Huether Increases Hot Air with Book

from guest columnist Dave Baumeister

Greetings Blogophiles!

It must have been slow news week in Sioux Falls. On Wednesday, Sept. 4, former mayor Mike Huether announced he was going to have a “media-only press conference” (that means he must not have had enough news to make it worth anyone else’s time) to announce the publication of his new book: Serve. Lead. Win.

That Sioux Falls newspaper and three television stations decided to cover the “press conference,” for whatever reason, and report how the book is available for purchase at Zandbroz and on amazon.com.

Now, I can’t blame Mike for this, as it was a shrewd way of getting some free publicity, but what is customary in cases like this is that the publisher sends out a press release, which most media outlets tend to ignore, or, if the author/publisher wants to insure the book (a.k.a “product”) is publicized, it is customary to buy an ad/commercial from said media sources.

Sometimes, a book might have such juicy content to make it newsworthy, but by Huether’s own admission, this one was not one of those books.

Heuther tells KELO-TV, “No, I don’t think there’s any dirt in there…. I was tempted. I was. But, you know, even when I was the mayor, and I was running for mayor, or even in my personal life, there’s times where, yeah, I wanted to go after somebody. But you just… not worth it.”

There was a time that I would have covered this and done a story for the Yankton County Observer, since Huether is a 1980 Yankton High graduate (he was a senior when I did my student teaching). It would have been interesting news to people in Yankton, as he still has family there.

But even then, I would have said, “Now, Mike, you need to buy an ad for that to run for a few weeks.”

I checked the website of Yankton’s other newspaper, and while ace reporter Randy Dockendorf did have a mention of the press conference and book on his Twitter feed, there was really no more information than that. (But the Yankton Press & Dakotan a much longer story than that Sioux Falls paper or any TV station had, so I wonder if Mike did buy and ad in the Yankton paper?)

I suppose there would be a decent market in Yankton to sell his books, as the Huethers recently donated a million bucks for the city’s new swimming pool.

But I am not going to go into detail on the new Huether tome or comment about its content, although, I might, if the former mayor wanted to buy an ad on Dakota Free Press!