Learning to be a good coach for your employees doesn't mean mastering complicated techniques or memorizing dozens of rules as much as simply developing the right attitudes in yourself. To be an effective coach, you need to follow some basic guidelines to help you cultivate the habits and perspective that bring out the best in your staff.

Responses to the Fall 2017 Publisher Confidence Survey conducted by Cribb, Greene & Cope indicate publishers continue to be encouraged about the short-term future, and are somewhat more confident than they were a year ago.

On the evening of Monday, Sept. 25, the U.S. Senate voted 49 to 47 to confirm William Emanuel to the National Labor Relations Board.

Newspaper owners and executives are encouraged to participate in the Annual Publisher Confidence Survey.

The survey asks 11 questions that provide direct feedback from publishers on revenue, profit and other current trends in the publishing industry.

The survey takes less than two minutes to complete, and results are provided immediately so publishers can see how others are responding.

We have been writing for months about the never-ending saga of legislative attempts to remove from North Carolina law a provision in the workers' compensation law that presumes newspaper carriers are independent contractors. This presumption has been very valuable since it was passed almost two decades ago. Since that time, there has not been a single reported independent contractor versus employee case in the workers' comp arena in the state of North Carolina.

Fending off another attack by industry opponents in the Oct. 4 special session of the N.C. General Assembly, the North Carolina Press Association stopped an effort to presume all newspaper carriers in the state to be employees, subject carriers to state workers comp and unemployment insurance taxes, and create a new test for independent contractor status.

On the evening of Monday, Sept. 25, the U.S. Senate voted 49 to 47 to confirm William Emanuel to the National Labor Relations Board.

Benchmarking helps newspaper management set goals, track success or failure, and provide objective standards for comparison, publishers heard during a session at the SNPA-Inland Annual Meeting led by Dolph Tillotson, president of Southern Newspapers Inc., and Tim Prince, vice president of Boone Newspapers and publisher of the Shelby County Reporter in Columbiana, Ala.

During this session, Tillotson shared a six-page handout offering the statistical analysis calculations that SNI uses, and he also is offering a blank Excel spreadsheet that can be used by other companies that want to implement something similar.

Family ownership of a media company or any other kind of company can be a beautiful thing. But it has its own unique challenges and solutions.

These are rarely discussed in the open, either inside the company or at industry conferences. But there's a whole world of solutions and best practices available for family owners, if you know where to find them.

If you're a member of an owning family, or if you work for a family-owned company, Steve Gray's latest blog post may help you see where to look.

Far from the sky falling, North Carolina's legal advertising and independent contractor-newspaper carrier climate remains intact. The leadership of the North Carolina General Assembly acted responsibly, with encouragement from the North Carolina Press Association and many SNPA members, to leave N.C. law unchanged.