Overheard at AMC

BOCA RATON, FLORIDA—The 2007 American Magazine Conference is underway with close to 500 magazine executives here. A snapshot of chatter from the conference’s sessions, dinners and booze-fueled cocktail hours:

"A good editor should have fairly severe A.D.D."
— Adam Moss, New York

"We found out that Boomers just aren't as hip as we thought they were."
— Hugh Delehanty, AARP

“For the journalists in us, we like when you pick a place to moor our yachts.”
— Jonah Bloom, Advertising Age editor

“I’m online all day. I can’t tell you three ads I’ve seen in the last three months—three!”
—Josh Quittner, ex-Business 2.0 editor, on the lack of effectiveness of online ads

“Don’t fear Google—it seems bigger than it really is.”
— Eileen Naughton, Google’s director of media platforms

"The goal was to have at least five readers cancel their subscriptions. I’m happy to report we vastly exceeded my goal."
— Brian Farnham, Time Out New York

"Speed kills--if you don't have it."
— Wenda Millard, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, on magazines developing an online presence

"Magazines have great assets."
— Philippe Guelton, Hachette Filipacchi

"The scariest word in business is irrelevant. The scariest question in publishing is, 'Do magazines still work?'"
— Dom Rossi, senior advisor of marketing and advertising, MPA

"If you don't define yourself in a changing marketplace, your competition will."
— Ed Kelly, president/CEO American Express Publishing Corp.

“The country gets a diversity of New Yorkers to choose from.”
— Mark Halperin, Time magazine’s political editor, on the race between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani

“For all the double-doming, the coverage may not amount to much.”
— Dan Rather, on the exhaustive press coverage of the 2008 presidential election in 2007

“If you make the mistake of lying to the press, you’re dead.”
— Tony Snow, ex-White House press secretary

“It’s embarrassing”
— Jonah Bloom, Advertising Age editor, on the conference’s “Magabrands” tagline

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