FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

In an era where every penny of incremental revenue counts—and the time to find it—it surprises me that only 22 percent of respondents to a FOLIO: survey last year said they use ad portals.

It's doubly surprising because often printers provide portals to their customers, making the process almost completely decision-free.

Ad portals automate the process of shipping both editorial and advertising files to the printer. They rely on a Web interface that tracks when a file is received by the printer, and they allow magazine production staffs to approve pages after a review of the page online.

With virtual proofing becoming the norm—an More...

Fifteen years ago I bought the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today every day. Now I just read them online. I subscribed to a slew of magazines, like The New Yorker, Newsweek, American Heritage, National Geographic. Now I read them and many others online.

Why not? It's free. And I'm just not one of those people who needs to have the experience of a magazine or newspaper in print. I like content, not form.

And because my behavior is like that of tens of millions of other people, the media industry is in turmoil. You can't overstate it: The newspaper industry's days are numbered. And many magazines wo More...

The deal climate is terrible. FOLIO: has tracked fewer than a dozen transactions in the last couple of months, and most of them were very small.

Worse, of that small number of deals, at least three were distress sales—that is, where the bank essentially takes over the business.

No wonder the deal brokerages are looking to repurpose their expertise. Berkery Noyes and DeSilva + Phillips, two of the four major M&A firms serving this market (the Jordan, Edmiston Group and AdMedia Partners being the other two) have added restructuring practices recently.

Both were frank. “Typically, a magazine publisher wants a third-party who is knowledgeable about the magazine industry to provide recommendations f More...

I read Simon Dumenco's column yesterday (via Bob Sacks' newsletter). Simon writes for Ad Age and used to write for FOLIO:. He's a valuable observer of the media scene.

The column is the best he's written. He hit the nail on the head in so many ways:

• The fact that this feels much worse than 1991 and 2001.
• The fact that, as Nick Denton says, it's extinction time.
• The notion that this really might be the end of MSM as we know it.
• The arrogance of the Huffington Posts of the world that think they can create meaningful journalism for free—by treating their writer More...

This comment on a blog post I wrote yesterday got me thinking about how people all over the industry are struggling to understand the unprecedented environment of today, which combines the fast-changing media structure combined with a remarkably difficult recession:

Driving revenue while trying to re-invent a business model is a difficult thing to do, it's like changing the tires on a moving truck.

I've lived through the economic downturns of early 1990s and 2000s, and right now, this one seems much worse.

Adding to the c More...

I’m predicting that Hachette Filipacchi Media dropping its membership in the Magazine Publishers of America ("Hachette Drops Out of MPA") is just the tip of the iceberg. Publishers are feeling economic pain and, consequently, the associations, audit bureaus and others are as well. If this recession is long and as challenging as it is right now, there will be more high-profile dropouts.

Think of it from a publishing company’s perspective: Your revenue is declining, you’re laying people off, you’re freezing salaries, you’re not f More...

I read a good column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about Doubledown Media and its demise. Doubledown, in a very real sense, lived by the sword and ultimately died by it. It celebrated the kind of excess and greed that would have made Gordon Gekko [right] blush. It championed the bullying, any-means-necessary culture of Wall Street traders—the kind of culture that blinds people like ex-Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to the profound immorality of their act More...

SAN FRANCISCO—The final day of a somber American Magazine Conference was capped by a long commercial for a mobile Web company called SnapNow and an engaging closing interview with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger described how he relates to Barack Obama even though he’s supporting John McCain. Obama, he said, must have had a burning ambition from childhood to become something great. “I always knew from the time I was 10 years old that I was going to come to America and become something great,” he said. “I didn’t know it was bodybuilding More...

SAN FRANCISCO—The American Magazine Conference is a study of an industry in transition. I suppose not surprisingly, this year’s conference is very much focused on e-media. Of the sessions that focus on the magazine business, seven are e-media related while only six are specifically print oriented. The sessions featuring business and political celebrities have also been valuable, if purposefully light. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pictured, didn’t illuminate much on the financial rescue of Wall Street—I doubt California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, coming Tuesday, will either.)

First full-day highlights included a sessi More...

Penton Media will name a new CEO in the next 30 to 60 days, and when it does, the executive will likely come from outside of b-to-b publishing, Anup Bagaria, vice chairman of Penton owner Wasserstein & Co. said Thursday.

Bagaria’s comment is significant because it indicates how Wasserstein executives view the future of Penton, and that future is likely to be e-media centric. “We’re talking to a lot of people, but it’s more likely to be from outside the industry,” Bagaria told me.

Which means Penton, like Cygnus Business Media and the old Primedia, is at a crossroads.

As formerly print-based publish More...

So the Inc. 5000 list of the country's fastest-growing companies has just been released, and the results indicate that entrepreneurship is alive and well in the magazine industry, despite the waves of bad news recently. A slew of magazine companiesNext Step Publishing, BZ Media, EH Publishing, Agile Business Media, the Pohley Co., Scho More...

Every day, it seems, headlines scream about the challenges facing print publishing.

It’s not exactly a secret that there’s a major change occurring in media, as readers move online and marketing dollars follow.

But how pervasive is that change? Maybe far more than anyone realizes.

At a Veronis Suhler Stevenson e-media conference for portfolio companies in New York Monday, 29 post-conference dinner guests were asked by their host, VSS’ Jeff Stevenson, about their media consumption habits. The guests were senior and executive managers from Advanstar Communications, Access Intelligence and Red 7 Media (FOLI More...