FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

It’s true. FOLIO: now has its own Twitter account.

Click here to follow FOLIO: on Twitter. We’ll be posting, er, “tweeting” breaking news, tips, updates, insights and more, 24 hours a day.

For those of you new to Twitter, signing up is very easy and free.

Here, via the Jimmy Fallon Show blog of all places, are steps to setting up an account:

How to join Twit More...

The market for tennis magazines is pretty small. Now it’s even smaller.

Tennis Week announced yesterday that it is going on print hiatus, shifting focus to its Web site.

Not surprising, given the enormous challenges all magazine publishers are facing at the moment. That is, until you consider the magazine’s publisher: IMG.

To the uninitiated, IMG is “the world's premier and most diversified sports, entertainment and media company. We partner with the world's leading marketers and More...

Here’s one way to use the recession to your relative advantage.

Good—the for-profit magazine with a non-profit ethos—has published a “recession” issue that is 80 percent smaller than its other issues.

The 5-by-7 inch April issue (regular size: 8-3/8"x10-7/8") is just 8 pages, compared to its usual folio of 116 pages, and carries just one ad—a “coupon” created by Aveda just for the magazine.

This is a magazine that is known for doing things a little differently—like allowing subscribers to “name their own price” for a subscription to the More...

Last night, on the 50th floor of the McGraw-Hill Building in New York, BusinessWeek.com’s editor (and tweeter-in-chief) John Byrne hosted a dinner for a small group of 10 readers who “made significant contributions to its Web site last year.”

“This is our first ever but it won't be our last,” Byrne said, via Twitter of course. "It was a terrific group of smart, engaged readers who had lots of good advice.”

He added: “Great meal, too, with chocolate mousse cake & apple tart with vanilla ice cream to finish it off.”

This type of “reader enga More...

The mysterious founder of “themediaisdying” Twitter feed—a running compendium of layoffs and shutterings in the media industry—has been outed.  His name is Paul Armstrong, a part-time journalist and a former communications manager at MySpace. He currently lives in Britain.

He wrote a column for BusinessWeek about the demise of the newspaper business:

If we're looking to affix blame, we should look no farther than to ourselves. At th More...

Following a report last week that the Reader's Digest Association had hired law firm Kirkland & Ellis to explore restructuring options, including a possible bankruptcy filing, RDA CEO Mary Berner fired off a memo to clarify why the firm was hired. Here, via Masthead Online, is the full memo:

As you may have seen, Bloomberg News Service has widely distributed an article reporting that RDA hired Kirkland & Ellis, a law firm that advises in bankruptcy cases and o More...

In a recent blog post, Bob Sacks argued that print publishers have a misplaced, irrational fear of digital publishing. The general reticence of old-guard magazine executives to adapt to the wild world of the Web has been discussed at length on this blog. But the fear part hasn't.

Specifically:

The very same executives that sit in meetings, on trains, and at home reading hundreds of text messages on their BlackBerrys for hours will deny there is a comfort zone for long-form reading in a digital format.

I More...

Some sad news from my inbox today. Ed2010’s daily newsletter is no more. The e-mail, launched in 1998 by then aspiring magazine editor Chandra (Czape) Turner, began as a cocktail party alert for EAs and lowly interns who made it a goal of nabbing that dream magazine job by the year 2010. It grew to include a daily newsfeed and "whispered" rumors of job opening, and included regular meetups, panels, cocktail parties and, eventually, paid classes (kind of like a niche Mediabistro) and a robust Web site—which, I’ll admit, had never visited until today.

That’s because I got the newsletter, and read it religiou More...

The latest issue of Quilter’s Home magazine has been banned by Jo-Ann Fabrics for its “controversial” content.

The retailer refused to carry the March issue because of a feature—dubbed “Shocking Quilts”—that includes images of “fabric falluses,” gun-toting Jesuses” and a “newborn peering out from his mother’s lady parts.” (Jo-Ann Fabrics sells about 7,000 copies of Quilter’s Home per issue, according to the Washington Post.)

The magazine†More...

The Magazine Publishers of America held its fifth annual digital magazine conference, Magazines 24/7, in New York today. Read our full report here. Below, some additional observations.

1. No Wi-Fi. At the Digital Magazine Conference. Wi-T-Fi?!?!

2. More than 250 attendees—a good sign for an association that was recently forced to cancel its signature event, the American Magazine Conference.

3. During his opening keynote, Avinash Kaushik, Google’s “analytics evangelist” (sweet job title), eviscerates News More...

Alain Lemarchand, president and CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Media’s U.S. division, announced a restructuring of its women’s magazines brands today, each aligned with a “chief brand officer,” reporting back to him. FOLIO: had been trying to land an interview with Lemarchand since last summer, when he took over the chief executive role from longtime CEO Jack Kliger.

Alas, the Frenchman gave it to the More...

With all the talk about magazine industry conferences being cancelled (or, in some cases, severely downsized, let’s say) it must give magazine publishers at least some perverted sense of justice that they are not alone.

On Friday, the American Society of Newspaper Editors cancelled its annual convention. Here’s the memo [via Reuters]:

ASNE’s leadershi More...