For the second year, Mississippi State’s Department of Communication will host the New Narratives Festival and Conference to focus on the changing landscape of communication.
Steve Soltis, a retired corporate communications professional with more than 20 years of experience working for Coca-Cola and UPS, and a member of the advisory board for the Department of Communications, spoke Monday to the Starkville Rotary Club about the festival.
This year’s festival is scheduled for March 22-23 at the Mill at MSU.
MSU Professor and Head of the Department of Communications John Forde said Soltis helped create the idea for the New Narrative Festival about three years ago.
This year’s festival, Soltis said, will focus on communicating through times of transition and disruption. He said new competitive forces, technologies and regulatory pressures cause an almost constant state of disruption.
“A lot of that disruption is creative friction which is a very positive force,” Soltis said. “We’re going to be exploring a lot of that.”
The festival will include speakers such as MSU President Mark Keenum, who will talk about food scarcity, and celebrity chef Robert St. John, who will discuss the “farm to table” movement, which promotes serving local food.
It will also feature Denise Horn, director of corporate communications for Turner Broadcasting Systems; Barie Carmichael from the University of Virginia; Dana Bolden, senior vice president and chief sustainability officer with Corteva Agriscience; Ken Askew, of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group in San Francisco; and several other speakers.
Soltis said the festival highlights the way in which communication is changing. The proliferation of social media, for example, has created countless new channels for organizations to share their messages.
“This is more than a festival,” Soltis said. “It’s mostly a learning experience. The whole rationale behind doing this is John and I have had a lot of conversations with members of the advisory board for the past three or four years around the changing nature of specifically corporate communication.
“But it goes beyond corporate communication,” he added. “It’s civic journalism. It’s the changing nation of organizational communication, political communication — every aspect of communication is changing.”
The spread of those new channels has made communication easier for everyone. The result of that, Soltis said, is open to debate.
“Everyone’s empowered,” he said. “But then you have to step back and say, ‘Are we really saying anything? Is it bringing us together or is it causing more division?’ I think we could be up here debating that for the better part of a month, but the fact is that it’s changing and we’re in the heart of the change.”
Soltis said last year’s festival was a “great success” and drew a few hundred people. He said it attracted students, professors and people from the community, as well as people who traveled to Starkville from across the country.
“We’d like to see it ultimately bloom into something that would attract several thousand people, but we also know we’ve got to take baby steps and we have to start right here by making sure the Starkville community has embraced what we’re trying to do here,” he said.
Registration for the full festival is available at https://www.newnarrativefestival.msstate.edu/ and is $185 and $45 for students. Registration for individual days is $95 or $25 for students.
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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