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Your connection to industry & member news | July 10, 2025
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Ad sales training featuring Ryan Dohrn set for Sept. 19 in Columbia
You don’t want to miss SCPA’s upcoming ad sales training featuring popular sales strategist Ryan Dohrn! Join us on Friday, Sept. 19, as SCPA hosts Ryan for a full day of practical, innovative and inspirational ad sales advice. Here’s a breakdown of the topics we’ll cover:
- Selling Value When the Advertiser is Focused ONLY on Price
- Grow Your Pipeline: 10 Ideas to Book More Advertiser Meetings
- AI-Powered Sales: Elevate Your Sales Strategy
- Winning the Tug of War with Time, 10 Ideas to Do More With Less
Ryan Dohrn is the Emmy award-winning creator of the 360 Ad Sales Training system and is a globally recognized media revenue consultant to over 500 companies. Unlike other media sales training consultants, Ryan actually sells advertising EVERY day! Since 1994 Ryan has worked in the radio, TV, and publishing space. Ryan’s resume includes time in promotions and sales at The NY Times Company, Disney, Cumulus, Citadel Comm, Vance Publishing, Morris Publishing and PennWell. He has trained and coached over 30,000 ad sales reps to date and speaks over 60 times per year. In total, Ryan has been a part of over $500 million in ad sales to date. Ryan loves teaching ad sales reps his simple and effective way to achieve ad sales success.
Thanks to sponsorship from the SCPA Foundation Smoak Fund, the cost to attend is only $75, which includes a boxed lunch. This session is limited to 30 attendees.
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MyHorryNews welcomes new managing editor, Andrew Brown
Waccamaw Publishers, which publishes weekly newspapers and news to its MyHorryNews.com website, is welcoming Andrew Brown to the team.
Brown joined the newsroom as managing editor in June, and will be covering Horry County Government and North Myrtle Beach-area news.
Brown was born and raised in Greer, South Carolina, and is a graduate of the University of South Carolina, with a degree in political science. He had hopes to work in politics, but his path went a different direction.
“The deeper I got, the more I saw how the real stories — the ones happening right in our neighborhoods and in our communities — were getting ignored,” he said. “Buried under the noise of national headlines and empty soundbites. It really annoyed me. So instead of just sitting there and complaining about it, I decided to jump in and actually try and do something about it.”
After college, his career started at The Lancaster News where he was a general assignment reporter.
From MyHorryNews.com | Read more
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Dunlap Media to launch GreerNews.com; Stewart named regional editor
Dunlap Media Group is expanding again in the Upstate with the launch of GreerNews.com on Aug. 4. GreerNews.com will be a daily, digital-only news source, providing news, sports and information for Greer.
GreerNews.com will be the third news site launched by Dunlap Media Group. GoLaurens.com launched in 2007 in Laurens, SC and GoFountainInn.com launched in 2024 in Fountain Inn, SC. Dunlap Media Group sites currently reach over 145,000 unique visitors each month.
“We could not be more excited to launch GreerNews.com as the local news and information hub for Greer,” said Bailey Dunlap, President of Dunlap Media, LLC.
“Greer is a fast-growing community, and we look forward to providing real-time reporting on everything that happens in that community. GreerNews.com will also be the premier location for local advertisers to reach their potential customers each and every day.”
GreerNews.com will be led by Regional Editor Trey Stewart. Stewart was formerly a sports editor at The Greer Citizen. After the closing of The Greer Citizen, Stewart founded Greer Sports Star, the premier site for sports coverage in the greater Greer area.
Breanna Laws will serve as a reporter for GreerNews.com. Laws is a graduate of Wake Forest University, earning a degree in Communications with a minor in journalism. She worked as an intern with the Winston-Salem Journal and was managing editor of the student newspaper at Wake Forest.
From Dunlap Media Group | Read more
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Editorial: We help keep your leaders accountable
The Index-Journal’s coverage of recent and ongoing scrutiny of two local municipalities has generated a lot of public engagement on our Facebook page.
Post views are in the tens of thousands for our coverage of Calhoun Falls’ recent forensic audit and subsequent fallout, and a story about Ninety Six’s latest town council meeting, during which a resident was kicked out by the police chief, has more than 14,000 views on Facebook.
It seems many in the Lakelands are concerned about the goings-on in these two small towns. And, many are encouraging the Index-Journal to continue its coverage, which we intend to do.
While the Index-Journal’s staff is small, which limits us from attending all of the 20-some-odd regular public meetings that take place every month in our circulation area, we do share those meeting announcements in our newspaper so you, the public, will know when and where those meetings are taking place in the event you want to attend.
We keep tabs on meeting agendas that are sent to us, if they are sent, and take note of anything that seems amiss or of special concern to the community.
Without us keeping a watch over the business that local governments are conducting, who would?
Our staff has always committed a lot of time and resources to attending meetings, conducting interviews, filing FOIA requests, writing and editing stories, and designing pages. That’s what we do.
From Index-Journal | Read more
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Post and Courier reporter lands national award for F-35 story and aviation coverage
The National Press Club awarded Post and Courier projects reporter Tony Bartelme its top aviation journalism honor for his gripping looks at the mysterious crash of an F-35B stealth fighter in South Carolina.
The National Press Club awarded Bartelme its Michael A. Dornheim Award, named after a longtime reporter and editor at Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine. Previous winners in the past five years include journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.
In 2023, a decorated Marine pilot ejected from his F-35B Lightning II over Charleston Air Force Base, but the stealth fighter kept flying and disappeared for nearly a day as search crews scrambled to find it.
The story generated international headlines, along with a host of unanswered questions. Why did the pilot eject? Why did it take so long to find the plane? The story had huge stakes — for pilots and the nation. The F-35 is the U.S. military’s most expensive and ambitious weapons program.
From The Post and Courier | Read more
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|  | Jonathan Vickery, publisher of The People-Sentinel, was recently sworn in as president of the Rotary Club of Barnwell County.
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|  | Congratulations to Andrea Kelley of The (Seneca) Journal who was recently named Environmental Journalist of the Year from the Environmental Education Association of South Carolina.
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Editorial: A meeting by any other name...
What exactly is a meeting? Well, literally, it is a group of two or more people gathering together to discuss something. When it comes to what constitutes a government meeting, the definition is a little different.
Technically, if a quorum (that is, a majority of an elected body) is present, then a meeting is taking place. It actually doesn’t matter if it takes place in the body’s normal meeting space (like a board room or council chamber) and the topic of conversation is irrelevant. If a majority is on hand, it is a meeting. The gathering can be dubbed “a meet and greet” or “a retreat” or “a hootenanny” or anything else. The verbiage and semantics are irrelevant on this point. A meeting by any other name is still a meeting.
If a meeting (a majority of an elected body gathering together) takes place a couple of other things have to take place as well. For starters, the gathering has to be open to the public. That applies, even if most of what will be discussed is done behind closed doors in executive session (a limited number of subjects can be discussed in that format according to the South Carolina Freedom of Information Act). The public has to be welcome and has to be allowed to sit and wait out an executive session, no matter how long that takes because a body might take action of some kind when they go back to open session.
From The News and Reporter | Read more
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Closed-door decision: Struggling SC town will shutter town hall after string of resignations
CALHOUN FALLS — A debt-plagued town that's in a legal battle with its water provider, the subject of a state criminal probe and has just entered its fourth fiscal year without a budget has stumbled into its latest challenge: There will soon be no one left to run Town Hall.
After a series of administrative staff resignations that include Clerk/Treasurer Wendi Lewis, whose last day is July 9, Calhoun Falls will close Town Hall to its 1,700 residents, effective July 10.
While announcing the decision after a closed-door meeting July 3, Mayor Terrico Holland acknowledged the town didn't know how it would collect utility payments from residents.
"We will be coming up with a plan to process water payments," he said.
Those funds are needed to pay the city of Abbeville, its water provider. Abbeville has an active lawsuit against Calhoun Falls, which it alleged is hundreds of thousands of dollars behind on payments and has sought drastic actions, including the authority to cut off water, if it doesn't pay up.
By Matthew Hensley, The Post and Courier Greenville | Read more
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News/Media Alliance applauds industry victories within reconciliation package
Arlington, VA – The News/Media Alliance, the largest trade association representing the news media industry, released the following statement upon President Trump signing his major policy package into law today.
Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, said, “We applaud Congress and President Trump for advancing a bill that will promote the production of high-quality journalism across the country. The legislation’s pro-growth tax policy will give publishers the stability and resources they need to invest in coverage that communities across America rely on. We are particularly pleased that the misguided moratorium on state regulation of artificial intelligence was cut from the final bill, and hope that in its wake, Congress will now take up further legislation to regulate AI on a federal level.”
The bill reflects a number of key priorities for the Alliance, including:
- Rejecting a moratorium on state legislation to regulate Artificial Intelligence
- Preserving the deductibility of advertising expenses
- Permanently restoring full capitalization of research or experimental expenditure
- Permanently restoring full bonus depreciation
- Reversing the limit on net interest expense to include depreciation and amortization
- Permanent extension of the reduced 2017 corporate tax rate
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FTC amended negative option rule struck down
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) “Click-to-Cancel” rule on July 8 noting the FTC failed to follow required procedures under the FTC Act during the rule-making process. The entirety of the rule was scheduled to go into effect on July 14. The government could petition for en banc review (a bigger panel of circuit judges reviewing this decision), before then appealing to the Supreme Court; however, en banc petitions are rare, so most likely the next step would be to ask the Supreme Court to hear the case. The decision may also force the FTC to restart its rule-making process. The Alliance will continue to keep you apprised.
By Holly Lubart, News/Media Alliance | Read more
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By John Foust, Advertising Trainer
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| Reliability means paying attention
I remember a billboard on an interstate in North Carolina which caught my eye. It was large 14’ x 48’ painted sign which promoted a law firm. The headline read, “We help people hit by drunk drivers.” Below the headline was a photo of a wrecked car and the name of a local attorney. Advertising folks like us would like the fact that the message was easy to read, because it was in a legible font on a white background.
But the billboard had a problem. The word “by” was covered by an overgrown tree limb on the left side. Instead of reading “We help people hit by drunk drivers,” it read, “We help people hit drunk drivers.” The missing word changed the message into something entirely different.”
Quite a blooper, isn’t it? The problem wasn’t with the sign itself. Someone should have been responsible for sending someone to check on overhanging limbs. Ideally, the limb should have been cut before the advertiser noticed.
Thinking of that sign reminds me of the cover of an upscale clothing catalogue my wife showed to me recently. Suellen pointed out that the model in the photograph was wearing a summer-style dress, but it had obviously been photoshopped onto a scene of a European tourist attraction with people wearing winter coats in the background. Read more
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