FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

So far, 2010 has not been an exciting year for magazine launches. According to MediaFinder, a database of U.S. and Canadian magazines, 176 new print titles launched in the first three quarters and 127 shut down. That's down from 259 new launches and 383 closures in the same period 2009.

I suppose any new launch these days is still worthy of notice, and fewer closures is a good thing. However, MediaFinder's numbers bring up an interesting anomaly—that launches were higher during 2009 when the industry was still in turmoil.

In effect, 2010 is noted for a drop in shut-downs (good news) More...

Publishers have been angling in this direction for some time now, but Condé Nast's elevation of Bob Sauerberg [pictured] to president is a very public acknowledgement of audience development's role in the corporate structure.

What nails the concept is CEO Charles Townsend's explicit recognition that advertising isn't the only game in town—and neither is print. Publishers have all known this for years, but what's finally emerging here is a greater understanding of the role customer insights can play—and not just for magazines, but all sorts of cross-platform products and services.
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The USPS, as everyone knows by now, is in dire financial straits. Among a raft of cost-cutting proposals put forth by the Postmaster General is the elimination of Saturday delivery. ABM has announced that it is in favor of the measure—to a point.

Facing a staggering $250 billion loss over the next ten years, the severity of the USPS's problems practically overwhelms any challenge by its constituency to dramatic proposals to cut costs—particularly those that pass on burdensome price increases or impact the timeliness of periodicals.

ABM, for its part, has come out and said, in effect, that it's OK with the elimination of Saturday del More...

Tuesdsay's announcement that Forbes is buying entrepreneurial journalism site True/Slant may be a small deal, but the event will have a pretty significant impact on both brands going forward.

PaidContent estimates the deal in the "low single digit millions." The site launched just a year ago, after all, and True/Slant founder and soon-to-be chief product officer Lewis Dvorkin [pictured] told me Tuesday that monetization efforts only kicked in once t More...

The anonymously authored blog Dead Tree Edition has pointed out that Time Inc.'s vice president of distribution and postal affairs Jim O'Brien was down in Washington, D.C. this week testifying before a congressional subcommittee.

He was representing Time Inc. and the MPA, speaking at a hearing called "The More...

ABM held its annual meeting this week in Charleston, South Carolina. Many of the familiar faces were there.

Also familiar were some “legacy” issues that kept cropping up throughout the program. Issues that I hadn’t heard discussed in some time. For all of the innovation we continually speak and write about, there are still some persistent, fundamental problems that are fouling up the aerodynamics. And, no, I don’t just mean the lack of capital.

During the program I was periodically surprised to hear publishing leadership getting hung up with “missionary selling”; or criticized for merely duplicating content across More...

Apple released a new set of rules last week governing the development of apps for its wildly popular iPhone and iPad—which just released a new 4.0 operating system upgrade prompting the new SDK rules.

Both devices have had publishers drooling over a new, potentially game-changing content platform even as they bristle at Apple's control over distribution and customer information.

According to reports on Apple's new programming rules, developers will not, among other restrictions, be able to integrate third-party measurement services in the apps. These would be services such as Google Analytics, Webtrends, and, well, Adobe's Omniture, among o More...

At first, I thought Hearst's new iPhone app division sounded cheesy, but the idea is gradually growing on me.

The division, called LMK, short for "Let Me Know", is a lean operation. Five employees churn out apps that cost $.99 to $1.99 for a "few hundred dollars of employee time," said the division's executive vice president George Kliavkoff in an article by The Wall Street Journal. This thing is built with one objective, load up the App store with as many products as possible, as More...

Adding up the revenue from GQ's 18,000 $2.99 iPhone app downloads is, for now, missing the point.

Rather, publishers should be knocking on Charles Townsend's door with a list of questions about who those downloaders are and what, exactly, their behavior and engagement metrics are like. How many articles were read, how did they swipe and pinch their way to that article, how many jumped from an ad or story directly to a product and bought it?

Yes, 18,000 readers at sub-$40,000 is chump change when held up More...

Where smaller publishers—from b-to-b to consumer enthusiast—form consortiums to attain economies of scale for materials and production services like printing, paper buying and distribution, the mass consumer publishers are setting aside their historically fierce competitiveness to tackle mass problems.  

Across-the-board ad page and revenue drops, online-sourced subscriptions, pay wall models, and digital content formats and distribution are some of the latest battles that big consumer publishers think can be won through solidarity.

It's an interesting concept that can be traced back to then Hachette CEO Jack Kliger's outspoken calls for pre-recession unity to revolutionize rate base—magazines needed to stop competin More...

These latest rumblings about a publisher supergroup led by Time Inc. joining together in a dramatic effort to head Apple and Amazon off at digital distribution pass is significant news. You've got the country's biggest publishers—Time Inc., Hearst, Condé Nast, possibly Meredith—in a bid for solidarity to fulfill this statement copped from a More...

Notch this one for the gossip column, but it does raise some interesting Twitter etiquette issues and highlights the confusion over just what kind of role Twitter plays in journalsm.

On Tuesday morning Peter Ha, technology editor for Time magazine, decided to ask his 1,000+ Twitter followers to confirm or deny a rumor that BusinessWeek was shutting down. The magazine has been on the block for a while now, and official bids are reportedly just being submitted. At this point, the last thing McGraw-Hill needs is a shutdown rumor on the loose.

In any case, Ha's tweet got picked up by a couple More...