FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page
Five Things One Executive Has Found to Be True
Tony SilberAt the recent Niche Digital event in Minneapolis, keynoter and Network Communications Inc. CEO Dan McCarthy offered a wealth of takeaway quotes. Among them:
■ There are two indisputable realities in the media world these days, and we need to adjust accordingly. First, readers and users of our products are increasingly distracted and have abundant alternative sources of information. And second, advertisers want to spend less money.
■ The world is post-digital. If the IT person or the CIO is driving your Web strategies, you're going for a ride. The truth is that technology just works. We don't care how an iPhone or BlackBerry does what it does, we are not engaged with the technology behind devices, we just assume they wi More...
Jack Kliger: ‘At Least I’m Not Running a National Magazine’
Tony Silber
NEW ORLEANS—The City and Regional Magazine Association’s annual conference concluded here Tuesday. (You can read FOLIO:’s coverage of the show here.)
Some leftover but timely quotes from event:
Author and speaker Orvel Ray Wilson, in a session on guerrilla marketing, quoting David Nour: “In social media, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
Former Hachette Filipacchi CEO Jack Kliger, who spoke in the last session on the second day: “That’s where I always wanted to be—speaking at the last session of a conference More...
Overheard at IMAG
Tony SilberBOULDER, Colorado—The IMAG conference—a gathering of some of the best and brightest independent (and independent-minded) magazine publishers—wrapped up earlier this week. Here are some leftover notes, quotes, and erstwhile inspiration from my notebook.
• In opening remarks, conference chairman Andy Clurman told attendees that the event would be a worry-free zone. “After all,” he said, “you are in Boulder, Colorado, or as we like to say, 25 beautiful square miles surrounded by reality.”
• Bob Sacks of Precision Media Group gave a great luncheon keynote, but he didn’t necessarily adh More...
What is a Magazine?
Tony SilberAt the Independent Magazine Advisory Group’s sixth annual meeting in Boulder, Colorado this week, Bob Sacks, president of Precision Media Group, offered six key properties for what a magazine is.
Tellingly, his were platform-neutral:
1. It’s metered. It’s paginated. It has a beginning, middle and end.
2. It’s edited, or curated.
3. It’s designed.
4. It’s date-stamped.
5. It’s permanent. Once created, it can’t be changed.
6. It’s periodic. It has a calendar or rhythm. It has a series of issues.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: The original dek in this story included the phrase &q More...
FOLIO: is Alive and Kicking
Tony Silber
The Digidaydaily e-newsletter today included a story asking the question whether the sun is setting on Forbes, Fortune and Businessweek. The newsletter's subject line and first sentence intended to make a reference to the high-profile shutdown of Portfolio last week.
Unfortunately, the newsletter left out four important letters in the name of the Condé Nast business magazine: "Port."
Which led some of our loyal readers to ask us what's up. We e-mailed the newsletter journalist and asked her to correct her story, which More...
My Experience with Twitter So Far
Tony Silber
In December I signed up for Twitter. I'd been meaning to do it for a while, but hadn't, because a) I'm not really an early adopter and b) I wasn't sure where another social network fit into my schedule, which already has Facebook, Flickr and mediaPRO.
But I believe in Rex Hammock's philosophy of experimenting in new forms of media, so it More...
Producing a Magazine Industry Event in a Maelstrom
Tony Silber
I just returned from the FOLIO: Growth Summit in Chicago. We conducted the event in a media-industry maelstrom—events all around us are being cancelled, downsized and postponed. You can’t overstate how hard hit the media industry is right now.
As I walked through the sessions and receptions, both old friends and new ones told me—one after the next—how they’ve had to lay off staff, how they’ve frozen salaries, how they’ve implemented unpaid time off, how they’ve got 2009 issues tracking at 50 percent of last year.
But the publishing executives More...
Will College Kids Still Want to Work in Magazines When They Grow Up?
Tony SilberIn this post ("Is Hollywood's Love Affair with Journalism Over?") I posed this question: Will young people gravitate to a business defined by bankruptcy and decline?
I was talking about magazines and newspapers, although, one could argue, it could've been the media industry in general.
Late last week I asked several of the leading voices I know in this area what they thought. Here are their responses:
Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni
J-School chair, University of Mississippi
We have become a very bloated industry. Now it is time to pay the piper. That b More...
Is Hollywood’s Love Affair with Journalism Over?
Tony Silber
Will young people gravitate to a business defined by bankruptcy, decline—and, likely, fewer films about it?
Movies
over time have usually depicted the magazine and newspaper industries
with a touch of glamour, power or idealism. For some recent examples,
think “In Good Company,” “13 Going on 30” and “The Devil Wears Prada.”
Then there’s the greatest movie of all time, “Citizen Kane,” and the
movie that launched 10,000 careers, “All the President’s Men.”
Yes,
there’s the occasional “Absence of Malice,” about journalistic abuse of
power, or “American Beauty,” where the troubled Kevin Spa More...
MPA Loses Some High-Profile Members—What About ABM?
Tony Silber
The news that the Magazine Publishers of America cancelled the American Magazine Conference, its signature event, and lost three high-profile members in the same week, got me wondering if other associations—specifically, American Business Media—are feeling the same kind of pressure from their members.
I asked several b-to-b CEOs, as well as ABM CEO Gordon Hughes, what they’re hearing. Are big-name b-to-b companies dropping out of ABM? What would happen if Penton Media or Nielsen Business Media or Reed withdrew? Or Advanstar? O More...
This Media Industry Downturn: The Same or Worse? And Why?
Tony SilberOver a three-year period from 2001 to 2003, b-to-b media lost about 35 percent of its revenue, according to the Business Information Network.
During that period, it was common around the industry for conference speakers and writers to describe it as the “worst media-industry downturn since the Great Depression.”
After awhile, we all took that as a given, though no one I know ever went back and actually analyzed the extent of that downturn compared with earlier ones.
I also remember the 1991 downturn. That was tough, even for someone who was a junior editor at the time. There were the usual rounds of painful layoffs. I remember one day when at least six editors I worked with made the terrible walk to the corner o More...
FOLIO: PRIME SPONSORS
Do We Really Need Two Audit Bureaus and Two Associations?
Tony Silber Association and Non-Profit - 10/01/2009-16:10 PMHeard around the industry in the last few weeks, mostly in quiet conversations, but in increasing frequency: Is the magazine industry, in its troubled state, best served by two or more audit bureaus and two or more major industry associations?
In the case of the audit bureaus, the argument goes that with a declining membership for all audit agencies, there's less need for two or more. In addition, it used to be that ABC served paid consumer magazines and BPA served non-paid b-to-b magazines. But that line has been blurred to the point that the distinction is almost meaningless. Now the key point of differentiation is that ABC has newspapers (good luck with that) and BPA has a significant international portfolio.
Also playing i More...