Catch Bill at the VPA!

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Catch Bill Ostendorf, our president and founder, at the 2021 Virginia Press Association News & Advertising Conference this week!

Bill will join a panel discussion, "Innovating in a Crisis" on how to turn the COVID pandemic to your advantage. How can you not just survive but grow during a crisis? Bil will talk about steps Creative Circle took to turn what could have been a down year into a year of record growth in 2020.

He'll also share some data from Creative Circle's national poll last summer on how COVID was impacting our readers and list strategies newspapers can take to turn the pandemic into a win for audience and revenue.

"If newspapers would leverage COVID to reinvent themselves and reconnect with readers, this summer could be game changing," he said.

Another panel will tackle the topic of "Covering Civil Unrest" featuring four staffers from the Washington Post who covered the siege on the Capitol in January.

The keynote speaker at the conference will be Les Zaitz, publisher & editor of the Malheur Enterprise. He'll talk about "Regaining Reader Trust" Thursday at 1 p.m.

Bob McInnis, principal at Robert McInnis Consulting, will lead a session on "Driving Serious Print and Digital Revenue," at 9 a.m. Thursday.

Other sessions include:

• Star Track: The Next Generation

• How to Report More Productively with a 'Solutions Journalism' Approach

• Getting People to Pick Up Your Paper

• Report Reponsibly: The Power of the Media during a Pandemic

• Revenue at Your Fingertips

• Local Government Reporting Can Be Fun!

• Small Staff: Big Impact - Engaging Your Community through Investigative Journalism

• Digital Sales Success

• Taking Public Notices Up a Notch When Record Requests Are Denied

• Moving Forward Online: Q&A with Tom Lappas

• New Journalism Through Collaboration

You Can Grow Revenue & Audience with GIS Improving Design to Increase Ad Revenue & Quality Virginia's Public Notices: What You Need to Know