Tag: Kenneth Neill

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News News Blog

Contemporary Media, Inc. Announces Leadership Transition

Anna Traverse, Ashley Haeger

Contemporary Media, Inc. (CMi) today announced the appointment of Anna Traverse as its Chief Executive Officer, effective June 15th. She succeeds Kenneth Neill, longtime CEO, who will maintain an ongoing involvement with the company, which publishes Memphis magazine, the Memphis Flyer, Inside Memphis Business, and Memphis Parent, as well as a wide range of custom publications.

Traverse currently serves as Chief Operating Officer of CMi. At Contemporary Media, she has been involved in editorial creation, revenue generation, financial planning, and identifying and implementing new ventures.

Along with Ashley Haeger, the company’s Controller, Neill and Traverse have worked together as a leadership team since the beginning of 2019. Neill will serve as Publisher Emeritus of Contemporary Media, Inc. He also will maintain his role as Editor/Publisher of Memphis magazine, and as Founding Publisher of the Memphis Flyer.

Kenneth Neill

Addressing the company’s employees on May 23, Ward Archer, chairman of the company’s board of directors, said, “We thank Ken for his many years of leadership. We would not be here without his vision and guidance. Anna has demonstrated reliably sound decision-making, and she has the skill set to lead the company into a bright future.”

Traverse commented, “I am excited to take on this incredible opportunity, and grateful to Ken for making our company the vibrant place it is today and for his continued support.”

In addition to Traverse’s appointment, the company also announced that Jeffrey Goldberg will transition from his role as Director of Business Development to a newly created role as Chief Revenue Officer, effective immediately.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Damned Statistics

Rather than shop, I spent a rainy Black Friday at home catching up on my reading and came across an intriguing editorial in that day’s New York Times. Titled “False Alarms About a National Crime Wave,” the Times‘ editorial board provided detailed statistics indicating that, far from escalating, the trend in violent crime in America is in fact receding dramatically.

The Times article called the long-term trend “unmistakable,” adding that “the rate of violent crime, including murder, has been going down for a quarter-century, and is at its lowest in decades. On average, it is half of what it was in 1990, and in some places even lower.”

As a long-time resident of Memphis, a city that’s unfortunately known for its high crime rates, these observations piqued my interest, and sent me off into the ether to check out the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. It’s a simple task; they’re found at: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/. The reports date back to 1930, although the oldest one online is from 1995.

I decided to do a two-decade comparison. Despite what critics sometimes say, the FBI’s numbers do seem quite “uniform” for every metro area in the country, comparing as they do apples to apples in a dozen well-defined crime categories. So I pulled up the detailed numbers for the Memphis metro area in 1995 and compared them with the same numbers 18 years later — in 2013 — the latest full year for which FBI statistics are available.

Those numbers speak volumes about what’s actually been happening here, suggesting that there’s something of a silver lining to our local crime cloud. Here are a few of the most interesting statistics:

• The Memphis Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) had a population of 1,072,051 in 1995; in 2013 there were 1,347,803 of us. That’s a 26 percent increase.

• Despite the fact that we had 26 percent more people in 2013 than 1995, the total number of violent crimes committed annually remained just about the same over this 18-year period: 13,432 in 1995, 13,389 in 2013.

• The murder rate in the Memphis MSA declined by 35 percent, from 214 in 1995 to 139 in 2013. Rapes declined similarly, from 937 in 1995 to 617 in 2013.

• Property crimes dropped 24 percent, from 74,042 (1995) to 56,471 (2013), while motor-vehicle theft fell from 16,263 (1995) to 3,517 (2013), a remarkable 78-percent decline. 

These numbers suggest, pretty convincingly, that Memphis today is in fact a safer place than the Memphis of the mid-1990s. More importantly, this downward trend has occurred all while our metro-area population has grown over 26 percent over the past two decades. Even in our “worst” categories, the crime stats for our now-more-populous area have stayed roughly the same, in raw-number terms.

Now let’s face it: Memphis’ crime numbers, like those of similarly poor Southern cities, are still pretty miserable, overall, when compared to more prosperous places like Boston or Seattle, cities whose murder rates, for example, are one-fourth of ours. But there seems to be no question that we are a decidedly safer place than we used to be. And while it certainly is premature to declare victory in the war against crime, we should not ignore the fact that the overall trend in regard to crime in the Mid-South is positive, not negative.

Mark Twain once said there are three kinds of lies: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” But sometimes statistics, however drab, represent indisputable facts. In 1995, the Memphis metro area endured 214 murders; in 2013, we had “only” 138. Of course, a single murder any year in Memphis is one murder too many. But does a 35 percent drop in your city’s murder rate indicate that the city is being engulfed by an all-new tidal wave of local crime?

I think not. As a community, we should start by remembering to allow our discussions about crime to be guided as much as possible by factual information, not by uninformed opinion that occasionally borders on hysteria. Blind hogs may get lucky occasionally, but they rarely find acorns.

Kenneth Neill is the Publisher/CEO of Contemporary Media, Inc., the parent company of The Memphis Flyer.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From the Editor: Arghhh!

Every year, when it’s time for our Memphis Tiger football cover story, I jokingly threaten to make the cover an image of Lucy from “Peanuts” pulling the football out from under Charlie Brown, as the poor fellow yells, “Arrghhh!” But that would be wrong.

The Flyer has a history with Tiger football that dates back to the early 1990s, when then-editor, Dennis Freeland, began covering the games in a weekly column and writing preseason cover stories about the team. Freeland truly cared about the program and wrote about it with dedication and tempered affection.

Just prior to Freeland’s sad passing in 2002, publisher Kenneth Neill, a longtime Tiger football fan, took on the job of covering the team’s games for a year. Perhaps his most memorable moment came in a column after a Tiger loss to lowly University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB), in which he bemoaned “losing to a bunch of pissants.” Needless to say, UAB Pissant fans were not amused, though it’s certainly a better team name than Blazers.

Since then, Frank Murtaugh has covered Tiger football and basketball for the Flyer. This week’s issue is his 11th preseason football cover story. He covered the Coach Tommy West “glory years,” when the team went to five bowls in the mid-2000s; he covered Coach Larry Porter’s sad-trombone “revolution,” when the team won three games in two years. (In one of his more foolish moves, Porter famously built a wall around the program’s practices and kept the media at arm’s length.) Foot, meet bullet.

When current coach, Justin Fuente, was hired three years ago, the hope was that the team would soon turn things around. Fuente has gone 7-17 in his first two years, in the process losing to such traditional powers as Middle Tennessee, Tennessee-Martin, and Temple. Attendance is lagging, cynicism about the program abounds. But hope springs eternal: The university’s slogan for the 2014 season is “Wait ‘Til This Year!”

That audacious slogan aside, it’s a football program that direly needs wins — and fans. So when the Flyer, which has covered the program for 20 years, asks for a few minutes with the coach or a couple of players for a cover photo for a story coming out the week of the team’s home opener, you’d think that program would be falling all over itself to cooperate.

But no. No posed photos allowed, says the university. Seriously? With 200,000-plus weekly readers, the Flyer is the second-largest print medium in Memphis. Wouldn’t a snazzy, clever Tiger football cover in hundreds of Flyer racks and boxes all over town help get people excited about the season? Might it not even put a few more butts in seats in the cavernous Liberty Bowl on Saturday? Come on, son, think. The Crimson Tide, you’re not.

I swear, if the team doesn’t win and/or lighten up on its photo policy, next August, I’ll be the one saying “Wait ’til this year, Charlie Brown.” And they’ll be the ones saying, “Arrghhh!”

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor

Suppose they gave an election and nobody showed up?  

“Suppose they gave a war and nobody showed up” was a common slogan on anti-war posters during the Vietnam War era. Flash forward 40-plus years, substitute the word “election” for “war,” and you’d get a pretty good description of what actually happened last May in the Shelby County’s primary elections, when nine out of 10 of us decided to vote with our feet, or more correctly, with our butts. 

Voter apathy here has long been appalling and lurches from bad to worse with each successive election. Last year’s city mayor’s race, for example, only attracted 18 percent of the potential electorate — half of what it was two decades earlier. This May’s Shelby County turnout was a remarkably low 8 percent, probably some kind of national record. Writing shortly after Eric Cantor lost his House seat in a primary race in June when only a fraction of the electorate showed up, Charles Blow of the New York Times asked: “What does it say about America as a society … when so many sit at home, and allow the voices of so few to carry so much weight?”

We do know what it says about Memphis. “You snooze, you lose” should be our communal bumper sticker, as we enter this August election cycle (early voting begins July 18th), when not only county and state positions will be decided (along with party representatives for federal office), but also, more importantly, each and every judiciary position in Shelby County. You may think it’s meaningless who gets to sit on our county commission or school board, but if you think the quality of the people who run our criminal and civil courts is unimportant, then you clearly are living on another planet. 

That’s why, beginning this week, the Flyer will be publishing in full-page form the results of the Memphis Bar Association’s membership Judicial Qualification Poll (see page 18). We will do so again in every issue of this newspaper until election day on August 7th. It’s our hope that by doing this, we will help inform Shelby County voters as to how the 87 lawyers who are candidates for judicial office in this upcoming election are regarded by their peers in the Memphis Bar. 

This is no ordinary election; we will be choosing the judges who will run our local and state courts for the next eight years. For better or worse, I suspect a majority of our readers will have some contact with at least one of these judges at some point during that period. To play no role in deciding who those judges might be is the height of folly.

Keep in mind that the publication of this poll in no way suggests any kind for endorsement of its results. As regular readers know, the Flyer has long declined to endorse candidates in local elections. (Check out “Why We Don’t Endorse” at memphisflyer.com.)

But this non-endorsement policy in no way suggests that we don’t care about election results or the level of participation in our elections. Letting so few among us decide so much is one of the greatest threats to our collective future. “Knowledge is power,” as Francis Bacon famously said long ago, so we applaud the Memphis Bar Association for providing the public with the results of their membership poll. A well-informed potential voter is far more likely than one who is uninformed to show up at the polling place.

Kenneth Neill is the publisher of Contemporary Media, parent company of the Flyer.

Bruce VanWyngarden is on vacation this week.

Categories
Special Sections

Letter from the Publisher

1 January 2009

Dear FOF (Friend of the Flyer): 

Whatever “shock and awe” 2009 has in store for us, this particular new year will have a tough act to follow. On the plus side, 2008 brought us a national election with a truly historic result, the election of the country’s first African-American president. On the not-so-plus side, 2008 also brought a fair amount of calamity, particularly these last four months, when we were taken to the cleaners, financially, as a nation. It’s been a long time since so many Memphis families have found themselves facing a new year with as much fiscal uncertainty as is facing them now.

2009 was on course to be a special year for the Flyer even before all this recent commotion, for we mark our 20th anniversary of publication with the new year. That’s a long time in any business, and we’re mighty grateful, to you our readers, for letting us enlighten, aggravate, and entertain you for two decades now. We couldn’t and wouldn’t be here without you.

Nor would we have survived half this long without the support of the thousands of local businesses who use the Flyer to reach out to Memphis, recognizing that the 50,000-plus papers we put out on the street every week represent an ideal opportunity for them to deliver messages to their customers in cost-efficient fashion. As a free publication that’s 100 percent dependent upon advertiser support, we really wouldn’t be here without local business owners who believe they can and should put their money where our mouth is.

And while, over the years, we have on occasion written things that have irritated those businesses, I like to think that we have a nice synergy going with them. After all, like most of our advertisers, the Flyer is itself “relentlessly local,” from top to bottom, in every facet of its business. Not everyone is aware of the fact that the publisher of the Flyer, Contemporary Media, Inc., is Memphis’ largest locally owned media company, or that that company has as its primary mission the publishing of the Mid-South region’s highest-quality journalistic products. We may not make millions for Wall Street investors, but I like to think that the scores of national journalism awards that line our lobby walls speak volumes about how well our editorial staff has accomplished that mission.

 

In these dodgy economic times, one hears more and more about how newspapers are dying. I’d be lying if I said that 2008 was a terrific business year for the Flyer, but I must confess, when I see these kind of reports, I feel a bit like Mark Twain, who, when he read his own obituary (in a newspaper, mind you) replied that “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Whatever becomes of other publications in town, the Flyer isn’t going anywhere. Across the country, daily newspapers have indeed suffered dramatic circulation declines. But happily, here in Memphis, weekly distribution levels at our 700-plus local locations remain at historic levels, with pick-up rates holding steady at

95 percent. As long as we continue to deliver these kinds of numbers, we’re confident that our advertisers will continue to find the Flyer a cost-effective way to reach Memphis’ “best and brightest” with their advertising messages.

We may be proud of what we’ve achieved, but we aren’t so blind as to think that the Flyer brand can still exist in print alone. In this day and age of instant informational access, memphisflyer.com remains an integral part of our journalistic package, a first-class website that delivers breaking local news and offers a whole range of innovative marketing opportunities for our customers. Our print and on-line products go hand in hand; in fact, one can no longer exist without the other. To that end, we’ll be rolling out an all-new web package later this month. I think you’ll be very pleased with our staff’s efforts.

As we commence our 20th anniversary year, we like to think we’re changing with the times, as we always have. We’ve come a long way by being innovative, bold, and sassy; don’t look for us to stop anytime soon.

All the best,

Kenneth Neill

Publisher/CEO