American Business Media (ABM) recently recognized Bob Tippee, editor of Oil and Gas Journal, with the Crain Award, given annually to an individual it feels has contributed to the development of editorial excellence in the business media.
Established through a grant from the G.D. Crain, Jr. Foundation, the award is named after the founder of Crain Communications, publisher of nearly three dozen titles, including BtoB and Advertising Age.
This week, Ad Age published an excerpt of Tippee’s acceptance speech under the headline, “It’s a Wonderful Time to Be in the B-to-B News Business.” Tippee is not naive or blind to the changes sweeping media, though:
We now compete in and contribute to a dimensionless yet expanding mass of information nobody wants to pay for. And let’s face facts: a lot of that information is duplicative, unfocused, and superficial. Why should anybody pay for it?
Hopefully, and helpfully, Tippee offers a way forward:
New electronic tools enable us to create value with timeliness. They push us toward news. But news has to mean more than flipping press releases and cherry-picking the Reuters file.
It’s great to read about an editor calling for his colleagues to invest in content and offer clear value to their audiences. Tippee is far from pining for the old days; he’s shaping the ones to come.
Edited April 25 to add: B2B recently reported a story, “Print finds defenders at ABM regional meeting“, that amplifies the themes here.
