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CallZone Media.

Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron. Let's all fine.

Now look, I'm just a simple country podcaster, but at my heart, I'm a writer.

I've been writing since I was 16.

I wrote about video games at a now defunct magazine called CVG, and then another called PC Zone.

And there's been one theme,

one thing that has hung around my entire media career. And that thing is that the people

running the media do not read or write. And I must sound a little dramatic, but really,

I'm not kidding. The majority of the media executives I've worked for, and the ones I've met

just did not understand or create

any media of any kind. There were publishers who ran games publications who didn't play games

and didn't write and hadn't written, didn't contribute anything to the magazines, and they routinely

made decisions that just made the publications worse.

There are executive editors at newspapers I've read and worked for that hadn't written a word in decades,

and they made calls about the tone and direction of writers that they didn't even bother to read.

And they were always looking for ways to increase readership without actually focusing on what made readers read things.

When I went into PR in 2008, which by the way, I did to move to America, I didn't really understand the job. Pretty good at it now, though.

I was still able to keep a lot of my media connections, both at home and the ones I'd met

on various press trips to America.

...