Interview with Justin Lyons Justin Lyons is the director of marketing and public relations at The Mariner’s Museum in Newport News. If he’s not running a 10K around the Noland Trail or hiding behind his stack of newspaper subscriptions, Lyons is keeping himself busy with the never-ending duties that go along with his position at the museum. While he may have graduated from college not even a decade ago, Lyons has already experienced what some never get a chance to in their entire careers. From creating his own newspaper to being part of a major naval discovery, Lyons has never failed to continue stepping up the ladder of success. His achievements are a result of motivation and drive as well as a never-ending love for journalism. As a media professional working in the real world, Lyons is more than happy to offer up advice and share his experiences as an example of one living success story after college. Lyons graduated from Western Carolina University in 1997 with a Bachelor’s degree in Communication, with a concentration in journalism and professional writing. After college, he began working for the Lake Norman Times where after a short period he became editor. During his time there, he also created a monthly newspaper, the Huntersville Times. In October of 1999, Lyons switched gears and moved to The Mariner’s Museum as the media relations coordinator. A few years later, as well as a few promotions, he is now the director of marketing and public relations. Lyons is currently burying himself in his involvement with the USS Monitor Expedition discoveries and looking forward to the upcoming events that will go along with this monumental affair in naval marine history. Planet Blacksburg: Did you go into college knowing that you wanted to be a writer? Justin Lyons: Yeah, I mean it’s not that I knew what I would major in because I wasn’t quite sure. I kind of flirted around with the idea of going into philosophy for a while, but really I’m the type of person where sitting down and taking multiple-choice/question tests just wasn’t me. I’ve always been good at writing and been able to communicate well through writing. Actually a friend of mine who was two years ahead of me…was in journalism at Western Carolina. I’d pick his brain and tag along for some of the stuff he was doing and just really got the flavor for it. So, I made the decision to jump into it, and I don’t regret it. It was really good and I got to do a lot of writing for the Catamount paper there. I got to do a lot of different stories. I mainly covered sports, but when I did my internships, I did two internships at the same time in Greensboro, N.C., and that’s when I knew that journalism was for me. Planet Blacksburg: What is something or are some of the things that you did in college that helped you prepare to be a successful media professional, such as internships or work experiences, or what would you say was the most impacting? Justin Lyons: It was definitely the internship I did. It was a small weekly business newspaper in Greensboro that I did the internship for, and their sister publication was basically a music magazine, music what’s happening kind of like Portfolio here but on a much smaller scale. I actually went in thinking I wanted to be on the editorial side of things in terms of just editing what people write and I did that, I kind of worked side-by-side with one of the copy editors, and I hated it. I couldn’t stand it. Planet Blacksburg: So you didn’t like reading other people’s work? Justin Lyons: I liked reading it, but it was just so technical. It was the commas and all of that stuff, and I mean I was falling asleep, and I was like, “I’ve got to get out, I have to talk to people.” So I went to the editors I was reporting to, and I was like, “Look, I’m learning a lot, but I really want to write. Can I get out? Can you give me an assignment?” They had a features page in the publication, and we talked, and he knew that I loved music so he sent me to do a profile article on the owner of Ziggy, which is a place that’s a lot like the NorVa in Norfolk. It’s an old house and this guy has lived a great story. The guy who owned it bought this house and turned it into this real small pub type place where you can hear good music, and now it’s a place where all the big bands always go to, but it’s still real small. He’s also a quadriplegic. He was in this bad wreck, and so he has this really great story. I went on to interview him and spent a couple hours with him and did the story. My editors loved it and sent me out on two more profiles to do. So that really just lit a huge fire under me to go into journalism. Planet Blacksburg: Looking back now almost 10 years ago, is there anything you wish you would have done differently, or are there any activities you wish you would have gotten more involved in to help prepare you? Justin Lyons: I wish I had spent more time exploring the public relations end of Communication. I really didn’t. I was so focused on journalism that I took only the required courses, like ethics and all that kind of stuff for communication. As for the PR side, I really wish I had gone into that. Planet Blacksburg: After graduation you went to work for the Lake Norman Times for about three years. How did you go about job searching after graduation to find your job there? Justin Lyons: Actually, I guess it was two months before I graduated, I pretty much was putting out 10-20 packages a week. Just getting the word out there, getting my name out there, and I had the profiles that I had done so I had actually been published which was [a] leg up on some people. I literally just blanketed all of North Carolina with me and then I got Lake Norman Times, which was kind of weird because there’s a family friend who actually works for the Sky Magazine in Delta’s Publication in Greensboro. He was a friend of the editor at Lake Norman Times and they happened to have an opening and so he got my foot in the door there. I came on there as a staff writer in ‘97 and I worked there I guess it was three years. Planet Blacksburg: Can you describe one of your first or most memorable experiences as a real journalist while working at the Lake Norman Times? Justin Lyons: It was a series I guess being an actual journalist. My internship gave me a really good conception that I was going to be out doing these killer stories and life would be great, but then when the reality of working for a newspaper, specifically a weekly, I mean you have to cover everything. You have to go to the town meetings. You have to go write about Jim Bob’s new service station that’s opening that people would want to know about, and any development that’s coming out of the ground. You quickly realize that you have to be an expert about everything. You quickly realize the spin factor when people kind of spin stories on you and the fact that you have to be down and dirty sometimes to get the real story and things like that. I’d say the biggest eye opener would be the first town meeting I had to go to cover. It was a three hour meeting and you have to go through the whole agenda, and you have one community that’s coming, and they’re angry about the fact that they have to paint their mail box white, and they want their mailbox red, and you have to listen to all this stuff and make a story out of it even though it may not really be. That’s when you start to go, “Oh my God!” but the weekly newspaper experience that I had, I wouldn’t change a bit of it. It was huge and I’ve said this many times to a few other people as well that that experience in those three years working for the weekly paper was harder than four years in college in terms of what I learned and experienced, and it was just night and day, and it was real world for my career. Planet Blacksburg: And what kind of editor were you specifically? Justin Lyons: Actually, in the weekly newspaper it was real small staff of about six. So we had one full-time writer, two part-time stringers and a couple of your columnist type people. So, I was a staff writer, and what happened was the editor of that time needed to concentrate more on the business side of the newspaper and the ads and everything. He really liked where I was going and my ideas with the newspaper, so he promoted me to editor. Basically I oversaw the editorial content of the newspaper and the news and also the team of writers that produced it. In the weekly newspaper business, because it is small, I was writing 12-15 articles a week, picking all the pictures, laying the paper out, editing the newspaper and sometimes I would even sell ads if I had to. It was 65-70 hours a week. Planet Blacksburg: So you were just all over the place? That’s pretty impressive for your first job right out of college. Justin Lyons: Well yeah, and the cool thing is that when I came out of college I was eager to just get in there and bury myself in my career and see where it would take me. So, it’s a weekly business and everyone will tell you it’s a burn out business, and you really have to dedicate your life to it. Then while I was there, Huntersville is a suburb of Charlotte and it was one of the municipalities in the Lake Norman area. Planet Blacksburg: Right, and you created a monthly newspaper there, the Huntersville Times? Justin Lyons: Yeah, it was kind of fun because at that time, since it was the closest suburb to Charlotte. It was the fastest growing municipality in the entire state so I kind of pitched [it] to my boss and the publisher of the Lake Norman Times and said, “Look we need to get a foothold in this community because it’s booming. Why not start a paper there that’s monthly that hopefully will go to weekly that the new community and the people coming in will buy into well and grow with?” So he bought into it and we created the Huntersville Times, which became a monthly paper there. That was fun, but again that was something that I had to do on top of what I was [already] doing so I increased my workload significantly, but it was good, and it was a good experience. Planet Blacksburg: So that’s pretty much where you got the idea for it? With it being so close and needing some type of media outlet? Justin Lyons: Yeah, the one thing in the weekly newspapers where they get their bread and butter from are what they call tabs or tabloids where they slide in the newspaper and shaped like half the paper. We did a tabloid type format for this where we were able to duplicate some of the content that was already going into the Lake Norman Times and expand it more to focus on just Huntersville. That was good too because it allowed us to double sell so when we’d go out to businesses we would say, “Look, for this rate you could get the Lake Norman Times, but for this rate which was just a little bit more you could get two publications.” So that really allowed us to do that. Planet Blacksburg: Are you still involved with the Huntersville Times at all now? Do you know if it ever moved on to become a monthly newspaper? Justin Lyons: No. I have no idea what happened to it after I left. I needed to move on in my career. After I had been there for so long, frankly I was just burnt out. So when I left I just left. I had to detach. Planet Blacksburg: When you began working for the Mariner’s Museum in October of 1999, you became the media relations coordinator or the public relations director? Justin Lyons: Well, I started as the media relations coordinator and then I’ve been through a million promotions, but I was the media relations coordinator, then I became media relations manager, and then I became PR manager, and then PR director and then this year I got promoted to director of marketing and public relations. Planet Blacksburg: What would you say is the man difference between working at the newspaper compared to working here? Justin Lyons: It’s still kind of funny. I remember thinking that going to work for a museum was so attractive to me because I was thinking I was killing myself, and museums, I mean they sit still with exhibits, and it will be great. You know? I’ll work a lot less and it was more appealing, but I was totally wrong about that. It’s very fast-paced, and there’s a lot constantly going on here at the museum. It’s changed a lot since I’ve been here. I would say that the biggest difference would be that in the newspaper world, it’s all about getting the story, understanding it, getting it, making sure you’re quoting people right, and then telling it in a compelling way. So, when you come to the public relations side of things, it’s all about carefully messaging everything. It’s about packaging what you want to do, and it’s about selling. It’s all about getting your message points right, knowing who exactly your audience is and what the best method for communicating to them is. [It’s also] making sure that you’re speaking directly to your audience and if you have multiple audiences, making sure that each message jives with who you‘re after. It’s a much more concentrated effort on speaking to people and getting the word out. Planet Blacksburg: It was just things like that that you were much more interested in doing as opposed to dealing with all the technicalities that go along with newspaper editing? Justin Lyons: Yeah, I love public relations, and I feel like it’s what I do better than marketing. I do still have that love for journalism. I still subscribe to six newspapers, and I love reading newspapers. I love seeing how they’re transforming into online so I mean, the love for journalism is still there. I heard time and time again from reporters you know that there is a lot of PR people who were taught journalism and how to deal with journalists…but never experienced it. It’s just a big difference between having been in the journalism field and now PR and how that relates when you talk to reporters and understanding what they’re doing versus people who have no idea what it’s like to be behind a computer as a journalists and out in the field. Planet Blacksburg: Well, that’s good that you have that two-sided vision of things. Here at the museum I found a list of your responsibilities… Justin Lyons: (laughs) Where did you get all this stuff? You’re starting to scare me. Planet Blacksburg: Oh, well you’d be amazed at what you can find on the Internet. Justin Lyons: Yeah, I’ve googled myself a few times, but I didn’t know all that was there. Planet Blacksburg: Well, yeah, I found that your responsibilities include publicizing news exhibits and special events, working with national/local media and also writing articles and press releases on stories pertaining to the Mariner’s Museum. What would you say is your main or most important task here at the Mariner’s Museum now in your current position? Justin Lyons: Well, there’s one person above me who’s the vice-president of my community development who’s my boss. So I report to her, and she’s ultimately in charge of the marketing end of the museum and then also the development end which does fundraising and membership, so she kind of crosses both lines there. My responsibilities [is] I head up the marketing and public relations end of the museum, which is a staff of four including myself. There’s a marketing manager who reports to me, a group tour manager, and then we have a marketing coordinator. So, I oversee all the advertising, all the messaging in the advertising, manage the use of our logo, the look of our museum and I oversee our website, which gets over a million visitors a year. It’s basically quality control. [I do] the public relations end of things with creating the message, getting the message out, write all the press releases, photo shoots for exhibits that we do and stuff. I basically manage most of the major events that we do here in terms of the exhibits and opening events or the USS Monitor Center that we’ve got going on here and doing the whole ribbon cutting and all that shebang. When our CEO gives speeches and stuff, I’ve done everything from all out written the speech to making sure he’s hitting the right messages. Planet Blacksburg: I actually found one of the articles where you wrote about for the Monitor Expedition from 2002. So were you actually involved with the event or did you just cover it for a story? Justin Lyons: It was a three-way partnership. It’s a little confusing, but I was the lead public relations person for the museum. Planet Blacksburg: Along with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the U.S. Navy public relations Officers? Is that the three-way partnership? Justin Lyons: Yeah, essentially the Monitor is a huge piece of what’s going on here. We constructed a new wing at the museum called the USS Monitor Center, and it’s a $30 million dollar expansion project. We’re the repositories for artifacts that come up off the wreck, and the wreck is owned by NOAA and is off the coast of Cape Hatteras. When they recovered items they needed somewhere to take them, and so that’s where the Mariner’s Museum comes in. Those artifacts come here, and we conserve them and exhibit them to the public. The third partner with the Navy got involved because NOAA needed assistance in recovering artifacts, and so the Navy said, “Well we’ll help you as a training method and use it to help train our divers.” They go 240 feet down. It’s treacherous conditions down there with currents, and so it was a great training. So, for five years I recovered artifacts every summer. I, of course, didn’t have to do that, but it was a hell of an opportunity. All three organizations had media relations contacts. The three of us would get together and come up with protocol, media calls, who deals with what, make sure everyone talks to the media so we’re all aware of the message points for each institution and just on and on and on. Planet Blacksburg: What was it like being involved in such a huge discovery, not only for the institution but also in naval marine history itself? Justin Lyons: That was by far a major, major, probably the highlight of my career. I mean when the turret came out of the water that was, even for this institution, for the Navy and for NOAA, that was a pentacle moment in everyone’s careers. I mean we had what I called, “total media saturation.” We were in almost every newspaper across the country. We were in newspapers internationally. We were on all the major news networks. The Today Show did an interview the next day. NBC Nightly News covered it. It was just on everything. It was so saturated that even the comedians on the late night shows were doing jokes about the turret and stuff. So I mean it was absolute and total, and it was very well coordinated and very well done from the three partners that were involved with it, It was really just an amazing experience. Planet Blacksburg: Do you have any specific memories about the event that come to mind? Justin Lyons: Yeah, I mean it was kind of cool because I got to be a part of a lot of pieces for that. We’re down in Cape Hatteras, which might as well be the end of the world as far as communication, and we’re out there to communicate to the world about what’s going on, yet there’s hardly any cell phone towers. We’re out in the middle of nowhere pretty much. We knew the turret was going to come up. They had been working on it all summer, and we were ready for it to come up, but the last little thing that the Navy had to do before they did the lift, they couldn’t do, because the current was so bad. So we’re stuck down there in Cape Hatteras with tons of media. TV, associated press, I mean you name it, they were there, and they were ready to get on a boat and go 16 miles out to watch this turret come up, but we were just sitting down there. Anyway, we did great coverage and everything, but I guess a day later on the way back they discovered a body in the turret. They discovered a skeleton, one of the soldiers, so it just continued to go and tons more media coverage after media coverage. It came here and it was excavated and that’s when they found the second body, and it was just one thing after another. It still continues today. They’re still finding things in the turret and excavating it. It’s really fun to have that project here. Planet Blacksburg: Are there any other major events that you can recall being apart of while working at the Mariner’s Museum besides that? Justin Lyons: Well, yeah that was a huge highlight. I mean I’ve opened over 24 or 25 exhibits doing media relations for that and PR and marketing for it. One of the highlights, in terms of exhibition openings, is we did an exhibit called Captive Passage about the transatlantic slave trade. It was about slavery and how it started and how slaves were transported and every aspect, but then we brought it up to today as how African Americans have made a huge impact in our country. That was a really great exhibit to work on because number one, we had to totally just throw the book out in terms of who our audience is because we were speaking to a brand new audience. We brought in a consultant who worked specifically on marketing to African American cultures. So I got to work hand-in-hand with her and learn a lot and do some pretty cool stuff. The other thing is we created a committee with people in our community that represented the African American community at large. We brought them in and created this committee so we could bounce ideas off of them and advocate what type of programming they thought we should do or should be done. We did a lecture series on some pretty intense topics at times; a film series and then we did a lot of different neat things. It was a lot of fun to work on the exhibition side. I’ve brought a few thoughts of mine to the table. We sit on 550 acres of property. The Museum is on the largest privately owned park in the country. We have the Noland Trail, which is a five-mile trail. So I started a 10K here, I guess six years ago. I’ve done a few things just because I love the park and I love running so just trying to bring attention to the park. Planet Blacksburg: Do you participate in the 10K? Justin Lyons: Yeah. It’s cool though. I mean people run the trail all the time so it just kind of made sense to do a race here. Actually, next week we’re launching a program called Friends of the Park, and it’s a park membership. It costs us $150,000 a year just to maintain that park so we figured if people love it so much, then we’d offer them a cheap way to support it. We created these little stickers that they can put on their cars that say, “I run the Noland Trail” so they can put those on their car and give us 20 bucks. Planet Blacksburg: Do you have any other career goals for the future? Justin Lyons: (laughs) I’ll be here forever. You know I don’t know the answer to that. I think that obviously everybody wants to go onward and upward in their career. My focus right now is March 9, and that’s the premiere of the Monitor Center. The opening of the Monitor Center is going to be major, major for my career, for the museum’s career and everybody involved with it because it’s just such a huge project. Fortunately, when I got hired in ‘99, the very first PR bid that I did was getting media to cover the museum, going to the city and asking them for $500,000 dollars to research and plan whether or not we should build something called the USS Monitor Center. I’ve been involved with this project from the very get-go and now, to see it constructed and be a part of its opening is going to be really cool. Planet Blacksburg: So you’re still pretty involved with that and not even thinking about anything else that you would want to do later? Justin Lyons: (laughs) I’ll think about it come the end of March. I mean it’s something in the back of my mind. Everybody always keeps their careers in mind and eyes open. I mean you have to. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet and become good friends and colleagues with a lot of PR professionals throughout the country. People at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I mean you name it. So I think there’s always going to be a lot of good opportunity out there. Planet Blacksburg: Well, as a final question on a personal note: Do you have any advice for college students majoring in Communication on how to become a successful media professional in the future? Such as things they can do now or something they should get an eye-opener about before going out in the real world? Or perhaps something you wish someone would have told you about Communication while you were still in college? Justin Lyons: I don’t know if there’s anything somebody could have told me because experience is experience, but I was very fortunate with the internship that I got, very fortunate for that, and it was huge. I mean I was still very close with my college career, and I loved my summers, and I loved getting far away from school and playing hard. That would be the biggest thing I would say is once you know what your career is to just intern as hard and as much as you can wherever you think you can get in. Experience is the world. The more experience you get, it will be easier to get a job when you get out because it shows your drive and your commitment to your career. It’s more than saying, “I did an internship because I had to and here’s where I did it.” Another thing I will say about internships is if you’re not getting what you want out of an internship, then move on. It’s worthless to go somewhere and shuffle papers, and there are those internships out there where you get treated like that. |