Aseries of press trips early this spring combined to produce the “Great Spring Tour of the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest” by our editorial team: Newly promoted Senior Editor Alexis Elmore in Buffalo, Managing Editor Kelly Barraza in Indianapolis, EVP Ron Starner in Toledo and me in Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky, Sioux City and Chicago.
Those aren’t the only places we’ve been going. This year already has featured meetings with diplomatic and business leaders, talks on trade, community visits, an event at the state capitol and conferences on university campuses here in Greater Atlanta, in addition to more of Ron’s increasingly popular speaking engagements (in Florida and in North Carolina) and his delivery of the Governor’s Cup to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Most recently, Alexis attended the Industrial Asset Management Council’s Spring Forum in Little Rock, Arkansas. And we can’t wait to continue our intentional effort to sit down in person with more of the leaders at the 80-plus international consulates and trade offices in our hometown.
Getting out in the field is an essential journalism function. It sparks experiences that will continue to distinguish what we do from AI-generated facsimiles of business intelligence — experiences such as talking to real people and witnessing real events happening in front of our faces. The connections generated out in the field generate insights you’ll find sprinkled throughout this issue of Site Selection and our decades of archives. You’ll also find them in the recent portfolio of the aforementioned Ron Starner, who in late April was named a national finalist for overall excellence in the American Society of Business Publication Editors’ annual Azbee Awards competition in the category of body of work by a staff journalist.
We perform enterprise reporting, interviews and data analysis so you can find business intelligence you don’t find anywhere else … and you certainly won’t find in copy-and-paste slop generated by one AI only to be consumed by another AI.
Speaking of which, not long ago I found myself on an organizing call before a panel discussion I was to moderate, with influential, savvy people on the line. Before I knew it, rather than simply talking, brainstorming and learning from and about one another, we were being told to follow an AI-generated script to make our purported conversation more effective. Things got awkward fast. I quietly rebelled. The panel went great by following each other’s human cues. The rebellion continues.
Some of you will recognize the headline on this page as the slightly altered opening line from “Baba O’Riley,” the “teenage wasteland” song that was the hypnotic opener from The Who’s 1971 album “Who’s Next.” There’s another line from that song to keep in mind as you consider whether to tear yourself away from the screen: “Let’s get together before we get much older.”
You can count on us to keep getting together — and then putting it all together for you.
