
Hey, thank you very much.
Welcome back.
Thanks to all our special guests today, cheese curd Nick.
He'll be at the farmer's market on Broadway for eight, three o'clock.
He'll be set up with his unbelievable fried cheese curds and his, um, Coney Island hot dogs and his brats and his hamburgers and in the whole thing.
And it's all without carbs or calories because like I said, he eats that on a daily basis and he's lost 47 pounds.
So
away.
Yeah, it's good to be back.
Thanks.
Yes, been allowed.
Do they
Or was
Chris do something?
I think that, uh, I think with Tori and Janelle here, I think that was working well.
Yeah.
He dominated.
Yeah.
Exactly.
live.
Yeah.
It's incredible.
Uh, I grew up in Green Bay.
So I knew what Broadway was 40, 50 years ago and what did you hang out there?
I don't want to in college.
I don't wear your leather.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
But what Brian and the on Broadway crew have done with on Broadway is unbelievable.
It looks like a Hallmark Channel in the winter when they do the Chris Kindle Market.
Oh, and like I said, it reminds me
That's very, very distracting too.
Window shoppers, you know, it's just and I think they're working.
They got some ideas I'd like to see that happen But that is the renovation and wasn't without an investment either, but it's I think it's paying dividends
Yeah, and then when the public market, I mean they're expecting I believe I think I was talking to Brooke or Marion a million people.
Somebody had told me Cabela's gets like 750,000 visitors a year.
I believe that.
of them
of the Year?
Well not paper, close actually.
Wisconsin Newspaper Association, every year all the paid newspapers that belong to, well all paid newspapers belong to the Wisconsin Newspaper Association and every year in Madison they have an awards banquet and we were this close to becoming winning the paper of the year.
Wow.
But no, last night we were
show of the year.
I
wider here.
But yeah, we were at the Green Bay City Council.
I was there last night and we were voted in as the official newspaper of the city of Green Bay.
Yes.
Yeah, I think I attribute that a lot to Chris Leonard, who just is a history buff.
Yeah.
Somebody that just truly cares about the community and she comes up with a lot of that.
That's
I like that a lot.
Let me ask are you thinking of more frequent publishing or where are you gonna go with this you I think a lot of people when you start over like that's not gonna work You know because you were in existence at one time and kind of the Chronicle was and then not now it's back and I obviously very strong if you're voted the newspaper of the community Plans yeah, well
You don't have to tell
I'll tell you what I feel is the future newspapers because I think what you're asking is will we publish a printed product more than one day a week and We feel that the future of newspapers is once a week in print on the weekends You get in your mailbox where you can sit on your back deck in the morning with a coffee or in the evening with a beer and Read the
okay.
Yeah, it's five o'clock somewhere
But then daily online, um, where, uh, you got a high school girl softball game on a Tuesday night.
We don't wait for our paper.
Uh, we put it online as fast as possible, either Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.
Yeah.
That's, I mean, we're the official paper of all the school districts as well.
And that was one of the things when we bought the paper from Mike Avenger, because it was originally the, uh, ash, wobbon and press that Lois started.
And then Mike took it over when she passed away and,
When he passed away long story short, we ended up buying it with the intentions of moving into Brown County because there really wasn't a lot of local high school sports coverage and and those student athletes need that.
thing.
needs to be covered.
Girls Lacrosse is
Yeah, nobody's coming.
And here's the thing too.
The other thing is people
read news differently than they did 40 years ago.
I mean, there's still people that love to get it in the paper form in their mailbox, but other people want to read it online or on the Facebook feed, but other people want to see it in videos.
So that La Crosse game that you mentioned, we actually had one of our interns there, a high school intern, a gentleman named Grayson that's doing tremendous from Bayport.
He went to it and not only wrote a story, took some photos for a photo gallery, but then he did a video interview.
of two of their athletes that we put on our website, on Facebook, and on TikTok.
And on TikTok alone, one of those video interviews of the girl, one of the girls got over 17,000 views in a few days.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
My time.
Time.
59 a year.
Yeah, at this point, we're $59 a year.
Unfortunately, the cost of newsprint keeps going up, and the US mail keeps going up.
We're getting hit again with another increase from the US mail.
But we want to be careful with that.
But compared to other print publications, we're very inexpensive.
I just bought
I mean we like that and you probably can't get your own delivery person like some other people but That's not gonna slow down that the post office because they've raised their prices and Lord their quality of service five days now, right?
Johnny did you get a letter from Matt walk to Green Bay your wife sent that or it it was crazy and it's like
The service used to be better and cheaper now, but whatever.
It's a government entity.
up in...
yeah.
We have a paper up in Marinette County called The Pestigo Times, which is just like The Press Times.
It's all local news, local high school sports.
We're the only ones up in Marinette County covering Crivets, Wasaki, Gillette, Surin.
And that paper...
My parents grew up in Marinette, so when we had the opportunity to buy it.
driving to the
it.
And when we bought that paper, it had over 8,000 subscribers, which is one of the largest paid subscriber papers in the state.
And I'm going to the US Post Office on this.
And what was happening is our office was good.
When we bought it, it was getting inundated with calls, with paper, people not getting their paper.
Sometimes two weeks late, sometimes five days late.
And what we discovered was the papers were getting delivered from our printer out of Chano to the Pestigo Post Office.
Now, I also want to say the people that work at the local post offices are great people.
They're great people.
They do everything they can to help you.
It's not
Right.
But what happened is the papers getting delivered to the Pestigo Post Office, all 8,000, and then the Pestigo Post Office was taking their papers, sorting them, and they're getting them out in the mail the next day.
And then, uh, we personally delivered them to the Cribbets and Marinette post offices in Menominee, and those got out the next day.
But then all these people that lived in Gillett, Surin, Wasaki, they, they were getting the paper a week, two weeks late.
And we discovered what was happening is the papers that got delivered to the Pestigo Post Office got delivered back to the Green Bay Post Office.
And then Green Bay was shorthanded employees, so they were getting sent to Milwaukee.
And sometimes getting lost so now what we've done and it was the suggestion actually of the postmaster in in Pestigo who's tremendous We're delivering personally to each little post office site site and now that's eliminated the
worth
Hollahan.
I had no worries.
Yeah, the internship program has been mind-blowing in my other life and Chris Leonard and her other life We'd like to show Fantasy Island.
We'd be teachers and high school teachers and In the we all know the state of the the news industry newspapers TV
across the board, it's in a state of flux.
And there's a shortage of local news coverage, and there's a shortage of students getting into journalism.
And newspapers are shutting down nationwide, and in addition to that, when they need to find employees, they're having a hard time finding employees.
And in general, the newspaper industry is old.
The people that are working in it are old.
We kind of Mr. Magood into this.
It wasn't our brainchild, but Microsoft a few years ago, four years ago reached out to us and other entities and said, hey, would you like to be involved with a grant that we're doing with local journalism?
And we said, absolutely yes.
And so we got involved in it.
In long story short, we tied him with UW Green Bay.
The Dean of Humanities, Charles Ryback, took the money that he got from Microsoft and invested it into his students so they could have a paid internship.
at the press times, and it was six students a semester.
In that first semester, two of those students, our sports editor, Tori Wittenbrock, and our city pages editor, Janelle Fisher, were a part of that internship program.
And what we saw, excuse me, was that you get the best and brightest, because we interview the interns, and we select the ones that we want to bring in.
All of them come in and we create a great atmosphere in our office intentionally and they all love the whole internship program and we see when they came in versus the end of the semester under the tutelage of Chris Leonard or Tori, our sports editor, Jeneller.
how to cover the news, how
write the news.
You don't go to the left, you don't go to the right, you write right down the middle.
And by the end of the semester, there's seasoned veterans covering school boards, city council.
And so we knew the Microsoft money was gonna run out after they said three years, they ended up going four.
It was tremendous.
But we reached out to the Green Bay Packers, Aaron Popkey and Nicollet National Bank and asked if they wanted to get behind it.
They've increased their backing the last few years, each year with it, which we can get
When I was going into college, journalism was literally the most popular major, because during Watergate, where everybody wanted to be an investigative reporter.
But a lot of schools have dropped their journalism programs.
It's bizarre.
Can't wait to be back with more.
Mike Holhand, general manager, headlines of the press times.
Back after this.
Mike Hollahan, General Manager, Headlines of the Press Times, a Pass It Forward intern program.
Both talk about our experiences with kids or ourselves with the world of journalism itself.
But Mike, another, Jim brought up something right before we put the headphones back on.
You get the journalism degree and I'll tell you what, doesn't matter what the paper industry is, man, are there about a million different offshoots you can do with that once you have that degree, isn't there?
Yeah, absolutely.
Like, I mean, Jim, talk about what your daughter
She got a journalism degree and she met with a lot of journalists.
One of them was, ah, don't do it.
There's no money in it.
And I'm like, oh, I don't know about that.
Don't worry about the money.
We'll figure that out later.
Went from Nashville to New York now assistant publisher and it's just led to some great things and John was talking about his start to journalism led to TV and you know I just think it's not like you're gonna write news.
There's nothing wrong with writing newspaper your whole the rest of your life I mean like he said there's Watergate some of that stuff was very cool to be the you know investigative reporter But I think journalism is a very rewarding career doesn't start real high pay But I don't think that should be the focus right
agreed agreed and and again back to that internship program
with the Packers Giveback and the Nicollet National Bank, they've been involved now for a few years.
We're now up to nine students per semester between St.
Norbert and GW Green Bay and then NWTC, where John came through.
And it's unbelievable.
It's been a game changer for us in the aspect that, again, you look across the whole United States and papers are failing, papers that are there are older people.
And in our thought process is moving forward with these interns, they're teaching us things as well.
Because here's the thing is the future of journalism, it's so important what we're doing right now because it's all in flux, but in flux is opportunity.
And the future of journalism
isn't what it was 10 years ago 20 years ago not you know you're still gonna do your serious stories because that needs to be done you're still gonna cover city council and school board because that needs to be done but in addition to that we got to start understanding this younger generation doesn't want to read the paper like our generation did so we're
heavily involved in multimedia, one of our former interns, Katie Koizman.
She now is the head digital editor for our papers where we're doing a lot of video.
And one of the things that we noticed is these high school sports videos where we'll just put a Bluetooth.
microphone on the athlete and do a video interview with your iPhone or Google pixel and put it up online.
Some of these videos, Tori Wittenbrock did one of the packer game that got over 865,000 views on Tik Toks alone.
And so it's, it's... Todd, are we on Tik Tok yet?
Yeah, just, man.
We will be by this afternoon.
That's right.
But it's tough.
None of us will be working here anymore.
And we are.
Nikolay National Bank sponsors all the high school stuff, but they...
It's telling us people want to consume news video.
So we do a lot of news video as well.
And John does a lot of it for us.
And he is incredible at it.
I mean, it's high production stuff by a one man band because John is incredible.
And John is the future of what a journalist needs to be.
John goes to a ribbon cutting, takes photos.
In addition to that, we'll do a video.
And in addition to that, we'll write 300-word story.
And back in the day, the way it worked with journalists is they had a reporter go to it and a separate photographer.
Well, you can't afford to do that anymore.
So you need to be multimedia.
But the other thing I'm saying is, as a newspaper now, we're looking at this summer, Tori's sister.
Bri is a junior at Tennessee and she did an internship with us last year on the marketing side.
She has a personality that's incredible We're gonna start doing edutainment videos where we're gonna We're gonna tell a story.
We're not gonna go left or right.
We're gonna Give people information, but Tori's gonna do it with video that's gonna be entertaining as well And my guess is that's gonna take off like crazy That's
I buy, obviously by your paper, by your competitor's paper, and a couple other ones that are paper that I read, but then I get three of them online.
And online, I wonder if you're gonna do this.
They have the story, and like Biden's whole prostate cancer, that's a long story, that's a long article, and you can hit where they just, it's read by a computer.
Yeah, I get the New York Times and you can do that on there.
You can just say have the story read to you.
Which I love if you're driving, you know, obviously.
probably AI generated.
No, they
That's a, I mean...
That's a really good idea, Jim.
I mean, we do podcasts, but maybe we need to start doing that as well.
That's not a bad idea.
Correct me if
And again, I'm a huge fan of print journalism, always have been.
I miss the old days, but was the journalism, whatever you want to call it, industry, were they a little slow in foreseeing the future, that the whole process of the paper and the printing and yada, yada, yada?
was maybe getting a little, that model was little losing its luster, was the news print business a little slow to adapt?
I would say, you know, everybody was in the whirlpool for a while there when the internet came out and nobody really knew what to do.
I mean, for a lot of things, if I would have looked back and said, hey, I should buy up some domain names and you can take a lot of money on that, you know?
But I think people are starting to learn it now.
And I think, you know, the future, we got to go to where the people are and
they want.
And that's what we're trying to do here.
And I personally think, you know, it's like Russell Wilson, why not us?
Why not us here in Green Bay?
Our owner, Pat Wood, has talked at National Newspaper Conferences about this internship program.
I think it's something that
is a model for all newspapers to turn things around because you're draining the swamp, you're bringing in young journalists, and you're bringing in young journalists that have ideas of how their generation wants to receive the news.
But I don't think the print edition's ever gonna go away.
Once a week in print.
We do.
Well, thanks for having
If you missed part of the show or want to share it with a friend to catch every episode of Mino and the Mayor on your schedule, listen now at CivicMedia.us or find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's easy to take Mino and the Mayor wherever you go.
Now back to Mino and the Mayor, here's John Mino and Jim Schmidt.
My name is Amir here.
Special thanks, Mike Hollen.
General manager headlines for the press times.
Ben and Deanna Malkor moving with the Malkors.
Check them out, folks.
They've got some beautiful places listed right now that just sound fantastic.
Jessica, by the way, those ones at Northbrook still fascinate me.
Jessica Williams, Jessica George, local veterans.
Veteran Salute brought to you by Olson Legal Group of Oshkosh and Berlin and of course Cheese Curd, Nick Farmer's Market.
That was gonna say, looks like it's cleared up out there, but it's not.
It just got brighter, got a little bit brighter, but it's, that is still, look it, when you see the leaves turn that way from where we're sitting and we're facing south and all the leaves are turned, you know, it's right coming right from the north and from the bay.
One more little shout out to Mike Holland, the fact that he's all in on that industry, not just his paper.
Like he's talking about getting a bench and getting interns and where it's going to go in the future.
And I just was really impressed with him today.
I'm so glad he was awarded the newspaper.
Yeah.
Isn't that weird that some sell-to-sell works and others don't?
Because, like I said, I just tried to make a call and I yesterday was chasing down Andre because I needed something from him.
He's on cell comment.
We just ended up texting.
It's just like, that's frustrating though after three, four days.
Well,
And I wanted to set up some stuff, and all my guys that I'm dealing with are like 75 years old, so they're having textures.
That phone ringing is everything to connect.
And for this, for seven days or whatever I haven't been able to, I've got a couple of events coming up, and I'm sure the people are trying to get a hold of me.
It's a week.
I always gave tours when I had guests come in for the games and I always went to the security room and then, I don't know if you know that type, but right down in the, where the players are, it's a little bit further than where the players locker room is, but there's two jail cells too.
Yeah, I've never seen those.
And I'm like, do you guys, who goes, there's two of them.
Is it male and female or is it the Packers and the opponent?
But he goes no it's male-female.
So can you imagine putting right next to each other in the same cell?
It's so if you're
I don't I think there's one I'm just obviously one in that area I don't know but what I thought I really thought that was interesting know that they they were separated by Male-female not because if you put a guy in there from the Bears anything yeah, I don't think they would end well but
Anyway, they know what they're doing over there, but yeah, we put them right down in there and then after the game they Take them over to
But I, I, okay, I would, my kidneys would explode because I would hold everything until I was more private.
Everything.
Oh, I, I would die from, I get what's called septic because I would hold it for a week and a half.
But what I've heard is that other prisoners or whatever are very respectful about that and will like turn their backs and stuff.
Then after the game do they take him to the Brown County or whatever?
Okay.
And then because I think it's the next day they get habeas corpus, but somebody works for our government.
That was pretty funny.
I know.
Um, but they're, I think it's Philadelphia.
They'll actually like do the trial right
I wanted to pass.
Let's do that We've got the civic media app, right?
Yeah, you choose WIS or WGBW and you can always text the studio that way.
Yeah, you can now send
a voice note.
So you can actually speak to us through our app and it comes to the studio and it sounds a little something like this.
Good morning, Mino and the mayor.
This is your producer sending a voice note from the app.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I do want to say about the Scotch.
So I went to, you know, I raised a little money once.
So I went to a guy's house and it was, I don't know, three in the afternoon.
Like 100 year old stuff Irish guy and because it was a special occasion Scotch or whiskey Scotch, okay, and I had some Wow, it was good, but you don't take doesn't take much of that stuff.
Oh,
Uh-uh.
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