Jackson retires from SBJ

Jennifer Jackson – just the second owner of Springfield Business Journal since her mother, Dianne Elizabeth Osis, founded the news organization in 1980 – is retiring from the media industry. Jackson sold SBJ’s assets for undisclosed terms to SBJ Publisher Marty Goodnight, who becomes owner effective Jan. 2.

“Who is Jennifer Jackson?” Jackson mused aloud when a reporter posed the question, just days before the sale was finalized. “Well, from a professional perspective, I see myself as very entrepreneurial. I am an entrepreneur.”

As she exits the news organization, Jackson said she’s far from retiring from business: Look for her to continue a longstanding interest in real estate as a commercial Realtor alongside Gerald Zamora at Zamora Real Estate Powered by The Firm Commercial, she said.

Jackson said, “I have taken a job with someone else’s company for the first time in a very long time. For the first time in 20 years, I am working with a group, but still as an independent contractor.”

Asked about Jackson’s prospects at Zamora Real Estate in a Dec. 29 interview, Zamora said, “You’ll see great impacts.” He noted that receiving a 2021 Trusted Advisers commercial Realtor honor from SBJ “was literally one of the largest catalysts to my success.”

In terms of the role Jackson is undertaking with The Firm, Zamora said Jackson is “challenging herself to become a market and industry expert,” working plenty of 12-hour days. He added, “She’s a person of integrity and trust. She’s a person that has no quit.”

Passion and ambition
In 2020, Jackson told an SBJ reporter, “My greatest hope is that I can honor my mother’s passion for the Business Journal and marry that with a financial outlook that is ambitious.”

Asked last week whether and how Jackson achieved this goal, Osis answered in the affirmative: “Well, I knew she would.”

Osis added, “Her communication skills, both in writing and in speaking, were a huge asset in building SBJ in the community, building relationships. I think she’s accomplished that, because now SBJ is going on to its next level, its new future, which will build on that.”

Additionally, Osis recalled, “What sticks in my mind right away is the way – the heroic way – that she brough the Business Journal through the pandemic. It was unheard-of, for us, our staff, to work at home. She sent everybody home, and everybody was networked in.”

This wasn’t the form of business leadership that folks necessarily expected from Jackson, friends and family say. Osis said that initially, neither of her two children were in a hurry to join SBJ professionally: “I knew they had long years of education and other careers ahead of them.”

But after years with another organization, Osis said that Jackson “started working with me again, little by little, and she was sure that she wanted to do it. She became sure, she saw the position that the Business Journal has in the community. … She wanted to be a part of that, and she certainly did.”

It was around this time – 2007 – that Jackson earned her doctoral degree in higher education leadership from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Additionally, Osis said Jackson showed leadership traits early in life: “She had the confidence to let her opinion be heard, her voice be heard. At anything she was involved in, she had that essential confidence that put her ahead, put her at the head of the table.”

Many interests
Jackson said, “I thought about how fortunate I am to have been able to experience, to pursue to many different interests in my career. … well, even in college, I started out very entrepreneurially.”

As a young student, Jackson said she bought into a bakery business on Walnut Street located near the former site of the Casper’s chili restaurant.

“I did that for about two years before I decided it wasn’t my calling and went back to college,” Jackson said, “but I took what I learned there and continued to put myself through college by catering and baking wedding cakes on the weekends.”

Jackson’s bakery business came after working through junior high and high school for Osis at SBJ’s former location on Sunshine Street, in space that now serves as a tattoo studio for the Kaleidoscope retail boutique.

Following college at Missouri State University, where Jackson earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in communications in 1992 and 1995, respectively, she kindled an interest in the construction industry. She said she worked for residential contractors, managing an accounting software application written by her late husband, Joel Jackson.

“I discovered I loved it, and discovered my late husband had a natural talent as well for designing and construction,” she said.

This work eventually led Jackson to Ozarks Technical Community College, where in the late 1990s she directed a unit known as Project CREW: Construction Readiness Education for Women.

“Project CREW is all about addressing the barriers that many women face as they begin to fill jobs that have traditionally been held by men,” Jackson wrote in a Nov. 7, 1998 SBJ column. “These barriers, however, have slowly begun to dissipate as more and more women pave the road for other women to follow.”

Mar’Ellen Felin, owner and chief strategist of Felin Communications and a former SBJ Publishing vice president overseeing creative services, sales and other activities, remembers this era well. At that time, Felin served Ozarks Tech as public information officer.

“We were building the car as we were driving it,” Felin recalled of their shared work in community construction education.

In the late 2000s, Felin joined SBJ. Shortly afterward, the Great Recession struck, and in its aftermath, the 2011 Joplin tornado wreaked havoc. “We had Joplin Tri-State Business Journal at the time, and the tornado came through,” Felin said. “So, we were dealing with the recession and the tornado and trying to keep everybody employed and keep the business healthy and all of that.”

Joplin’s business community recovered, Felin said, despite tremendous damage from the tornado. Jackson, in 2013, sold the Joplin news organization to Larry and Mikell Warren, owners of Joplin-based Atlas Risk Management LLC, according to past coverage. Larry Warren confirmed Dec. 31 in an email that he and Mikell owned and operated Joplin Tri-State Business Journal until 2017 when they closed it due to “sagging revenue.”

“We enjoyed our time owning and being a part of it,” Warren said.

Felin credits Jackson’s instincts for “business survival” for stewarding the company through the economic downturn and the natural disaster. It’s a personality trait Felin believes Jackson shares with Osis, despite their distinctiveness as individuals.

“Jennifer’s daughters have said it: ‘Strong women raise strong women,’” Felin recalled. “And I just, I don’t think from what I saw in their relationship, I don’t think Jennifer saw the world any other way.”

Along with successfully facing the challenges of the economy and forces of nature, Felin said Jackson turned her attention toward news media’s digital predicament, which was emerging at that time. As the 2000s turned toward the 2010s, Felin said it became clear that some readers perceived that reading free content online was a sufficient dose of business news.

“While the internet had been around for a while, at that point we were still developing what the website was and what digital offerings were,” Felin said. “It’s hard to imagine now, how – again – we were building the car as we were driving it.”

Tenacity was another characteristic Jackson exhibited, Felin said. Viewed from within the Springfield community, SBJ had become a household name, providing a steady diet of business reporting. Viewed from the nationwide professional business journalism community, the take was quite a bit different, Felin recalled: “They were just baffled how a community our size could support a business publication.”

Yet SBJ continued to prosper, Felin said. And it took serious work to make it happen.

“I don’t know if (Jennifer) would describe herself as an optimist or not,” Felin said. “I think she probably would. But what I saw wasn’t exactly an optimism, but a refusal to fail.”

Felin added, “It wasn’t like an empty optimism, like everything’s going to be fine, everything’s going to be fine. Now you had to dig deep. And I mean, she got that from her mother.”

Jackson’s recollection dovetails with Felin’s. Not only did SBJ make its way through the downturn and the tornado, but the news organization also embraced 21st-century digital strategy. In the last couple of years of the 2000s, the SBJ team relaunched SBJ.net under “Web 2.0” standards and introduced a subscriber paywall in the fall of 2010, according to past SBJ reporting.

“I am probably the most proud of our decision to protect the value of our coverage,” Jackson said last week as she reflected on her time at SBJ. “I think it was a scary thing when we locked down our website, OK, and we made a big deal about it. We made a big splash about it. We did a whole advertising campaign around it. We had local business leaders dress as Clue characters, and we laid clues in the paper and online regularly about what was coming.”

Jackson recalled that at least one major business community leader was “very skeptical” that the Springfield business community would pay for news content, in a time when commodity information flowed across the internet: The Wall Street Journal was one of few news organizations running a paid online subscription model prior to the 2010s.

Felin said that when Jackson tasked her to implement a comprehensive digital upgrade for SBJ, concepts existed for what they were trying to accomplish. But not much else.

It took months to create a plan – with Jackson communicating the urgency of the situation along the way, Felin said.

“It was a unique coding problem that there was no code-sharing back then, and this kind of coding didn’t exist,” Felin said. “So then we had to also work with the developers to figure out how to make this happen on the website.”

“It was scary, but it was necessary,” Jackson said. “No. 1, it helped us truly, I think, establish the value of our content and drive home the importance of having professional journalists creating the content, and not simply taking sources of information that are otherwise available.”

Instead of being relegated to a curator, SBJ continued as a creator of business journalism, Jackson said. “And so while mainstream media nationwide saw just a massive decline of readership and subscribership, we doubled in that year, and we continued to grow.”

Jackson identified three areas of connection provided by SBJ that make the difference for the publication, before, during and after her time at the helm of the business.

“Springfield Business Journal has always identified themselves as a connector of people to people, and people to businesses, and people to information,” she said. “OK, that’s really hard. And I think we’ve done all three of those things really well, since inception, and continue to do that today, even with all of the other means now available.”