FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page
For November Issues, Magazines Hedge Presidential Bets
Dylan Stableford
With the election less than two weeks away, many magazines have already put their November and December issues—the ones in mailboxes and on newsstands—to bed. And those that are referencing the election have been forced to declare a winner between early. Vogue, for one, featured a cover line alluding to a Barack Obama win (“All the Vice President’s Women”—featuring “four generations of [Joe] Biden beauties”) on its November cover.
The American Bar Association’s monthly magazine smartly More...
A ‘Sexy’ Dental Magazine?
Dylan Stableford
Like the economy, the health of the magazine industry is a big topic of conversation among publishers and pundits heading into 2009. One, Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni, the University of Mississippi professor who tracks magazine launches, is vying to become the industry’s number one Kool-Aid distributor:
I am sure that we all need a touch of bloom in the midst of all the doom and gloom economic climate we are witnessing these days. So, without further due, here is some good news. The number of new More...
Does Color Count as Product Placement?
Dylan Stableford
New York magazine this week joined a small but growing list of publishers to turn over their magazines to a single sponsor, selling 24 front-of-book advertising pages to HSBC, the European bank—making it the magazine’s largest single-issue advertiser ever.
The New Yorker famously sold its entire inventory to Target in 2005, sparking a debate over the ethics of running a campaign that used illustrations, mimicking the New Yorker’s famed covers, and a cover that, More...
Are Ad Page Figures Inflated?
Dylan Stableford
We’ve pointed out numerous times, the Publishers Information Bureau’s revenue figures, given the steep discounts magazines often give advertisers, are bogus.
Just how bogus? Roughly 40 to 75 percent, according to this report on the Media Daily News Web site. As Bob Sacks, consultant and noted futurist, notes, “That is a lot of smoke and mirrors for an industry with limited accountability.” (FOLIO: stop More...
Should Time Link to Newsweek?
Dylan Stableford
Poignant riff in Andrew Sullivan’s 5,300-word “Why I Blog” essay—for the most part a defense of blogging as journalistic form—in the newly redesigned Atlantic:
Writing in this new form is a collective enterprise as much as it is an individual one—and the connections between bloggers are as important as the content on the blogs. The links not only drive conversation, they drive readers. The more you link, the more others will link to you, and the more traffic and readers More...
R.I.P. Mygazines, 2008-2008
Dylan Stableford
It’s over:
More...Dear valued members, visitors and publishers,
Due to monetary reasons and the state of the global economy, we unfortunately must close mygazines.com. We simply ran out of funds to support the daily operations.
We thank you for your patronage.
If you are a publisher interested in understanding more about our model and vision for the future of the publishing industry going forward, or to discuss our Business to Business model opportunities, please email us at mygazines@gmail.com.
Sincerely,
The Mygazines Team
Welcome to the Magazine Spin Zone
Dylan Stableford
Every three months, the Publishers Information Bureau, the part of the Magazine Publishers of America which counts advertising pages and estimates rate card revenue, puts out a press release summarizing the performance for the previous quarter. And, like clockwork, the copy of that press release reads like pro-print, partisan spin. Every time. Friends, it drives me crazy.
This week’s PIB release was no different. Here was the headline the MPA went with:
FOOD & FOOD PRODUCTS AND RETAIL LEAD AD CATEGORIES
More...
Newsweek Pulls ‘Up-Close’ Coverage of Palin for Kindle
Dylan Stableford
Newsweek is pulling together its election coverage for a series of e-books packaged for Amazon’s Kindle. (Newsweek is the first magazine to do so, Amazon says.) Given all the hullabaloo surrounding last week’s Newsweek cover—featured an unretouched, hair-and-pore-exposing Sarah Palin closeup—I thought the tagline of the Palin e-book [above, right] was a bit ironic.
Click here for more on News More...
The Atlantic Unveils Redesign
Dylan Stableford
While Newsweek has apparently started the process of reimagining its print magazine—ordering design guru Roger Black to come up “fantasy versions” of the newsweekly—another iconic American magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, has completed a radical revamp of its own.
FOLIO: VIDEO Q+A: Atlantic Media President Justin Smith
The magazine is set to unveil the redesign—just the eighth in its 151-year More...
Video Interview: Luke Hayman
Dylan StablefordOn the rooftop of the Chicago Marriott at the FOLIO: Show a few weeks ago, I did an interview with Luke Hayman, the renowned magazine designer at Pentagram and one of the conference’s speakers, about trends in magazine design. Hayman spoke quite favorably about Esquire (“I love what David Curcurito is doing”) and, I thought refreshingly, spoke openly about his disdain for the trend of “free magazines” as perpetuated by Niche Media. His argument? “They’re treated like garbage and they look like garbage.”
Tell us how you really feel, Luke!
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New York Times Publisher on Whether There Will Be a Print Edition in 10 Years: ‘We Can’t Care’
Dylan Stableford Audience Development - 10/24/2008-09:37 AMArthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman and publisher of New York Times Company, delivered the keynote address yesterday at WebbyConnect, a three-day summit on the future of media, which was organized by the producers of the Webby Awards and held in Dana Point, California.
Sulzberger, sometimes referred to by the nickname "Pinch," gave an interesting answer to the “Will there be a print edition of the New York Times in 10 years?” question:
“Let's start with the fact that the heart of the answer must be we can't care. We do care; I care very much. But we must be where people More...