Put down this magazine. And pick it up online, if you like. Or enjoy its content at one of our conferences. We’re working to unify the experience, no matter where you are.
As editors, analysts, content producers and designers, we think and talk a lot about how to deliver content that resonates with you, the retailers, wholesalers and suppliers who make up the c-store and retail petroleum industry.
We wrack our brains to think about what will grab your attention, speak the language of your business and—if we’re truly on our game—provide information that will get you to think about your customer or your operation a little bit differently.
The measure of great content isn’t just that it looks spectacular or reads well. Today, content needs to be more than just valuable or entertaining; it has to be readily available in a form that’s convenient to your busy lives.
It needs to travel between the page and the stage, from the screen of a computer to that of a smartphone. And it still can look spectacular and read well at the same time. Yes, this is quite an expansion from the conversation of a few years ago, when many of our CSP Daily News readers were asking if we could make our product mobile-friendly.
To that end, we’ve been pouring a ton of thought and resources into improving the digital presentation of our best print work. And you can see the results of that effort in our redesign of CSPDailyNews.com and specifically in the digital presentation of some of our most popular print issues, such as our Category Management Handbook.
Today, content has to be readily available in a form that’s convenient to your busy lives.
We will expand on CSP Daily News’ Resources sections in 2017, building in essence a collection of microsites around key topics and special reports that are critical to both your operations and category execution:
- Our award-winning Top 101 C-Stores.
- Healthy/Natural: A look at how convenience can tackle consumers’ growing demand for natural and organic foods.
- Workforce and Compensation: A look at wage standards across the c-store industry and how the outliers are building growth strategies.
- And four new special reports that look at our industry’s best in a number of different programs and offer you takeaways that you can apply to your business: Fuel 50: America’s Top Fuel Brands; Top 20 Independents; The Foodservice Issue; and Digital 25.
So what may start as a compensation report becomes a full-fledged destination for ongoing insights on workforce and human resources, including news, related research, from-the-trenches intelligence from insiders and more.
That’s the direction media is heading. Technology has changed everything, and we want to be right there with it to bring you content in any format you want to receive it.
At the same time, our own business is evolving. Last year, we shared the news that we had acquired Technomic, the leading market-research firm for the foodservice industry. With that, I thought that if we could bring the various subject-matter experts from across Winsight’s media titles, its events group and Technomic into a single team, we could greatly expand the expertise at your fingertips from merely the stories the CSP team produces to the best insights and expertise from across all of Winsight, whether that be market research from Technomic or an inspiring speech at CRU.
This is why I recently announced a reorganization of Winsight that will move us in that direction. We are placing all of Winsight’s content producers into a single organization, working together for you.
We see a day in the near future when you will be able to move seamlessly from reading an article about the Top 101 chains in CSP magazine to reading breaking news about one of those chains in our daily email blast, to searching related data by segment on our website and then downloading the full research report from Technomic, and finally to hearing the heads of these chains talk about the shifting industry at our Outlook Leadership Conference.
At every step, you’ll recognize the content—be it print, digital, research or in-person—as the award-winning, quality content that is essential to your operation and, again, helps you think about your business or your customer a little bit differently.
For us, it’s nice to win awards. But it’s far nicer to help your businesses prosper.
Grey Montgomery is chief content officer of Winsight LLC. Reach him at gmontgomery@winsightmedia.com.
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