Why it's good to be the guy with gray hair ... and more!

Doing TV always makes for a great hair-on-fire moment. So I jumped at the chance to spend 15 minutes with Bob Considine, the host of Minding Your Business. Bob is a Star-Ledger alum and the Chief Communications Officer at the New Jersey Business & Industry Association.

(Full disclosure: I’m a big fan of Bob and the NJBIA, which, among other things, made finding new health benefits far easier than I imagined it could be. If you’re a small or new business, deciding whether you need NJBIA in your corner isn’t something to wrestle with; it’s an IQ test.)

As for the video above, Bob and I discussed the transformation of The Star-Ledger from the state’s dominant print brand to an entirely different mission at NJ.com, now one of the country’s largest news and information websites. It was great to reminisce about the challenges and the people who made both jobs so great. The people, after all, are the ones who made a seemingly impossible transformation work. I also told Bob those years easily were the challenge of a lifetime, and I’ll still go to my grave grateful that I had the best job in New Jersey journalism.

So why leave? Bob asked.

I explain why it was time, and we then moved into all things Whitmer Consulting and my new life as a digital media and strategic communications specialist, working in New Jersey and beyond. We also talked about the “aha moments,” when I started to realize there were clients who needed exactly what we do at Whitmer Consulting.

And the gray hair?

Well, my 36 years in journalism included learning how to monetize a newsroom and seamlessly integrate it with sales and marketing teams. That gives me a unique understanding of how the decline of traditional media has created incredible opportunities for companies to create content and campaigns that tell their story — a story that can be targeted to their audiences.

There’s more. So much more.

So give a watch and send along any follow-up questions. Just jump in the comments. I’ll be watching!

Kevin Whitmer is a strategic communications/digital media expert and President of Whitmer Consulting LLC. He spent more than 30 years managing large news operations and building digital audiences.

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