FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

Did you ever read “Sometimes a Great Notion” by Ken Kesey? Yes, the Ken Kesey with the psychedelic bus. Before the Merry Pranksters and after his successful “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Kesey penned this novel, one of the great works of American fiction, a sprawling tale of the struggles of a northwest logging family, the conflict between brothers, the small independent logging company the family owns and their fights against larger timber interests.

The most recurring metaphor in the book is fighting progress, alluded to in the form of the Stamper family home, which is built on a bend of a great river that is constant More...

The games we play change over time. I wonder if my favorite magazine game has gone the way of stickball and “kick the can.”

When I worked at Ziff-Davis in the 1980’s I was fortunate enough to be placed in a “loop course” type of specialized circulation class taught by the VP of Circulation and one of the industry’s most outrageous old school characters, Larry Sporn. Larry taught us a simple little game called “newsstand shuffle.” Basically, all you had to do was go to a newsstand, browse the magazines, and accidentally place your companies’ titles on top of your competitors’ magazines. The trick was to make sure y More...

Many years ago when I had the good fortune to work for Ziff-Davis, I read a quote from Bill Ziff about how publishing had changed. I've lost the quote but it went something like this:

"It used to be that our business was run by enthusiastic eccentrics—people who worked and lived day in and day out in their markets and hardly even realized that they were running a 'business,' in the classical sense, at all."

I brought this idea up speaking to a roomful of publishers at the Niche Magazine Conference in April—that the future may be linked to the past and that the magazines of tomorrow need to be published by inde More...

It’s very quiet now, as the snow falls across the recessionary landscape. Though it’s only Fall outside, the inside of the b-to-b media business feels like winter. The private-equity players that got caught when the music ended with no chairs left to sit on or Greater Fools around to buy their roll-ups, are sitting in workout meeting after workout meeting with the banks and other lenders trying to scale back their debt and cut their losses.

The CEOs and top managers of these companies are gamely pulling in the remaining revenues for 2009. The cuts they made probably won’t be the last, but the Fall usually brings a few pleasant surprises, a few More...

The news that Google will now broker display ads much as it does text ads is positioned by the company as being a way for publishers to make more money by selling remnant banner space. Here's the article in the WSJ [subscription only].

I have a few issues. First of all, many vertical niche publishers already have relationships in place with ad networks that suck up and sell all of their remnant space. For example, we partner with IDG TechNetwork and are generally happy. There are hundreds of other networks like this. But our experience and what I have heard from oth More...

It seems to me as if media companies are falling all over one another in a race to price themselves out of business. First, print, with a few exceptions such as SD Times, is in a death spiral. We know that many many publications are on their way out. But it seems that media companies in jumping on the online bandwagon are so desperate for sales - any sales - that they are pricing themselves into oblivion.
 
Because there are very low barriers to entry on the Internet there are often dozens or even hundreds of places that an advertiser MIGHT find a buyer. Which websites are best?? Dunno, wonders the ad buyer, who then concludes that it must be the ones that generate the most clicks or have lower prices.
 
What about More...

Editor's note: Ted Bahr, president and publisher of BZ Media, a Long Island, New York-based software-development industry publisher, gave a keynote at the third annual Niche Magazine Conference, an event for small companies, held in Denver this week. Here, taken from Bahr's keynote, are 12 tips for operating a niche media business:

•    Keep infrastructure costs low—spend only on products and people, and no excesses.
•    Check facts and contentions versus “trust.” More...

If anyone needs more proof of the declining value of high quality editorial, this could be it.

CSO Magazine, winner of the most recent Grand Neal award for editorial quality, is in trouble. Now, I know nothing about this directly, but I have this old fashioned habit I can’t get rid of. I count ad pages. And from my hand counts, advertisers could care less about editorial quality.

You may remember the story of IDG’s CMO Magazine. Lots of fanfare, seemingly invincible target along with the side benefit of having the advertiser base as part of the readership. And it immediately sashayed its way into multiple Neal Award nominati More...

One of my favorite people in the industry is straight-shooter Jack Semler, President of the Readex Corporation. Readex is best known for ad readership studies (like Starch and Harvey) although they also do a healthy business in more general subscriber studies and other types of research. In any case, WE publishers are their customers. If WE are really worried about business next year, we will do fewer paid outside studies and Readex's forward business outlook for 2008 should be down.

Well, here's what Jack said; "As for our indicators, we are kicking butt right now.  The ad effectiveness study count will be up and the number of proposals we are writing for custom studies is above average.  IF all holds up and doesn't crash More...

I was idling around the newsstand at lunch and was surprised to see the December issue of Hemmings Motor News sitting there, weighing in at 696 pages. Hemmings is basically an antique car and car parts directory. Looking for an antenna for that 1964 Corvair? Find it in Hemmings.

The curious thing is why the print publication is still thick as a phone book. If ever there was a publication to become disintermediated by the Internet, this is it. Hemmings is a place where you go to find things you are looking for, not for random discovery. And, in fact, it has a robust Web site, claiming to be the â More...

I must be on some list or in some business databases. As the president of a small company, there are some weeks when I get three or four calls a day from salespeople trying to sell me HR services, healthcare plans, consulting services, etc. ... This induces cruelty to telemarketers, which I have been known to practice. It’s very annoying and I don’t feel good about myself afterwards.

Increasingly, I find myself chanting some variation of the mighty McGraw-Hill advertisement known as the “Man More...

I’m given to rail against the state of the world in terms of the overreaction in favor of online marketing methods over print advertising. As with any sea change in the sales end of our industry, there are multiple players (publishers, clients, ad agencies) and plenty of blame to go around. A frequent target for publishers is ad agencies. Part of this is historical, as an agency can stand between the publisher and his/her client. And part of it is structural. Clients squeeze ad agencies, who have to run leaner and often assign inexperienced media buyers to select media.

Today, there are two beefs we have with ad agencies: one is the “RFP due by the end of the day.” The other is “we’re only buying online.” Clearly, ther More...