T
Bill Paul pre-STN: He interviews
Commander David Scott of Apollo 15 when Paul was a
television reporter for KSL News in Utah.
wenty-five years ago, I launched School Transportation News. But the central idea of STN, as we quaintly called it, dates back 20
years more. In the mid-1970s I served as the campaign manager for a U.S. Senate candidate in Utah. Running against a firmly entrenched, 18-year veteran senator, we adopted a news strategy. We issued lots of news reports on a daily basis as we wanted to show our candidate was deeply involved in state issues. At one point we published a tabloid newspaper.
It ran eight pages and was chock full of news articles about our candidate, Jack Carlson, a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Now, fast forward to mid-1991. When you start a new publica- tion it is important to distinguish oneself from the competition. At the time I worked for the competition, School Bus Fleet magazine. It was
then, and remains to this day, a vener- able, well established, highly regarded magazine. How to compete against this giant?
Ten I remembered the tabloid of the Carlson campaign and the answer presented itself. News. Lots of news. As much as I loved School Bus
Fleet, at the time we only published six times a year, or once every two months. Tat meant news develop-
ments from the field lagged. In other words articles might as well be ancient news by the time we pub- lished them. So that was the opening. Publish monthly and focusing on shorter news articles and not longer fea- ture articles. After all there are about 13,000 active school districts in the country, and we started with a circulation of about 18,000 readers. About two thirds of the districts operated their own bus fleets and one third were contracted operations. While these numbers haven’t changed much in the
intervening 25 years—though our circulation has grown to more than 28,000 readers each month—I quickly found that I could call any transportation director anywhere in the country on any day of the week, and voila, a news story emerged. Tey were engaged in something—operations, training, policy development, meetings with parents, lobbying their
November 1993: Bill Paul attends the NAS- DPTS annual meeting in Pittsburgh and agrees to organize the Western States Show with the state directors.
July 1994: School Trans- portation News presents its first Western States Conference and Trade Show at the Tropicana Hotel & Resort in Las Vegas.
That same year, Bill Paul worked with Don Carna- han and Ron Kinney to form the NASDPTS Sup- plier Council, patterned after the American Public Transportation Association supplier governing board was a member of.
www.stnonline.com 29
July 28-31, 1996: The Western States Show moves to the Reno Hil- ton, now known as the Grand Sierra Resort.
1998: The first
STNOnline.com website goes live. STN launches new publication, “School Bus Technician.”
May 28-31, 1998: STN produces the inaugural—and only— Mid-America Confer- ence & Trade Show at the O’Hare Hyatt Hotel and Rosemont Conven- tion Center in Chicago.
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