by Tyler M. Carey, Chief Revenue Officer
As we reach the anniversary of the beginning of the Pandemic “Lockdown” back in March 2020, two Washington Post articles caught my attention. One about the hindsight that can now be applied to the tragic impact of the COVID-19 virus on the world, which was far greater than any of us could have anticipated, and another about how conferences and events are trying to adapt to restart in-person industry meetings this year as hope around vaccines and recovery begins to take hold. It was exactly a year ago that Westchester temporarily closed its Danbury location, hoping to have staff return expediently once it was safe. A year on, nearly all of us are continuing to work from home, with only select staff going into the office as needed to tend to billing and postal needs. As vaccine distribution improves, we look forward to more formally reopening our operations in Danbury and Dayton in the States, Stratford upon Avon in the UK, and Noida and Chennai in India.
The pandemic quickly impacted all of us and the ways we engaged with our clients to support them evolved rapidly. We realized that our history and expertise working distributed, globally, could help many of our clients who were newer to navigating the distributed or “work-from-home” model. Our marketing team quickly brought together clients and industry figures for a webinar to talk through their approaches to the challenges that hit us all immediately. On our website, we set up a Work from Home resources page, curating articles and other useful information to help people adapt to this new way of working.
Many of our clients were experiencing similar challenges within their operations, prompting us to create video content to address those issues, including:
- A video with one of our production editors about how to use Adobe markup on a PDF,
- An additional video highlighting key Client Portal features for project management while working from home, and,
- The “Publishing Now” webinar produced in conjunction with Publishers Weekly , which focused on where the industry was by July of last year.
You can find all of these and more video content on the Westchester YouTube channel.
We’re all continuing to consider what’s next for the publishing industry. On April 6th, Westchester will again partner with Publishers Weekly for the industry thought leader webinar, “Publishing Now ’21: Looking Forward”, featuring insights from Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks, Cathy Felgar from Princeton University Press, Lorraine Shanley of MPI, and Tom Chalmers of Legend Times. I invite you and your colleagues to join us for this free webinar, and engage with these publishing experts on questions about all aspects of the industry and supply chain that are affecting you.
Westchester remains committed to helping the Publishing Industry with its changing editorial and production needs, and continues to pivot and address individual workflow needs for our clients, to help each client in their areas of greatest need. Stay connected with us through our webinars, video content, and our recently launched Westchester Words podcast, featuring short, impactful conversations on topics specific to the publishing industry. Contact Us to discuss your challenges, and how Westchester can help you.
Words are the primary means by which our clients communicate with their customers, so we are always looking at various media that we can use to connect with them, as well as our colleagues throughout the publishing industry. During the pandemic, the absence of in-person events combined with an urgent need for timely, relevant content grew, motivating us to host more webinars of our own and to partner with others in the industry to speak with their audiences about topics that were of interest to them.
Tyler M. Carey, Westchester’s Chief Revenue Officer, has worked with our sales and marketing teams that have led our growth since becoming an employee-owned company in 2014.
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