A group of mayors visiting Columbus this week as part of a regional session for the Mayor’s Institute on City Design explained their strategies for gaining support for big community projects, saying they use everything from live video streaming to old-fashioned newsletters to get their message out.
The mayors gave their views during an open-to-the-public panel discussion at Upland Columbus Pump House in downtown Columbus, giving local residents a chance to welcome the mayors to Columbus and learn more about their cities.
After a welcome by Richard McCoy, who leads Landmark Columbus, which brought the institute here this week, AIM Media Group Vice President and Group Publisher Bud Hunt led the mayors through a series of questions about how they work to communicate to their citizens, and how the media plays into that communication strategy.
Bruce Wilkerson, mayor of Bowling Green, Kentucky, said his city issues press releases to the media in an effort to lead the conversation.
“If we are the first to get the information out, we set the narrative,” he said.
Each of the mayors has a different media landscape to navigate, with the cities represented having a variety of print, radio and television coverage, some who focus and are located in the city, but others who are from bigger cities nearby.
It is not unusual for Salisbury, Maryland Mayor Jacob Day to interact every day with multiple journalists representing a variety of news outlets, he said.
Day said his administration does as much media-direct-to-consumer as it does with journalists, using the new tools of social media that are now available.
Live-stream video to Facebook is prepared for city residents to watch either live, or saved on social media, and reporters are invited to come to filming to ask questions during the broadcast, he said.
For the full story and more photos, see Saturday’s Republic.
