it's really been, it's been even better. And I still feel like, and this is the thing, man, it's like, I still feel like we're just scratching the surface of really leveraging some of the things that we can do with SEO and with social media engagement. Like, I feel like that there's, there's so much more that we're, that we're not doing that we need to be doing, but. And now we finally have a platform, right. That allows us to really kind of tap in. It's like, it's like, it's like, it means I get, it's like getting a high performance vehicle now. And now we can really kind of, kind of do some stuff, man. Like now we can really, you know, we figured out how to, how to get it, how to get it in gear and now we've got to really kind of like ramp it up and, and really put it through its paces and see what we can do. And I think we're going to be very pleased with, with what it delivers in the next, in the next year. I mean, we're already, we're already seeing year over year traffic is Is up. Are another thing that's, that's up in the last year, man. And again, you know, and some of this is, is driven by, by Covid. Sure. But it also like we have, you know, we have the tools and the resources now to get that information out quickly and to be responsive. And we're finding it and getting it and wanting it and coming back year over year. Our newsletter subscriptions are up 18%.

Wow. 18%. Yep.

And that's. And again, man, that's with like not, not even really like we're, we're not. We have not fully leveraged that capability either yet. You know, there's, there's more. I think there's more we could do to promote our newsletter and sign ups and stuff like that. But that's what we're seeing. We're seeing. We're seeing pretty consistent signups from the embed forms there on the site. And that's. And that's a good deal. But I think like really letting people know like that's available and it's useful. And also like, I think again, just getting into the newsletter stuff, man, and really kind of we can do more to. I think one of the things in the next year that I hope to be looking at and working on is really kind of segmenting the newsletter and doing some, you know, doing some different things for the people that. The people that engage with it every day and then also maybe doing some separate things for the people that maybe don't engage with it as often. You know, offering a once a week, a weekly subscription option instead of the five days a week.

Yeah, that's a good idea. So as far as the newsletter goes, let me just tie this back. You have leaky paywall running on the site and it's metering the number of free articles that somebody gets. The casual flyby reader can read. What is it? Do you remember what the meter is set to?

I believe we set it to one right now.

One free article. Okay. So you have essentially the site saying, hey, you get one, you get one free article. So it's pretty locked down. And then you have to register, which is free.

Yeah.

And if you register, you have a choice of digital registration for digital access to content and you have a choice of print as well. You can get the print magazine for free too. Right.

Or you can get both. And that's. And again that. But that's. That subscription is part of the reason that it's so locked down is if you want our magazine content really you should be a truck driver or you should be somebody who is allied with the industry. Right, that's, that's who this is for.

Right, right.

And we believe that it's, we believe that it's worthwhile for you to get it. So, yeah, we will. If you, if you want it, you can look at one. If this is for you, please sign up because we've got a lot more of this content that's. It's going to be very relevant to you and your business. And it's free.

Yeah. This is the feed to your memberships selling, essentially. So somebody comes on and says, oh, I'll register for online only or I'll do print and online. It's free. You give them a good form, they have to kind of quote unquote prove who they are. And then that actually gets sent to your as 400, which is in my opinion, sort of magic because that's a, that's a, that's a classic system.

Yeah, yeah, we've had to do. We were talking about that just the other day, man. It's kind of like, it's like running the old Commodore 64.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's, it's that, that was a beast in the day. I, I remember running it back back in the day. But anyway, so you're. So your free registration, you have, your traffic actually has been going up even though you have the meter set at only one free article, let's say per month. And then.

Correct.

And then people register on the site that of course takes their email address and puts it on your mailing list. What I'm hearing though is your newsletter subscriptions are still up 18%.

Yeah, yeah. And that's really exciting, man. Like I'm really. And again, like that, that is happening without like a big, without a big push from us to like really like, like we're not, we're not nagging people on the site to sign up for the newsletter. We're not even really nagging them so much on, on social media either. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's, it's just, it's just kind of. It's happening. It's happening very organically.

Yeah.

Which is exciting.

Which is, which is really great. And I mean, looking at your site, are you delivering a pop up? I forget. Time to go. No, not even a pop up. Is this a result of the, of the registrations that are coming in through leaky payroll?

Yeah, we think so. I mean, that's part of it. And also like, I mean we are, we are, we do have a sign up on social media and I've, I've been trying to make a concerted effort to also like schedule posts on social media about it.

Mm.

You know, but it's not really been like, it's not been a real coordinated campaign. Okay. And actually, you know, I was, I was in the leaky, leaky paywall settings the other day just making sure that, that, that, that was, that, that was turned on. You know where you can, you can, you can click, click yes if you want the newsletter, right? Yeah, that's on, man. And we're, you know, it's, it's, it's pretty wild I think. But I think what it.

I think.

What it shows is that obviously there's real interest and real growth opportunity in this newsletter thing. And we've really, it's really exciting, man. That's something that I'm hoping that we can really kind of continue to hammer out.

I think that's a great idea. I think that's worth some energy looking at the local news space right now. You know, you, you have a lot of startups that are coming in with newsletter only products and they're growing like crazy. You know, it's, you know, email, sometimes you run it. I run into, you know, some, some people that say, hey, you know, oh, email's, you know, it's so old. And who reads email? It's all a bunch of spam. But the truth is, is it's actually, it's, it's the best direct marketing tool that a publisher has in their pocket. Right. And when, and when people opt into a newsletter, they're saying, hey, I want to get it, you know, send it to me.

Right?

So, you know, if you're sending good quality journalism, yeah, people are going to want it. They're going to, they're going to complain when they don't get it. I do it myself. And it is even more important today with all the noise, you know, social media, a lot of noise, you know, everyone's trying to get ranked in Google search and there's a lot of competition everywhere. But when you get that email address, it's yours, right? You, now you've started the relationship with your, with your reader, your subscriber and, and of course now you, you have that sort of whole trust thing and then you can build out from there. Because if, yes, if you come out with a new newsletter format or a new product or an event or whatever, you have your goldmine of email, you know, to go announce that. And there's just no better way of doing it. So, you know, I'd say to anybody. And believe it or not, you know, we still. I still run into publications that are, you know, email light. They're not aggressively going after the email addresses and not looking at opportunities down the road. In fact, this is a service. Have you heard of Subtext? You heard of them?

I've not heard of Subtext.

So Subtext is a service where we're testing it out on a site right now where you can pay extra. It's like a premium plus subscription. And you get access to authors, to the writers. Right. And the access is all text messaging. So it's an SMS service. And, you know, if you have questions, you text it to a number and it kind of queues up in the dashboard. And then you can see, okay, is there a common thread here? Then you can push out a text in mass to answer a popular question, or you can send responses one at a time. It's a very flexible system, and what a great way to. Okay, we got email, but now leverage text messaging. Everyone I talked to, I said, take a look at it. Think about it. What could it do for you? But it's sort of related to that. Collecting of the email addresses is step one so you can announce these things.

Yeah, sounds cool. And like I said, man, the thing that I really think is important for us with the newsletter going forward is we have a dedicated segment of those subscribers who engage with the content. Often about. About a third of them are frequent, frequent openers. Read everything, do that stuff. And then about, you know, about, you know, half of them aren't very engaged and don't really open. And maybe, again, maybe it's something like, okay, is that. Is that an audience that we can target with? Maybe they just want to read the best of the week or what is. Like, what is the. What these are the things that I need to know about trucking that happened in the last week are the things I need to know about what Oida is doing to fight for me and to represent my business against all of this, you know, all the. All the stuff that's going on. And that's. That's kind of like. I mean, that's. That's. That's a really important part of what we do, man. And I think that it's, you know, it's important for. For everybody to feel like that they're. That there's somebody in their corner.

Yeah.

There's somebody that says, I see you. I see what you're going through, and I'm on your side. And that's, you know, that's the relationship that we want to cultivate with our readership. And that's the sort of voice that Landline aspires to be, is to really be that advocate for the small bitcoin truck driver.

Are you considering creating another, more focused newsletter? Do you have any plans for something like that?

Well, I. I don't know about. I don't know. Like, that's. That's a good. That's a good question. Honestly, I. The thing. The thing that I initially thought of, like I said, is just kind of like, maybe. Maybe they don't want to read it every day, but maybe if we just send them. Send them the highlights. The highest of the highs, like, this is. These are. You know, maybe if it's. These are the. These are the top five things that. That drove the conversation on social or they got the most. The most reader response. I mean, like, that. And again, like, those are. Those are some tools, and those are some. And some of the data that we can. That we could leverage to really kind of refine our product even more. And there's just, like, one of your questions is, like, what's the biggest. The biggest failure? Man, my biggest personal failure is I get overwhelmed with. There's so much data, sometimes you don't even know, like, how to. How to process it or how. Or what to do with it or what it all means, man. And just trying to stay on top of it can be.

Yeah.

Can really feel like shit. I'm drowning.

Right, Right, right, right, right. That's the world we live in.

Yeah. I'm driving. Drowning in all of this information. And how do I separate the. The signal from the noise?

That's a good question.

And that's been. I mean, and that's been the challenge that. It's been difficult. It's been difficult for me to adapt to, you know, and that's. And. But I think the. And the best advice I can give anybody that's. It's similarly situated is, you know, go to. Go to a conference, take the. You know, take the small step of looking at, you know, looking at a YouTube course or a LinkedIn course on. On analytics or whatever that thing is that you're trying to understand, man. Just take that. Take that first small step. Stick a toe into the water and try and learn.

Right?

That's. I mean, that's why I went to WordCamp. I knew nothing about WordPress, man. And I still don't know that much about. About the coding side of it at all.

Yep.

But I knew. I knew enough to know that I didn't know. And that the people who did know were going to be at this thing.

Right, right.

You know, people like. People like you and Jeremy and a host of other people that I met, man. So I got some great. I got some great contacts there.

Some.

Some folks that I've, you know, gotten to connect with over the years and come to know. And I really appreciate and value their. Their friendship and their insight, man. And it all. It all came from me just, you know.

Yeah. Yeah.

Really stepping out of my comfort zone and going to a thing where. Where I knew that or I knew I was going to be the dumbest guy in the room.

I hope we can get back to doing that, because I agree. The connections are the gold, really. I mean, learning being able to take some time to think, you know, to unclutter your brain and think, you know, what are we doing here? What's the priority?

Yeah. And to get excited about, like, because everybody is facing these same challenges of what do I do with this data? How do I engage meaningfully with my audience? Yep. I mean, like, we. Everybody knows, like, if I want, you know, if I want somebody to click on my. On my story, I can write a sensational headline or, or like, really like the bad engagement. The most engagement always seems to come when you, when you, like, mess something up, you get it wrong.

Yeah.

You know. Yeah, but that's, but that's not really meaningful engagement, is it?

Right, right, right. Well, you're.

So how.

You're, you're, you're. You're. You've learned about email newsletters. Like, that's a big lesson. Right. You're getting. Maybe a third of your readers are actually reading, you know, regularly reading. That's, That's a great number. I mean, that's, that's. That's pretty high.

Yeah.

And. And so I think you should feel good about that, and then. Fine. All right, so what's the. The next step? Let's, let's, okay, look at the. What's going on with the traffic to the site and like, like you said, you know, go to a conference or, or maybe even hire a third party that specializes in analytics.

Yeah, absolutely, man. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

And I can point you, you know, in a direction if you like, and have that conversation where you can kind of kick back a little bit and not feel the pressure. Like, okay, I don't have to learn everything myself because there are already people out there that have, you know, have these.

There are subject matter experts and I. And it's never been easier. It's never been easier for us to find those people and to network with them and to engage in a meaningful dialogue.

Let's talk afterwards. I got some thoughts for you.

Sure.

So I want to shift a little bit into social media, since you brought it up earlier. And I say the bar for social media and publishers is okay. I post an article, I move it over to Facebook. I posted in, maybe LinkedIn. I post it maybe on Instagram, depending on where I'm at. Is there anything that you're currently doing that you think is actually working, or is social media kind of. This is something we just kind of need to deal with, and here's our flow at this point.

So I think. And social media, man, is an area that still feels like is evolving a lot. You know, like where. One of the ways it's evolving is where. Where's our audience now? Where they. Where is the conversation going? Yeah, because we've seen, you know, we've seen a lot of people, you know, with. With all the political stuff that's been going on. You know, many people are. Disenchanted with Facebook, you might say.

Yeah, yeah.

And Facebook, because of. Because of the demographics of our audience and everything else like that. Facebook is far and away the most important social media site for us. Our demographics tend to see you older, and that's primarily the nature of the industry. So Facebook is far and away way more responsible for our social media traffic than anything else. I mean, it just.95% of our traffic on social is Facebook. I mean, on a given week, it might be 91%, but it's really important for us. And I think, for me, what I would like to see is certainly social media is an important part of the conversation, but we know in the past we've been burned. When Facebook has changed their algorithms, they make it more difficult to find. Find published articles and stuff like that. And so it's really. For. For me, it's not. The conversation on social media is important for us in terms of, like, having a sense of where, you know, where our audience is and what. Like, what. Like what are the issues that are important to them? You know, what. Where is that. Where is that meaningful conversation taking place? And I think. And really, I think that the way. What I'd like to see us do is kind of is carve out a space where we can kind of have some more. Some more meaningful conversations there and make it less about, you know, like, here's our story, you know, click on it and share it.

Right.

And make it more about, like, where is that. Where is that dialogue? You know, one of the things that a friend of mine who started a local news publication did very early on with the. With the COVID 19 situation is she created a. She created a closed Facebook group.

Yeah.

For people that were. Sorry about that. Can you still hear me?

Yep.

Okay. For people that were in Kansas City and had concerns about the coronavirus locally, like what to do, and, you know, it was. She got a bunch of people that she trusted to be moderators early on of the discussion and put some pretty fair rules in place about, look, we're not going to talk politics. This is. We're really trying to be a place where, here's what's happening with the virus locally. These are the restrictions, blah, blah, blah.

Right.

And it became. Man, it became a really valuable resource and a really good conversation to actually like to shut out the noise and to try and figure out, like, what's going on in our community with. With this disease. And I think that there's. There's real value in. In those types of conversation spaces rather than just sort of being like the. Like the approach now where I. I put. I put a story out on my. On my. On my publications feed or whatever, and it's kind of. It's kind of like being like a. Like a carnival barker. Like, step right up. Read that. Read all about it. You know, I think it's important to get away from that and to really try and engage more meaningfully. One of the questions that you sent me prior to this was about the most important thing for a publisher to do, and I really think it's audience engagement. My first answer, though, was like, when I looked at that, I thought of, like, what did I always want my old newspaper publisher to do? Number one, don't meddle. And number two, vigorously defend your newsroom against frivolous lawsuits.

Interesting. So are you. Are you or others involved in Facebook groups at this point?

So, yeah, I'm involved in that. And in that group, Landline does not have a sort of A sort of conversational Facebook group like that. Because the other challenge with that and the big. And the big thing that's. That's needed to kind of keep that going is you need. You need moderators who are willing to stay involved and stay engaged.

Yeah.

And, you know, it's. You know, that's. That's a. That can be a logistical challenge.

Yeah. Yeah. But I think.

I think it's. I think it's worth exploring.

Is there a big independent truckers group on Facebook that's.

There are A number of them, yeah. And we have, you know, some various members of our organization are involved in some of them, and we get some news tips from them, but, I mean, they're like. They're like any large unmoderated conversation that you might be into. I mean, like, I'm in a freaking coffee and motorcycles Facebook group.

Right.

And like, like some. Most. Most of the time, they're pretty good about keeping it. Coffee, motorcycles. But you're. I mean, even just this morning, somebody. Somebody posted a picture of a guy with 10 toes on each foot and he's like, got my vaccine. And somebody's like, this is. This has nothing to do with coffee or motorcycles. You know, what are you. What are you doing here? Are you posting this here?

He's trolling you. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, like, that type. That type of stuff, you know? You know, it doesn't matter like what it. Like what. What it is. It could be so innocuous. It's just coffee and motorcycles, baby.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Come on. Let's. Let's. That's going to put a smile on everybody's face. Coffee and motorcycle.

That's funny. So have you guys paid for promoting posts in Facebook or done any Facebook advertising?

A little bit, yeah.

Any results from that?

You know, we don't. We don't really do it very often, and it's not something that we're, you know, we're more interested in. We're really more interested in organic growth. Yeah, I mean, like, that's. That's kind of our big thing, because we don't have. And that's. And that's another reason why we're kind of like. Like I said, I think it's important for us to be aware of the conversation and. And Facebook, like I said, it's a really important space for us in terms of our social media traffic. But yeah, man, I would like to see us get into a place and we're getting that. That way now where it's more. Our traffic sources, our referral sources are more evenly distributed from organic search referrals and social media.

Yeah.

And hopefully as we grow our newsletter subscription, that becomes an even bigger source. And then we've really got. And that's. And that's what we want, man, is we want those people that are really engaged, really active, like those sort of power users to really become. I mean, that's our key constituency.

Yeah. And you're building apps, too?

Yes, we are building an app, which we're pretty excited about.

Yeah. So you can engage with the app like no other place, really. Push notifications and alerts. That's going to be an interesting piece of the puzzle for you guys, I think, especially with the mobile audience that you have. So this has been great. Greg, I'm going to go backwards and re. Ask the question now that we've about talked, talked a lot about the website, you know, going from three websites to one website having, you know, leaky paywall on it, taking registrations, feeding that member loop and what, what you, what you're doing in social and with your newsletter, what if you were to, you know, if I were to be starting a publication, let's say, tomorrow, what would be the one thing you would tell me to do based on your past experience?

Well, I mean, Who are you trying to reach, man? Like, that's.

I'm putting you on the spot. I'm putting you on the spot.

And yeah, so my, my question, my question back to that person would be like, you. My recommendation would be you've really got to have a focused idea of who your, who your market is, who you're trying to. Who is this for? Yeah, okay, this for. And we, and that was one of the things, I think, that attracted you, Pete, to this project in particular is Landline, with its, you know, reputation in the industry. And it's, and it's, it's long history. Like, we had a. We really are dialed in on. We know who this is for. We know who we're trying to reach. We know what we want, who we want to engage with. We know where they are. Yeah, that mattered. And I think that made, yeah, that made this transition process a lot more. A lot smoother because we, we kind of knew who, who we were going for and how to, and how to reach them. Yeah, I think that's, that's the key thing, man. Like, who is this for? Who am I trying to reach and where are they?

Yeah, yeah, that's.

And once you, once you can identify those things, then that gives you some clarity on. Okay, so what, what should my priorities be? Yeah, and honestly, man, again, with the percentage of, you know, like, with the percentage of our traffic that was mobile, we needed, our new site needed to be something that was developed with a mobile audience in mind that was lean and mean and played very well on a phone because that's the primary means of how, of how not only our existing audience engages with it, but, but our potential audience engages with it.

Yeah, yeah. And bring as much content with you as you can. Post as much.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's for sure, man. And that was, you know, that was really something that I, I wish we had. I wish I had. I wish I'd known what I know now then and been able to make a. A much more. A much stronger argument for doing that. Because like that. And really it should have been, you know, that should have been a bigger. A bigger part of the budget from. From. From. From me on as. As the project manager. Really interesting. Really, really had a. I should have really had a nuanced argument for why we needed to spend that money there.

Yeah, it's tough. I'll tell you right now. It's tough. But, you know, we talk to, you know, as, you know, we talk to publishers all the time and, and, and one of the things I do tell them is, look, you know, you're, You're. You're migrating from print to web here. There's, There's a lot of copy paste happening. It's. It's a grunt work. You can hire out for it for sure. But, you know, every article that you put online is a magnet for a specific Google search and for social sharing.

Yep. And we have, man, we have so much. We have so much great legacy content that I. Yeah, you know, I feel. I. There's. I almost feel a responsibility to. To get. To get some of that stuff up there because it's been really. You can really. You can trace the impact that Landline has had on. On the industry and on and on legislation. Not just Landline's impact, but Oida's impact too, man. There have been a number of, you know, lawsuits and things like that. That. The, that the association has been very forward on that. I mean, like 25 years ago. Well, I guess it's 26 this year. Oida sued the Tennessee Public Service Commission because they were shaking down drivers out of state truck drivers, and the. The commission got. It got disbanded.

Wow.

Because of an OIDA loss. I mean, like, there's been. There's been a number of things that OIDA has done in truth and leasing regulations. Probably the first legal victory that the association. The first major legal victory that the association won back in the 80s. I mean, I just.

Yeah. So you have great old historical pieces you want to.

Yes, yes, we do. And that stuff, man, is so important. It's interesting. But it's important for the historical record too, man.

That's.

And now we have this. Now we finally have this platform, by God, where we can. We can put it out there and it looks great and you can find it.

Yep.

And yeah, I mean, I, we do like I, straight up, I missed the boat on that.

Yeah. Okay.

I did not fully understand the value of that on a number of fronts.

So the next time a publisher says, says, well, you know, we have a lot of content but you know, we'll start fresh. I'm gonna send them to you.

Yeah, I mean like, and I get it, man. Like, like again, like some of, some of our daily news stuff that, like the, the, you know, the, like the, the workaday blog posts and stuff like that. I, I don't know. Another thing that we would have had, we would probably had like with some of our, with some of our stories, some of our beats, man. I'm sure like the, like the headlines, the pretty URLs would have been like the same headline and then it would have been like the number, the number 57 at the end of it because it's, you know, 20 years. You're mean, you're, you know, there's only so many. Right.

Right.

So many times. So like that, that was part of it I think too is it's like, you know, we've, some of this stuff won't be, won't be very relevant. It'll clutter up our search. Like, like when we're trying to find something, it'll just, it'll just be there cluttering, you know.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I, it sounds to me like bringing some more of the historical content forward and working on that newsletter, you know, you can't go wrong with that.

That's the legacy, the legacy print product. Bringing that, bringing that forward, that should have been a much, a much higher priority for me. And I, and I see, and I recognize the value in it now in ways that I didn't, I didn't fully understand when we began this process. And that's really something like, it's like, that's another thing too, man. If you're, if you're, if you're looking to migrate a legacy print product online. Yeah, man, bring it all and budget that. Because, because that, that content is so important. It's. Google loves content, man. Like the more you can bring like the, the more legit you are.

Yeah, yeah.

You're not. It's like, it's like it's, it's proof that, hey, we're not just some fly by night outfit. We've been doing this for 46 years.

Yeah. We had a publisher rent a OCR scanner, a high resolution OCR scanner, cut their magazine bindings. They rented it for a week, I think, and it was basically a full time scanning of this publication and bringing the copy online.

Wow.

Yeah, it's worth doing, no doubt. Hey, well, Greg, thank you so much for coming on. This has been great pleasure, Pete, you guys went through such a dramatic transformation and I'm definitely looking forward to what's next from you guys. So we should, we should do this again once your apps are live. We'll probably have some experience to talk about and that, that's a very, very important topic. And yeah, we'll keep chatting. So thanks, thanks again for, for coming on the show and stay healthy.

Hey, thanks, Pete. I really appreciate your time, man.

Oh, my pleasure. All right, see you, Greg.

See you. Bye.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. You can find us@paywallpodcast.com Be sure to subscribe in your podcast player of choice and we'll see you next episode.