We hosted the 11th Annual DBT 40 a few weeks ago.
Think about that for a second. We’ve now honored 440 Delaware achievers and innovators under 40 since we started Delaware Business Times. Many of them were publicly recognized for the first time.
We launched the Delaware Business Times in September 2014, in the face of The News Journal (and others) deciding to de-emphasize business coverage. I can actually remember a time when Gannett had a 10-person business staff in Delaware. But the decision to stop publishing Business Monday made the choice to start a pro-business publication in the First State easy.
I asked our leadership team to reflect on DBT10. There were three recurring themes:
- Movers-and-shakers commend us for being a reliable source of good business news.
- People are hungry for news that impacts their communities beyond ribbon cuttings and groundbreakings.
- It’s inspiring to meet members of the next generation at one of our events and then watch their careers take off.
We started STUFF (recently rebranded as Delaware Careers) because workforce development is a big issue today. Our readers like that we’re shining a light on the problem of not having enough workers to fill the available jobs.
We are showing students, their parents and the business community that there are good, well-paying career paths where you don’t necessarily need a degree. These are in the trades, in areas like construction and healthcare, which they may not have known much about.
As proud as I am of Delaware Careers – which has won two national awards from the Association of Area Business Publishers (AABP) – there are many other differentiators.
We launched the CEO of the Year Awards and the Mitchell Awards to recognize catalysts of change and drivers of inclusivity. We co-host the annual Women in Business event in upstate and downstate venues with our Delaware Today sister publication. The list goes on: Delaware 222 (highlighting people at the peak of their careers), Giving Guide, 90 Ideas in 90 Minutes and publications in conjunction with the World Trade Center Delaware and the DCA Construction Excellence Awards.
Readers love our Book of Lists and we’ll be focused on doing a better job of tying our articles to the companies and CEOs. It’s a valuable resource for statewide leads and information.
When the Business Roundtable came out with their Growth Agenda, it called for more promotion of Delaware’s entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem. That led us to launch Innovation Delaware.
The path ahead is bright.
We’re fully digital now, but we could have done that sooner. Introducing a paywall has helped us fund our journalism. But digital is another way to deliver information to people how they want to read it.
We’re going to do a better job of covering the government and politics. I think we’re electing some very progressive, anti-business candidates. They could cost us our corporate capital status. We still take way too long in this state to get things done and we’re losing business because of it. That’s frustrating and deserving of more attention.
In closing, I’ve been blessed to have some very talented employees. I want to shout out to Sam Waltz, our founding publisher who helped get this thing off the ground at a time when people were questioning starting a print publication in 2014.
We couldn’t have gotten here without some talented editorial employees – our founding editor, Michael Mika, who hired Christie Milligan, a Milford native who became our second editor. Peter Osborne, with 15 years of business journalism experience, was next. He hired Jacob Owens, and the two of them hired Katie Tabeling, who’s our current editor. I’d like to thank Avie Silver (formerly of Spark) and Charlie Tomlinson for getting our business development off the ground and our current leadership team of Mike Reath, Lisa Minto and Kate Schlegel.
Local news may be more important than it’s ever been. People want to know what’s going on, and they want it presented in an unbiased way. Opinions are clearly marked as such. I promise we’ll continue to follow that path.
Thank you for welcoming us into your lives.
