FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

REMAG’s sprawling and multi-faceted kiosk program would not be easy to announce in two to three words on a newsstand magazine cover. In fact, it would be hard to explain in 25 words or less. It’s new, fresh, innovative and, from a blogger’s point of view, a little complicated. But the program is, in fact, all about the newsstand sales of magazines, so it deserves our attention and comprehension.

REMAG’s Blake Patterson called me to give me an update on the program. Since I blogged about this last year, More...

Every now and then, when our own newsstand landscape begins to look too homogenous and our cover formulas too tired we look overseas to shake us up a little.

Or a lot—the polybag premium craze that swept our consumer publications a decade or two ago (but who’s counting) was sparked by one UK company.

Polybag premiums to some degree have, after many years, run their course here in the U.S., but any publisher with a serious commitment to a UK distribution is aware that it is still the vernacular on the English newsstand.

Partworks are a UK newsstand innovation that take the practice of polybagging premiums to a new level. They offer expensive, high-quality premiums on every product and, as the name indicates, More...

The Borders bankruptcy has been a long time coming. It was well over a year ago when a Borders executive walked away from a conversation in which I asked, in a less-than-diplomatic way, about the long-term chances of the chain. So we’ve had plenty of time to go through the stages of grief, and also to modify our budgets and business plans, and to think about where we would sell our copies when the giant was gone.

All the preparation hasn’t made it easy. For many of my publisher clients Borders was the second biggest source of distribution and sal More...

It’s the riches of our digital life that are being offered up to us, this time through the MagNet data system.

Of course, most of us are getting great feedback from our readers from our online cover surveys. In some cases the readers help sway a decision: the close-up or the distance shot for the cover image? The quirky human interest article or the solid investigative piece as the lead? The starburst or the banner?

It’s a wonderful world of reader participation and interactivity. But no doubt about it, the best way to assess the impact of a cover is still through its newsstand sa More...

The gang at Wal-Mart is always up to something, and the latest something appears to be a chain-wide initiative to move transportation services away from suppliers to their own trucks and warehouses.

Wal-Mart, of course, does have its own trucks, which they currently use to move product from distribution centers to stores. The initiative is meant to lower costs through direct supply across multiple categories. How that is likely to translate for magazines appears to be the elimination of the wholesaler suppliers with the difference in discount going directly to Wal-Mart.

But does Wal-Mart intend to make the same arrangement with magazine publishers? And how would that play out for magazines?

For some publishers, it†More...