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Kim Garretson, BJ '73

What do you do?
I joined Best Buy as Director of Emerging Media to develop communications platforms that approached our in-store and online audiences like a media company. Recently, I joined the company's Global Innovation Network to identify breakthrough consumer technology and media products and services to commercialize. Our strategy of customer centricity means that Best Buy is targeting customers like media companies target audiences, with different offerings for business, women, the affluent, empty nesters, and various youth markets.

How did you get your job?
I was recruited by a New York magazine industry recruiting firm looking to bring in someone with expertise in all areas of media, including editorial, sales, publishing management, and new media.

What is the best professional lesson you learned at the J-School?
Fight for your ideas, especially if they unique and potentially threatening to the status quo in your company.

What would be your best advice to current students?
Become experts in emerging media audience trends, not just in editorial and advertising storytelling. If young audiences are not embracing today's media and advertising content, what are reasons and how can you innovate as a media professional to find audience affinity?

What do you consider to be your greatest professional achievement?
I co-founded a new media publishing firm that we developed into the fourth largest Internet professional services firm before our sale to a global ad agency group. Also, our firm won Advertising Age magazine's first ever interactive marketing award.

What makes you good at your job?
Due to the pace of business today, getting internal and external audiences to stop and listen to concepts and propositions means applying the storytelling skills of a journalist. I think I've learned to be a good storyteller.

What do you work on in your spare time?
As a prostate cancer survivor, I have a men's health non-profit aimed at what I perceive is a crisis in men's health communications. Too many men do not consume health media or see their doctors on a regular basis. My campaign site has been featured in Time, Reader's Digest and more than 500 newspapers.

News Releases

April 3, 2007: Convergence Journalism Project Offers Media Outlet for Columbia Schools One of the latest trends in media technology is giving community members an unprecedented insiders' view of Columbia's public schools, thanks to the work of a group of radio-television journalism and convergence journalism students at the Missouri School of Journalism, several faculty members, an alumnus, teams of high school students and their advisers. [More]