FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

The decision by the BPA Board of Directors to not loosen the requirements for reporting 1-year, 2-year and 3-year names separately was a bold move. As the pithy phrase goes, "Let me know how that works out for you."

I know more than a few circulation directors who were not expecting this outcome-to say nothing of their publishers and presidents who were betting on saving a few hundred thousand dollars-per publication-on telemarketing this Fall.

And if that bet was made this spring, well it's kinda too late (The "June cycle" for renewals ended May 31). Where would you rather spend $300,000? Supporting your shrinking print franchi More...

The trade media business, such as it was, has been ripped apart and largely destroyed by Google. The musical chairs game that private equity players have been playing is finally out of seats and many household names have been left holding the bag, trying to hardball the banks into restructuring or just going bankrupt. The “strategic” multi-market players are shedding print assets like pounds in a sauna wearing a rubber suit.

And so, last week’s shocking closure of 23 titles by Reed merely underscores the evolution of our industry back into what it once was, and I will p More...

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about “not giving an inch,” in terms of selling print to my customers. My friend Tony Silber, among others privately, took issue with this [“The Last Samurai”] and questioned whether I was losing my mind or was becoming some sort of anachronism.

The jury may still be out on that, but I am going to expand on my reasoning and share the results of our efforts to “not give an inch,” this Fall at my company.

My proposition was that, as an industry, we have a responsibility to sell the benefits of print as a medium as opposed to the old days of just selling against competitive titles. As much of the industry More...

I understand and appreciate my friend and industry colleague Tony Silber’s confusion over my recent stand defending print’s value and my refusal to accept customers’ blithe dismissal of the medium in favor of an exclusive online or lead-gen marketing strategy.

So, I thought it was worth clarifying my thoughts, which admittedly might have been influenced by falling a bit too hard for a literary metaphor. Most publishers have many children. Print. Banners. Newsletters. Lead generation. Webinars. And more. No one—including Tony—is saying print is dead or will disappear entirely fr More...

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...