FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

Interesting moment at New York Magazine Day—I mean, aside from the VP of Toyota Motors telling the Magazine Publishers of America chairman that magazine readers don't care about editorial ethics anymore: Deidre Depke, Newsweek.com's assistant managing editor who recently took a company buyout offer (one of many longtime editorial staffers to do so), showed up for a panel called "All Things Digital" (s More...

When we last heard from Josh Quittner, he was facing down the demise of his Time Inc. title, Business 2.0, while a fervent group of his Facebook friends were trying to save it. (After Time Inc. refused to sell the magazine to rival Mansueto Ventures—home to Inc. and Fast Company—the company folded it into Fortune.)

Now, Quittner's been poached—cross-company style—from Fortune by Time editor Rick Stengel. Here's Stengel's memo:

April 16, 2008

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Gawker Media founder Nick Denton (and FOLIO: 40 alum) has always thought of his snarky blog network as something of a Condé Nast of the blogosphere. Now, after months of speculation, Denton has trimmed three titles from his portfolio—selling his music blog, Idolator, to Buzznet (which recently purchased Idolator's chief rival, Stereogum), travel blog Gridskipper to Curbed (the real estate blo More...

SEE RELATED STORY: Penton Media Announces Hiring, Salary Freeze, Company-Wide Revenue Reforecasting

This memo, obtained by FOLIO:, was sent Friday by CEO John French to Penton staffers:

To All Penton Employees:

Recently, we've enjoyed success in certain areas of the company. Specifically, Penton's Exhibitions Group is off to a strong start to the year highlighted by the success of the Expo West event (one of New Hope's tradeshows covering the healthy products industry) in Anahei More...

Yesterday, FOLIO: reported on the lastest restructuring at Ziff Davis Enterprise. For those ZDE "completists" out there, here's the full e-mail exchange I had with CEO Steve Weitzner:

From: Dylan Stableford
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 1:46 PM
To: Steve Weitzner
Subject: folio: inquiry

Hi Steve:

I’m told ZDE is beginning its restructuring. Can you confirm:

How many jobs were affected?
Who was promoted?
Are there more job More...

Vogue’s latest cover—featuring basketball star Lebron James and supermodel Gisele Bundchen—was notable for a number of reasons. For starters, it was just the third time a man had appeared on a Vogue cover (George Clooney and Richard Gere being the other two) and the first African-American male to do so. But the magazine quickly came under fire for what bloggers and other media critics saw as perpetuating the ugly stereotype of a black man as the “wild, savage, white-woman-obsessed beast,” as Gawker Media blog Jezebel put it. (One even suggested that those More...

The Players Club, the magazine for professional athletes founded by Lenny Dykstra and published by Doubledown Media, had its launch last week. I had an interview scheduled with Dykstra—apparently notorious for missing interviews with journalists but one helluva stock picker!—but he never called. (Naturally, I waited by the phone, sucking on a hunk of chaw for six hours, but no “Nails” for me.) I had plenty of questions, the first of which is why Dykst More...

A couple quick notes on Michael Arrington—the sleep-deprived founder of Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch and member of the 2008 FOLIO: 40—which didn’t make it into his 350-word profile.

• When I called him a couple weeks ago (12:00 p.m. EST, 9:00 a.m. his time) he said he was working on a post (something about a brothel—seriously) and had yet to go to sleep. He echoed then what he told the New York Times over the weekend—that tech blo More...

The FOLIO: 40—our annual list of industry innovators and influencers—was officially unveiled today. We call it the oldest, most comprehensive and most distinguished compilation of its kind. Because it is. Obviously, it’s not an all-inclusive affair; rather, it’s roughly the result of two months of meetings, scouring notes, archives, old issues of FOLIO:, Wiki-researching, more meetings, spirited reply-all emails, paring down, another meeting, some brushing up on profile writing, then the actual profile writing, editing, copyediting. And, then, at some point, we get to this.

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Price wars between celebrity magazines are nothing new—we all remember the move by American Media Inc.'s Celebrity Living to drop its newsstand cover price to 25 cents a couple of years ago. (Celebrity Living, of course, is dead.) But rarely if ever do you see a magazine call out the competition by name as OK! has done this week, touting that its $2.99 cover price is “$1 cheaper than Us Weekly & People!” (OK!—it's worth noting—is going for the trifecta with this one: Britney, Jamie Lynn and Suri).

The cover, however, has another problem, this time related to its Britney Spears’ “scoop” (see how the More...

This week, another small, fiercely-independent magazine folded (“Another Small Music Magazine Bites the Dust”). The publisher, as they often do, wrote an apologetic, heartfelt, 1,000-word note to subscribers detailing the constant struggle that is being an independent magazine publisher in 2008.

It’s also one of the best “exit” memos I’ve read in awhile (sadly, there have been enough of these lately to compare), touching not only on the “harsh and sudden shock” of having to fold, but also on the blood, sweat—the love, really—that went More...

I just got an e-mail from a spokeperson for Newsweek confirming that 111 of the 150 staffers offered buyouts are leaving the magazine. They're calling it a "voluntary retirement program."

Here's Newsweek's statement:

"Confronting the challenges in today’s media climate, we recently offered a voluntary retirement program to some of our employees. We were fortunate to be able to provide generous packages for eligible staffers who wanted to move on, while also saving on some of our existing expenses. A number of the familiar faces who accepted the offer, includi More...