FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

Vogue’s high pharaoh of fashion, the prickly Anna Wintour, has received a high honor from the American Society of Magazine Editors. No, it’s not a new pair of her signature sunglasses. The group has elected the devilish editrix to its Magazine Editor’s Hall of Fame.

Wintour [pictured] officially will be honored at the annual National Magazine Awards ceremony scheduled for April 22 in New York City.

Her election to the Hall is no big shocker, really. She’s easily one of the most recognizable magazine editors—if not by name then by appearance—and has steered one of the industry’s biggest brands for more than two decades.
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The stampede of iPad application unveilings has begun.

Time Inc.’s Sports Illustrated was the first, that I recall, to roll out a video demo of the splashy app it’s been developing for Apple’s iPad device. Now comes Condé Nast’s Wired, which on Tuesday posted a video to its Web site promoting its new “Wired Reader” app. Back in November, Wired said it was working with Adobe to build a magazine application that will enable the publisher to deploy its magazines on a number of digital devices, including computers, smartphones and color e-readers—including the iPad. They were More...

For the third straight year, Time Inc.’s Sports Illustrated unveiled its highly anticipated franchise powerhouse, the Swimsuit Issue, Monday night on CBS’ Late Show with David Letterman. For those of you living under rocks, this year’s sultry cover model is Brooklyn Decker, wife of tennis star Andy Roddick.

Wasting no time, SI posted the behemoth 2010 swimsuit package online, packed with more than 1,400 photos and 100 videos of all the scantily-clan models taken du More...

The technology and publishing worlds held their collective breaths last Wednesday, awaiting Apple’s unveiling of its iPad tablet device. However, according to his Twitter feed, outspoken Weblogs Inc. founder and Mahalo.com CEO Jason Calacanis had beaten us all to the chase. On the eve of the unveiling, he informed his more than 90,000 followers that he already had the tablet device and had been beta testing it for 10 days.

“Yes, it’s true… I’ve been beta testing the Apple tablet for the past two weeks More...

The anticipation today ran thick. I almost passed out at my desk awaiting the news.

Wednesday afternoon, at an event in San Francisco, Apple co-founder/CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the company’s much hyped tablet device. Called the iPad, it enables users to browse the Web, read e-books, watch videos, listen to music and play games, among other things. The iPad has a multi-touch screen with a virtual keyboard and is available with 16, 32, or 64 GB of SSD storage. (The device will sell for $499 for 16GB of memory, $599 for 32GB and $699 for 64GB.)

At the event, Jobs said the Wi-Fi version will be available in 60 d More...

Some recent events have pointed to the acceleration of two trade publishing giants leaving the magazine publishing industry.

After a failed auction in 2008 and closing all but one of the magazines published under its Associated Construction Publications group last spring, Reed Business Information in July said it was putting its portfolio of U.S.-based titles back on the block. Last month, it sold Broadcasting &a More...

The fate of 126-year-old Editor & Publisher is no longer drifting in uncertain waters. The shuttered newspaper magazine was acquired Thursday evening by Duncan McIntosh Co. Inc., the Irvine, California-based publisher of Boating World, Sea Magazine and The Log newspaper.

Wait, what? Why in the world would the publisher of boating magazines want to buy a big-name property that covers the newspaper industry?

"I published newspapers when I first got into this business and have been reading Editor & Publisher on and off for more than 30 years," Duncan Mc More...

Magazine advertising revenue is down. Way down. We know this. Do we need any more reminders?

Needed or not, the Publishers Information Bureau Tuesday released its 2009 year-end magazine advertising report. It revealed that ad pages for 2009 were down 25.6 percent, while estimated revenues closed at $19.45 billion, a drop of 18.1 percent.

While anyone could have guessed that it would spell yet another quarterly decline (the 10th out of 11 since PIB began reporting on a quarterly basis in mid-2007, to be exact) I couldn’t have projected (or perhaps didn’t want to) that a mere 18 magazines would post ad pa More...

The irony here is thick.

F+W Media recently let go Emily Gordon as editor-in-chief of Print magazine. Now, the publisher is looking for a content director to replace her—someone it says will head content development strategy across media platforms, including digital, social media, e-commerce, books, events as well as the print magazine.

When I spoke with F+W president David Blansfield about the change, he declined to speak directly about Gordon’s departure but did have this to say: “A lot of publishers are facing the challenge of how to inspire legacy editors to think and More...

FOLIOmag.com recently posted its annual round up of magazine and media predictions for the coming year, collected from a wide cross section of industry professionals. All in all, we came up with roughly 115 predictions from more than 20 people.

Until we posted it, that is.

Since Thursday morning, I’ve received e-mails and phone calls from another small army of wanna-be fortune tellers—all wanting to add their illuminations about 2010. And, of course, I couldn’t resist. Below are the additional predictions I’ve collected so far.

Do you have a pred More...

If attention is what it wanted, Publishers Weekly succeeded.

For its December 14 issue cover, the Reed Business Information title used a photo entitled “Pickin’,” shot by photographer Lauren Kelly for a new book by Deborah Willis called, "Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present." Willis, an African-American, is the head of New York University’s photography and imaging department.

The cover [pictured] More...

Crain Communications on Thursday announced that Jonah Bloom, longtime editor of trade publication Advertising Age, was leaving the company to serve as CEO and editor-in-chief of budding blogging network Breaking Media—home to Above the Law and Dealbreaker. Following Bloom is Ad Age senior editor Matt Creamer, who will take the executive editor post at Breaking Media.

When I heard the news, I shot Bloom an e-mail to get his take on his departure—what about the opportunity at Breaking Media lured him away from Ad Age. Another question I asked was: Looking back at your time at Ad Age, what More...