27: Unpacking Why Manufacturing Industry Publications are Ever-Changing - with Kate Bruns

Meet Kate Bruns:She is a lifelong writer, who spent 20 years working in the higher education communications world. She was living in Des Moines, Iowa when her husband took a new job and the family moved to Neenah Wisconsin in January 2020. After a short time as a very reluctant pandemic homeschool teacher dabbling in freelance marketing communications work, she jumped at the opportunity to embrace her first love, magazines. So she became a writer-editor at insight publications, a regional business magazine serving Northeast Wisconsin. Today, her primary responsibility is editing the BI monthly magazine insight on manufacturing. Lori: In this digital age, is there still room for long-form print magazines and what are you hearing from your readers about that?Kate: So inside our manufacturing has been around for 15 years. We serve 18 counties of Northeast Wisconsin covering manufacturing. And yes, over those 15 years, the internet has exploded. It's gotten noisier digital communications are definitely the thing. But over that amount of time, the appeal of a tangible print product has actually sort of come back in some ways. Our audience is pretty broad-ranging in terms of age. But obviously, some of the folks who've been around a little bit longer are still pretty big fans of holding something in their hands and reading it kind of really diving into a topic, which is what we do at Insight. So, you know, yes, there is still room for print publications to advertisers like it. But we are evolving, just like every other business into doing more digital and insight. But really our flagship, our heart, and soul is still in that print world with the glossy photography in the color and the tangible magazine that people can sit down and have their coffee and read on a Sunday morning or whatever.Lori: Was it intimidating jumping into this new job setting of manufacturing?Kate: It definitely was intimidating. I mean, I had my father was an engineer. And until I was probably 12 years old, I thought he drove a train. I love it. So I was like, Oh, my God, he makes tractors, I don't really know what else is involved in that. So you know, growing up, it was not something even though he was in the space, I didn't really understand all the nuances of manufacturing. And then when I went to journalism school, I was very focused on sports media and the human interest type of journalism. So yeah, when I'm offered this job to be editor of IOM, I'm thinking oh, my gosh, I'm not a thought leader on manufacturing, I'm going to ask stupid questions. But you know, like I said, it really doesn't matter. If you have that expertise yourself. I'm looking for the experts. I'm not I don't have to be the expert, I have to make what they say sounds good. And, and helpful in connecting people. So it's really been really pretty awesome to learn so much about manufacturing in the process of having this job. And I'm just so inspired and sort of awed by this concept of making, right? You know, this area of Wisconsin has one of the largest concentrations in the country, for manufacturing, and you don't see that everywhere. And you kind of take for granted that people are actually making things here. And it's really, really cool.Kris: What have you grown to love or appreciate about manufacturing since you started there?Kate: There are so many stories to tell. And the community is actually really collaborative. I think in my brain, I thought, you know, these are competitive, proprietary enterprises that don't want to talk about their problems or share their secrets. And in some respects, that's definitely true. But the competition is global. For most of these manufacturers in Northeast Wisconsin, the collaboration ends up, you know, being pretty localized. And we're just so much stronger, versus a region in Northeast...