FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

The American Business Media Annual Conference last week in Jacksonville, Florida, was a really interesting one, for a whole lot of reasons. This year's conference was certainly the last of a breed.

With the ABM membership voting last week to approve a merger with the Software & Information Industry Association, the ABM is no more, at least as the 107-year-old independent entity it once was. Now, really, all is up in the air. Whether CEO Clark Pettit stays on board beyond the fall is an open question. Probably not. Same for CFO Todd Hittle. I'll be following up in the days ahead with the SIIA chief, Ken Wasch, for answers on these and other questions.

In the meantime, some observations:

More...

Min wrote about John Suhler’s retirement last week. Other than that, and some mentions in the financial-industry media, his retirement didn’t make much news. To me, that’s an oversight, because John Suhler is certainly one of a dozen or so major figures in the magazine industry in the last 40 years.

That group includes people like Bill Ziff, who founded two major magazine companies; both had brands that live on today. It includes people like Peter Diamandis, who in the eighties bought CBS Magazines for $650 million and flipped it to Hachette less than a year later for a $100 More...

Two significant industry conferences in the last couple of weeks were dominated by the question of whether print is dead. At the American Magazine Conference two weeks ago, Ben Horowitz, co-founder, Andreessen Horowitz, said this:

“Babies born now will never read anything in print. At the same time, people in their 40s and 50s will never stop reading print. Face the reality that print will eventually go away.”

(You may recall that Mark Andreessen and some college classmates invented the browser that became Netsca More...

We received this e-mail from the Joss Group on Monday, as the hurricane was about to hit. Not only did they take a shot at our decision to postpone the MediaNext event—we didn't cancel it, we postponed until January—but they also made hurricane jokes.

For the record, Joss Group, here's some of what Hurricane Sandy did:
• Caused 51 deaths.
• Knocked out power for 7.5 million people.
• Caused the cancellation of 16,000 flights.
• Caused unprecedented flooding on New York's 100-plus-year-old subway system More...

Oxford, Mississippi—Magazine publishers from a broad cross section of the industry spent two days presenting their best practices and innovative ideas for an era of transition during the third annual ACT III conference at the University of Mississippi.

Like at the AMC in San Francisco last week, the underlying theme of the event was whether print media's best days are behind it. And if it is, the question was how long the decline will take, and how far down print will go. And like at the AMC, there was no broad agreement. In fact, sa More...

Frank Cutitta, CEO of the Center for Global Branding, speaking at the American Business Media Annual Meeting in San Francisco Tuesday, offered an insight into the relationship of IT and Marketing. With a slide showing a road sign warning drivers to slow down next to another of a rocket careening out of control, said: “IT is the land of slow and no. They’re like, ‘Frank, we have to really think this through.’ And marketing is the unguided missile. Like me.

“There are few people with ‘double-deep’ skills, expertise in IT and in marketing,” he concluded.

MORE 2012 ABM ANNUAL MEETING COVERAGE:

ABM Annual Meeting Coverage
More...

The Western Publishing Association had its annual conference Friday in Los Angeles after a layoff of a couple of years. Called WPA Media Publishing Conference 3.0: Navigation. Innovation. Growth, the event was lightly attended, with perhaps 100-120 total attendees, including speakers and exhibitors. (Pictured to the right is the closing panel: Rick Calvert, CEO, BlogWorld & New Media Expo; Jordan Gold, VP, products & content, Freedom Interactive; Dan McCarthy, partner, DeSilva + Phillips. Pictured below to the right is the closing panel audience.)

But the content was often quite strong, and as with all face-to-face events, th More...

What’s the difference between Garden & Gun and Portfolio, two award-winning magazines that were both launched in 2007?

Other than the obvious response—Portfolio is out of business while Garden & Gun thrives—for Sid Evans, the difference comes down to one word: Soul.

Evans, the group editor of Time Inc.’s Lifestyle Division and founding editor of Garden & Gun, says being “soulful” makes all the difference between magazine success and failure, and it’s something Southern magazines can teach the world. More...

Here are some ruminations on trends, courtesy of my annual trip to the U.S. Open with three good friends, Ted Bahr, CEO of BZ Media, Steve Davis, president of SRDS, and Michael Forgash, an account executive at SRDS.

We've been doing this outing for years, the four of us, and over that span, as a result of my exposure to the accumulated wisdom of my three industry colleagues, I've come up with countless terrific stories for FOLIO: and our other brands. And I've often changed the way I look at the business as a result of the conversations we have.

This year, we discussed some especially timely things. One was an observation that a More...

New York--Media companies of the future will be organized differently from the way they are now, with much higher capital expense costs and much greater need for in-house digital development skill.

That, with some accommodations for varying markets and editorial missions, was essentially the conclusion of a panel of media executives at the DeSilva + Phillips Dealmakers Summit last week.

The panel, called "How Will Media Companies Be Organized in the Future," featured four well-known executives: Frank Anton, CEO of Hanley Wood; Dan Lagani, president of Reader's Digest Media; David Liu, CEO of The Knot; and Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis Media.

It was one of several timely sessions at the event, the ninth annual More...

That phrase was the title of one of the presentations at Samir Husni’s recent conference, called “Reimagining the Future (While We Still Have Time),” and held at the Magazine Innovation Center in Oxford, Mississippi. The presentation was made by Thomaz Souto Correa, the vice president of editorial at The Abril Group in Brazil. And while Correa discussed many things, there is a particular idea in that title worth thinking about.

Perhaps the future doesn’t exist because no one, and I mean no one, knows what it’s going to look like even two years from now. Think about More...

BPA has announced the winner of its second annual house-ad contest. Participating companies create a house ad campaign that touts the value of the third-party audit, in this case, obviously, BPA’s audit.

The winner this year [pictured] is Grand View Media Group. The Birmingham, Alabama-based company created an ad featuring an image of a Groucho Marx mask with the tagline, “Wondering What the ‘Other Guys’ Are Trying to Hide?”

The blurb beneath says, in part, “Being BPA audited means not hiding behind silly disguises. No handshake guarantees that you’re getting what you paid for.”

I strongly believe in the third More...