New Year, New Focus

The advent of a new year is, perhaps, the most popular point in the calendar for making, or at least vowing to make, changes in both your professional and personal life.

What will you try to do differently in the coming 365 days? Exercise more and eat healthier? Read more books and spend less time staring mindlessly at your smartphone screen while your life slips away? Finally get that Instagram/Vine/Snapchat account up and running for the store? Figure out what Vine and Snapchat are exactly?

We’re no different. The team at National Jeweler, with the help of our magnanimous new owners at Jewelers of America, spent the last few months of 2015 outlining a plan for 2016.

Here’s what we decided we will do in the new year.

1. Streamline our newsletters to make them better. For years, National Jeweler had been distributing seven newsletters a week—the Daily five days a week in the morning, the Diamonds newsletter on Wednesday afternoon and the Majors newsletter on Thursdays.

We also had a monthly newsletter with a theme that had evolved over the years but, most recently, was Metals & Gems Monthly.

This year, we are cutting back to five newsletters a week—just the Daily—plus our quarterly digital magazine. The next issue of the digital magazine is set for publication on Wednesday, Feb. 24.

The idea of generating less “content” in an age where there is relentless pressure to produce seems counterintuitive, but I firmly believe that our resources here will be better spent generating less while making what we do produce more in-depth and helpful to readers.

2. Focus on original content that helps jewelers improve their businesses. National Jeweler has been in the business of helping jewelers run their businesses since 1906 and we are renewing that focus in 2016.

Many of you may recall our popular Product Panel. We are resurrecting this survey of jewelers regarding product sales in a specific categories (e.g., bridal, silver, watches), and we are retaining another much-loved National Jeweler feature, About Retail. About Retail highlights a retailer involved in an interesting promotion or venture, such as J.R. Dunn Jewelers’ partnership with the Humane Society that we wrote about back in October.

We also are launching One to Watch, which highlights an up-and-coming jewelry designer, and How To, an instructional article for jewelers. The first “How To” will run in February and the