FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

We’ve heard the bad news from the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ first half Fas-Fax report. We’ve also heard New York magazine’s good news clamoring above it—a 3.4 percent increase in single copy newsstand sales, even with a 20 percent cover price increase.

Jewelry industry magazine JCK, published by Reed Business Information, clearly chose the right magazine to imitate for its May, pre-show issue—one of its most important of the year. According to creative direc More...

When former Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia CEO Susan Lyne stepped down this June, Slate.com said it was a sign that the “company is doomed.”

“The hard truth is that demand for Martha Stewart in all forms—magazines, books, TV shows, Web sites and merchandise—has passed its peak,” James Ledbetter wrote.

For FOLIO:'s August issue, I spoke to Wenda Harris Millard who, along with Robin Marino, took over as co-CEO after Lyne resigned. She, of cour More...

Metropolitan Home is one of the latest magazines to dip its brand toes into the housing market.

The magazine has teamed up with Showtime to create “the ultimate multimedia showhouse” in New York’s Gramercy Park neighborhood. They’ll transform a $20 million, 8,800 square foot Greek revival townhouse into a “chic, upscale residence,” where they’ll hold parties, tours and other events.

Met Home is far from the first magazine to do this. Esquire t More...

Picture this: “A photographer in scuba gear photographing a woman in a sari who is repeatedly immersing herself in water while trying to strike the right post and emote with the appropriate facial expressions.” That is how Douglas Barasch, OnEarth editor-in-chief, describes the process of creating the cover image for the magazine’s summer issue.

On top of that, the OnEarth team was trying to make the cover “provocative, but not exploitative.” They wanted a “hauntingly beautiful image that enticed the reader to pick up the magazine and look at it,” says art director Gail Ghezzi, conveying a “sense of power More...

When FOLIO: reported the launch of aggregated enthusiast network LOUD3R last month, the company’s CEO Lowell Goss left a comment for our readers asking for feedback, which he got:

“This aint gonna work guys,” one commenter wrote under the heading, “Poor execution. Poor idea.” “Pulling in feeds from across the web and having just a single line of content is not what I'd call a ‘community site.’ ‘With minimal c More...

Last week, FOLIO: pointed out that Blood-Horse, a niche horseracing magazine, forfeited a major traffic-generating opportunity by waiting too long to post its exclusive photo of Big Brown’s loose shoe.

Earlier in the week, at the Circulation Management Conference and Expo, LatinFinance magazine’s marketing manager Kathy Andrew told a story that’s worth holding up as a counter example.

During the magazine’s Fifth Finance Summit in Argentina this month, a keynote sp More...

Taken literally, the cover of Dairy Herd Management’s April issue is a bit off the logical mark. “Bovine pirates digging for treasure,” as Face Up panelist Jamie Leary called them, do not immediately convey the cover story topic—the rising cost of cattle feed and its impact on dairy producers (who make up the magazine’s audience).

And despite the dark sky—used to create a “foreboding atmosphere,” says art director Rhana Castle—the turquoise sea and white sand conjure ima More...

Trolling the newswires and sifting through my inbox this week, I came across a few press releases from media companies—IDG, TechTarget, Time Out Chicago—touting their status as one of the “best places to work” in their given cities or states.

Ordinarily this type of “news” wouldn’t be on our radar but, given comments about low morale, I thought it might be time to draw attention to people who at least seem to be happy working in media.

IDG made Boston Business Journal’s list of Best Places to Work in More...

A magazine without a tagline is a magazine confused. Or, potentially, one with a reader confused. What is this magazine about? Who is it for? What is it like? Tell me, tagline!

But a bad tagline can be just as confounding. It can be misleading—like if Palms Springs Life, “California’s Prestige Magazine,” contained ads for Wal-Mart. It can also make you wonder what on earth the people in charge were thinking.

Take, for example, Vegetarian Times. Great magazine, but an off-putting nuance in the tagline: “great food, good health, smart living.” Good health? Why not “great food, good health, decent living”? A tagline More...

EVANSTON, Illinois—I've been covering the Independent Magazine Group's conference here this week. Despite the gloom and doom that sometimes (justifiably) seeps into industry events, the mood at this show was generally positive if serious, with publishers speaking frankly about the challenges facing indie magazines. In other words, "no bull***"!

Here are some assorted, random quotes from the sessions:

“[I’m glad to see that] everyone here is more concerned with communities than demographics.”
—David Lusterman, publisher, String Letter Publishing and IMAG conferen More...

For its June issue, Glamour is doing something it’s never done before: a “list.” Well, an official, branded list, anyway. Glamour’s “50 Most Glamorous” will … well, you get it already.

And why not? Fellow large circulation magazines like People and Time seem to publish a list issue every other month. List issues do historically well at the newsstand. And Glamour, like a lot of titles, has been seeing a decline in single copy sales in the past few years—a 7.8 percent drop between 2005 and 2006 and a 10.3 percent drop from 2006 to 2007.

Last year, People’s 100 Most Beautiful issue was ITS More...