Staying Curious

hen I spoke about Site Selection and its annual Sustainability Rankings to an executive MBA class at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business in the fall, I began with a fact that is always an attention grabber.

“Site Selection,” I told the evening gathering, “launched in 1954, the same year two other magazines were launched — Playboy and Sports Illustrated.”

I’ll leave it to you to consider how those two gray eminences are faring today. As for how we’re faring after 70 years, we keep reaching milestones. In addition to this 70th anniversary issue, Conway Data’s Custom Content division, staffed by the same team that produces our flagship publication, in December produced our 100th custom content economic development magazine, which averages out to 10 guides per year over 10 years spread across more than 30 state and regional clients.

I recently checked in with another graying but erudite eminence: Dennis Cuneo, the partner at Fisher & Phillips LLP and former senior vice president of Toyota Motor North America, who made an analogy with an even older publication.

“As the Bible is to preachers, your magazine is to site selectors,” Cuneo told me.

One of the ways that’s true is I can always find something new to learn when I turn to it. Our archives — literally sitting there on our shelves in hardbound volumes — never fail to yield something relevant from a random flip of the pages. Perusing historical archives in real space is one of the favorite pastimes of Ashton G. Ellett, Ph.D., a historian and archivist at the University of Georgia’s Richard B. Russell Library.

“I always tell students, ‘Go grab a magazine or a roll of microfilm, hold down the knob and just look around,” he says. Ellett specializes in oral histories. He and colleagues at UGA are working with Site Selection and Conway Data to curate and make available to the world our entire company archive.

Site Selection is an oral history of sorts too: My conversation with Dennis Cuneo, for example, took place exactly 20 years after I first interviewed him. His observations and reflections will be shared in an upcoming online exclusive at siteselection.com. “A journal like yours isn’t viewed as politically motivated, so you have credibility and do your job objectively, running articles on pros and cons,” Cuneo says. “You’re trying to present facts and figures that site selectors and communities can use. You’re doing a great service to the site selection industry.”

Spread the word: The passage of time has only served to polish and deepen the appeal of our work to global corporate location decision-makers and to an ever-broader audience curious about the role of place in global business strategy. As long as that globe keeps turning, we’ll continue serving up stories that keep that audience turning the page.