An introduction to Shopping Center Business’s new blog and web site.
Jerry France
If you ever saw our old web site, you know this one is a world of difference. ShoppingCenterBusiness.com has gone from 1.0 to 5.0 We’ve taken the cap off the bottle and we’re opening up our world a little bit.
We have many magazines at France Media, and we touch all of them in our roles with our parent company. But we’ve always maintained specific duties on Shopping Center Business. It was our first magazine, and it is a strong commitment by all of us. Combined, the three of us have been covering the industry for 85 years (and yes, Jerry makes up more than half of that time).
As part of our jobs, we get to travel the U.S. — sometimes the world — and see a lot of 
Scott Francethe commercial real estate industry. This blog was designed as our way to report the shopping center industry in a way we can’t in the magazine. We’re going to be taking you inside our roundtables, our interviews, and our travels to the many conferences that we attend each year. We’re going to reserve a lot of the content for print, so what you’ll see here is the story behind the story, before it happens in print.
Part of our design for this blog was to tell you about some of the places we visit. We see a lot of shopping centers while we travel, and we meet a lot of people. They don’t all end up in the magazine, 
Randy Shearinbecause we don’t always announce our arrival. We visit a lot of places for background. In the industry, they call it casing the competition. We don’t compete with shopping centers; we visit them so we can have a reference point. People tell us about a lot of great places, and we like to take a look if we’re in town. Over our careers, we’ve been to thousands of retail centers. We’re not going to be judgmental, but we’re going to share some of the observations we see on our travels and let you know about the latest and greatest retailers we see as well.
It won’t just be the three of us on the blog either; we are inviting some keen industry observers to participate with us and, over time, you’ll get to see some of their opinions too. We look forward to seeing you soon.
— Jerry France is the publisher of Shopping Center Business, Scott France is co-publisher, and Randall Shearin is Editor in Chief.