Dubroff: After 15 years, our approach to regional news defines our brand
Henry Dubroff
I like to talk about how I started Pacific Coast Business Times 15 years ago with a leased Saab, a checkbook and a business plan.
Along with those tools were a few basic principles that guided our enterprise.
We are at heart a news organization.
Our mission is to deliver news stories to our audience in print, on the Web, via email or whatever format gives us a competitive advantage. We view ourselves as the business journal of record for the tri-county region, which means our audience is heavily skewed toward business-to-business coverage.
Speaking of coverage, our news reports are balanced across a number of beats, but we see technology, commercial real estate, finance and agribusiness as core coverage areas. Over the years, we’ve added hospitality/tourism and health care to our portfolio.
We are focused on breaking news, on exclusive coverage and on stories that have a regional impact. We have special relationships with Bloomberg News, Harvey McKay and others to deliver a broad range of coverage.
Since the beginning we’ve been active members in the Society of American Business Editors & Writers and we’ve adopted the SABEW code of ethics as a guide for our professional conduct.
We have lively editorial and opinion pages that are meant to be a forum for our readers. We don’t endorse candidates in political races but we’re not shy about speaking up on issues that affect the business community.
During the past year we’ve added a cartoonist and we’ve created an informal board of contributors to liven up our opinon pages. We welcome your views.
Our goal is to continuously improve and expand news coverage and we really appreciate the feedback we get from our readers. We count on you to help us provide the data for our Top 25 lists, to nominate individuals and companies for our special reports and to tell us when we’ve got something wrong so we can correct the record.
We’ve believed from the beginning that our news reports should be subscription based and we’ve never wavered from that view. We welcome everyone to sign up for our free email alerts and we offer a sampling of content online.
But if you want the full Pacific Coast Business Times print and digital experience, you have to pay for it — it costs less than a dollar a week. I’ve been really pleased to see so many others, including Apple, Netflix and, of course, the rest of the nation’s business journal community, make the subscription model a permanent feature of the new world of media.
For the past 15 years, we’ve stuck to our discipline and delivered a unique new service to the region — a weekly print publication and online experience that’s independent, locally-owned and grounded in the community.
We’ve branched out into hosting eight awards programs during the year and we really appreciate the audience and sponsorships that have made these successful. And we’ve created a long-term partnership with KCLU, the NPR station for the Tri-Counties.
Thanks for your support — we’ve had a wonderful ride.
