This summer I was accepted as a recipient for the Stuart R. Givens Memorial Fellowship Grant, which funded an opportunity to intern in an art gallery in New York City this past summer.
While there, I interviewed several people working in New York in varying creative professions. Dan Corcoran has recently been an Executive Vice President for eHealthcare Solutions, manager of The 356 Group and acted as a go-between for the business and creative ends of publishing. During the summer he was able to meet with me to talk about how he got into publishing and his insight after many years in the industry.
Question: Can you tell me a bit about yourself, and what you do?
Answer: I have always been a creative individual, so the creative aspects of media have always appealed to me. Although I’m not the source of the creativity, where I’ve been successful is in leveraging the elements of creativity from a business standpoint. So from the developing of visual and copy messaging, to communicating a proposition to educate and inform readers and online users, I have taken those aspects of the creative process and leveraged them for a business purpose service of driving and increasing revenues.
Q. What was your college experience like?
A. I did not graduate from college; I finished three years in college. I started out in John Carroll University, and then went on to Cleveland State University. But in the summer of my junior year of college I was recruited to join a publishing company, accepted the full time profession, and sub-sequentially did not return to college.
Q. What are the various jobs in publishing?
A. There are editors for content development; there are graphic artists for visual communication, whether it was the design element of the journals or websites, or just advertisements; there are salespeople so they could sell the advertising in the journals; there are finance, so they could run the books side of things; and executive management.
Q. Do you see magazines being online publications rather than in-hand publications?
A. Only if they have miscommunicated the role that they play in the market. Print journals are read, online journals are sourced; the difference being that for people who read print they like the touch and feel it, they like the ability to drive down the highway as a passenger in the car and sit and read it, through it, etc. Online journals are more looked upon as a database for sourcing information on potential suppliers for needs that people would have as consumers or business professionals.
Visit the full interview at tawilkes.wordpress.com.
