Owner and Creative Director Jamie Cole began his professional career as multimedia designer with what is now People, Inc. (formerly Southern Progress Corporation, Time, Inc., and Dotdash-Meredith). His department launched the Southern Progress Corporation division’s first web site, ProgressiveFarmer.com, and he designed version 1.0 of both SouthernLiving.com and CoastalLiving.com. Contrary to most multi-platform journalists in the late 1990s, Jamie moved from digital media to print media to become Senior Editor of The Progressive Farmer magazine, where he worked on all facets of the magazine’s repositioning from an agribusiness trade magazine to a rural lifestyle consumer publication. He was named Managing Editor of the magazine in 2008, and guided the magazine’s print and digital efforts, including the popular “Best Places To Live In Rural America” program.
In 2009, Jamie left the magazine to help create Advanced Content/Red Barn Media Group and serve as its Creative Director.
In the past 16 years, Red Barn’s projects have won numerous awards from the American Agricultural Editors Association (AAEA) and the National Agri-Marketing Association (NAMA). AAEA named Jamie its Designer of the Year in 2012, its Writer of the Year in both 2010 and 2013 (runner-up in 2016), its Photographer of the Year in 2016, and Communicator of the Year in 2021 and 2023—the only person in the organization’s history to win all four of its major journalism and marketing communication awards. For his consistent award-winning work, he was named “Communicator of Merit” in 2025. Under his leadership, Red Barn has been awarded First Place from AAEA in six of the last eight years for results of its content marketing programs in social media.
Jamie has also been awarded by Folio, the American Society of Business Press Editors, and the National Agri-Marketing Association, along with writing and reporting honors from Society of Professional Journalists and Associated Press.
Jamie graduated from Jacksonville State University in Alabama with a degree in Communication and a minor in English. He was the John C. Turner Outstanding Graduate in Communication, and served as president of the Jacksonville chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and as Editor in Chief of JSU’s award-winning student newspaper, The Chanticleer. He also taught interactive journalism courses at JSU.
He received his master’s degree in Journalism at the University of Alabama, and also received the department’s Outstanding Graduate Student award. He taught in the University of Alabama’s College of Communication and served on the school’s Institute for Communication and Information Research Advisory Board. He received the Department of Journalism’s Outstanding Research award in 2013. His academic research includes the first American academic work focused on credibility in brand journalism (published in the Spring 2014 issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly). He also received the Robert Lance Memorial Award from the American Journalism Historians Association for outstanding research; the scope covered how the Southern Living brand was born. As an experienced content marketer and media effects researcher, Jamie was asked by SAGE Publications to write articles defining the terms “Content Marketing” and “Native Advertising” for the SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society (2020).
Jamie lives in Alabaster, Alabama, south of Birmingham, with his wife Charissa and son Sullivan Thomas. In 2020, he was elected to the Alabaster City Council. In his spare time, he serves on the boards of the Alabaster Arts Council, the Alabaster City Schools Foundation, the Alabaster Water Board, the Alabama Governor’s School, and the Ag Communicators Network (formerly American Agricultural Editors’ Association). He also plays piano anywhere someone will let him.