FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

First they get a You Tube account. Now the New Yorker is throwing hip-hop dance parties at Hiro and hosting discussions with the writing team behind Knocked Up and Superbad. Such was the scene at the fifth annual New Yorker Festival, bidding to become the most eclectic literary festival anywhere, over the weekend. For starters, a report
from the Sasha Frere-Jones-hosted dance party Saturday:

It's really unlikely that Sas More...

From the often over-looked direct marketing list-spam news:

Direct Media is pleased to announce that they have been awarded management of the 159,000 name Condé Nast Portfolio subscriber file.

Published monthly, Condé Nast Portfolio offers readers a business angle in every story, from politics to art, technology to entertainment and seeks nothing less than to shape the conversation in business. Since its highly anticipated launch in May, Portfolio has offered a unique blend of business news, trends, and the upscale lifestyle, which is sharply intelligent, and visually compelling.

The Condé Nast Portfolio subscribers are affluent, influential executives who are passionate about business and life. They are intellect More...

Maybe those seemingly incessant anniversary issues aren't such a bad idea after all. The Atlantic Monthly says its 150th anniversary November issue contains more than 80 pages of adverting-or roughly 20 more ad pages than it normally carries-and a custom gatefold cover "requested specifically by an advertiser." And in a fit of Web 2.0-dom, the magazine is also inviting readers to contribute 200-word essays online for inclusion in a future Atlantic issue. The self-gloating editor's
note, however, is tough to take:

"Unlike other publications, The Atlantic wasn't created to track a particular identity found on a map-Hollywood's glamour, New York's More...

Fresh off its partnership with Nintendo to revive the 19-year-old Nintendo Power, Future US, niche publisher of music and gaming magazines, has announced it is reviving-or "exhuming," as pseudo-rival Game Pro called it-Playstation magazine.

The move comes a year after Ziff Davis ceased production on the custom magazine. The new official Playstation will be published 13 times per year.

With Playstation, Future US now publishes all official of the official video game console magazines in America: Official Xbox Magazine, PlayStation: The Official Magazine and Nintendo Power.

Here's a magazine event that is scandal-proof and UAB-free: the Australian version of Cosmopolitan attempted to set a Guiness World Record last week by gathering
over 1,000 bikini-clad babes-1,010 to be exact-on Australia's Bondi Beach.
The magazine advertisements recruited the beauties in Cosmopolitan print
advertisements and a micro-site, 30 Days of Fashion and Beauty.

The girls, of course, spelled out "C-O-S-M-O."

As Folio: previously reported, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post launched the latest glossy iteration of Page Six late last month as a Sunday insertion with guns aimed at the hated Gray Lady's New York Times Magazine. What we didn't report: the tabloid's marketing push. The Post has thoroughly (if annoyingly) blanketed subway cars and Metro North trains with display advertising, like the placard above, playing the obvious alliterative "sex" theme. They're even running an ad on local New Yo More...

An odd moment happened Sunday at the Folio: Show during a pre-conference session. Doug Harbrecht, director, new media, for Kiplinger's, effectively dissed the viability digital magazines. "They're doing nothing for us," Harbrecht said. "They're static ... I think people are realizing that they just don't want their content that way.

(Consider, of course, that Harbrecht also admitted that one of the most common refrains heard outside the office is "Oh, my Grandfather used to read Kiplinger's.")

A few minutes later, an energetic team from Nxtbook, one of the show's sponsors, gave its sales pitch to the same room about how digital is growing, vibrant and why people "just do want their conte More...

The New York Times today announced that it will drop its paid online subscription program, TimesSelect, effectively admitting its two-year attempt to charge its Web site users to access premium content and archives had failed.

TimesSelect, which charged $49.95 per year ($7.95 a month) for access to its columnists and the newspaper's archives, drew an estimated 227,000 paid subscribers and $10 million in annual revenue. Beginning at midnight, the newspaper will open up access to its entire site to readers. So what

changed?Many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to More...

JANE PRATT: Tell me about the new record.
MICHAEL STIPE:  There's two of them. We're putting out our first live record, which comes out in mid-October. Our first ever live release, it's a DVD so it's a feature length film that was shot 2 years ago. That comes out in October, and I am going over to Europe to do press for that. But then I'm working on the new album that comes out in March probably.  And ... the band, it's been a really tough ten years for us.  We at times, we're not communicating on the level that we should have been and we were trying to keep a real brave face public More...

Here's some news every publisher in America can relate to:

[Forbes,] the family controlled publishing company that last year sold a big minority stake - reputed to be as much as 40 percent for $300 million - has now sold off its two corporate helicopters. The flying machines include a Bell JetRanger, a nifty little four-seater that used to be perched atop the Forbes yacht the Highlander, and a larger Apache-type chopper used for long-range commuting by the corporate brass and guests.

"Forbes did sell the two 20-year-old aircraft," a spokeswoman confirmed. "We are planning on buying a new Bell JetRanger for the Highlander as More...

Bad timing. EMap, the U.K.-based publisher of FHM, is reportedly having no trouble attracting suitors for its on-the-block company -- it's the topless teens that are posing a problem. According to a report in the Media Guardian, FHM has come under fire from England's Press Complaints Commission after the magazine published a topless photo of a 14-year-old girl without her consent.

The photograph appeared in FHM's April 2007 issue as part of a gallery More...

File under sadistically cool: Consumer Reports has partnered with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety to launch a section of its Web site devoted to crash test videos. Searchable footage of some 200 vehicles tested at the iInstitute's Ruckersville, Virginia testing center can be found at consumerreports.org/crashtest, and the magazine has plans to add more as more vehicles are crash-tested.

Consumer Reports, by the way, is closing in on 3,000,000 paid online subscriptions. As in, people pay money to research what they're about to lose money on.

Luckily for us, the crash footage is free to non-subscribers.