FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

NEW YORK—At the Bryant Park Hotel last night, a discussion sponsored by Bluewolf, a technology consulting company (with the generic sounding title “Future of Media: Preparing for Change”) kicked off with a video clip from 1981 about the San Francisco Examiner’s first experiments putting print content online.

It’s a bit disconcerting that a few of the same major issues that media companies were grappling with in 1981—like paid content models and the Web putting print employees out of jobs—are plaguing the industry today.

During a Q&A session—with media executives from Google to the Buffalo News weighing in—keynoter Clay Shirkey, technologist, professor of interactive telecommunications a More...

In a recent interview, University of Mississippi professor Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni—always good for a provocative sound bite—discussed a number of sensitive industry issues, including publishers committing “mass suicide” by prematurely folding titles (read: Hallmark) and the disadvantages of giving away content online.

Yet, despite everything that is “crazy about this industry,” Husni considers now “the More...

Last week, Amazon.com launched a self-service platform for its Kindle e-reader, allowing bloggers to publish in the Kindle Store using standard RSS technology.

Anyone can sign up for a blog vendor account and point Amazon to their blog’s news feed. In return, Amazon says it will pay bloggers for each active Kindle subscription to their blog.

Before you say, “Yay! Free revenue stream!” keep in mind the returns may be impossibly small for most blogs. According to PC More...

Criticism, particularly the “constructive” kind, can be brutal. But one publisher swallowed his pride to produce a better cover.

With an eccentric self-portrait of CEO William Tincup, Strategy, a bimonthly startup targeted at 25-45 year-old “Type A” MBAs, was featured in FOLIO:’s November Face Up, a monthly profile of magazine covers, which includes a panel of judges who offer criticism.

Strategy was trying to find its niche as a “360-degree on business,” said publisher Matt Pettoni. Strategy's design team took the criti More...

All-type covers are everywhere. Thinking of producing one?

Pros: No photoshoots and the costs associated with them.

Cons: They may not be as easy as they look.

With publishers scurrying to cut costs wherever they can, it’s no surprise that the art departments have felt the strain of cutting back on photoshoots and finding creative, low-cost solutions to effective cover art. Increasingly, magazines across the newsstand spectrum—Scientific American, New York, Money, Communication Arts, Strategy and Business, Consumer Reports, Real Simple, Foreign Affairs and Forbes—have gone the all More...

It’s a question that has puzzled parents—and online publishers—for years: What do teens want?

The Media Management Center at Northwestern University and Newspaper Association of America Foundation recently got 96 teens to stop texting for 20 minutes to find out how online news sites are engaging—or disengaging—them.

Click here for a PDF of the report.

The general consensus—if there ever can be one when dealing with fidgety teens: content engagement, not bombardment, to be key. Said one 16-year-old participant: “ More...

Last week, Vibe launched Vibe Verses, its third annual online rap battle (think American Idol meets hip-hop). This year’s installment features the “No. 1 Stan Contest,” giving aspiring rappers a chance to be judged by artist Eminem.

While Vibe has produced a number online events and promotions—such as its recent online experiment, the Vammys—the magazine is banking on Eminem’s popularity to boost traffic, users to its social network  and, yes, subscriptions to the magazine.

So far, the contest is on track to have three times th More...

First lady Michelle Obama isn’t helping magazine sales at the newsstand as much as originally thought.

AdAge recently reported that Newsweek’s December 1, 2008 cover story on “The Meaning of Michelle” sold 90,000 copies on newsstands, 15 percent below its average for the second half of 2008. More’s October issue with cover story “Michelle Obama at 44” sold just 154,000 copies on newsstands, 23 percent below the second-half average.

Exceptions to this rule were titles like Ebony, which sold 261,000 newsstand copies in September of 2008, up 26 percent from the six-month average. January’s Essence, whi More...

The April issue of O: The Oprah Magazine generated some hype for being the first issue in the magazine’s nine-year history to have not just Oprah as the sole cover subject. (Oprah shared the cover with Michelle Obama.)
 
An anonymous comment on the foliomag.com story (“Oprah Shares Cover Magazine First Time”) read: ”It's all about ego. Do you really think she would share the cover with anyone else? Doubt it.”

Apparently, O is shedding the ego in favor of sales.

On March 19, comedian and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres announced via her < More...

What do Beyonce, Michelle Obama, and Kim Kardashian have in common? They’ve all gone under a magazine’s Photoshop knife and come out looking lighter.

Most recently, Complex mistakenly released a pre-retouched image of socialite-model-actress Kim Kardashian on its Web site with (gasp!) cellulite on her thighs. The photo was only up for a few hours, and quickly taken down when the mistake was realized.

The cellulite, however, was less disturbing than the fact that the photo’s background—and Kardashian—got visibly lighter from pre-touch to retouch.

In 2005, Radar claimed that Vanity Fair lightened More...

It’s not news that ad page numbers are falling, magazines are becoming thinner and at least one folds every day (today? Tennis Week).

But the NYTimes.com has figured out a way to show a spectrum of 96 magazines (a nice, round number) or the winners, losers, and even those already-folded, in a fun, interactive format.

Now, they need one for newspapers.

Maybe it’s the economy. The volume of comments on FOLIOMag.com have been at an all-time high lately.

Here, a few of the more funny, insightful and controversial …

On "24 Observations from the Magazines 24/7 Conference" and Rodale executive vice president and group publisher MaryAnn Bekkedahl’s claim that 23-year-old on an iMac in the café may not produce great content:

“I don't have the answer but I think that a good starting point would be to peek over the shoulder of that 23-year-old with his iMac in the cafe. I don't picture a newspape More...