FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

In National Lampoon's European Vacation, there's a scene where Eric Idle, playing an English bicyclist, is hit by the Griswald family vacation rental car (Chevy Chase can't quite get used to those tricky U.K. driving patterns). He's bloodied and bruised, but still insists on giving the tourists directions. When blood starts shooting out of his wrist, Idle downplays it as "just a flesh wound."

I wonder if there's a magazine industry counterpart in the memos that sometimes get sent accompanying layoffs.

Take Penton Media CEO John More...

SEE RELATED: Cygnus Exploring a Sale

I met with Cygnus’ co-CEOs, Tony O’Brien and Carr Davis [right], today at the Kitano hotel in New York. They confirmed the company is exploring a possible sale. (Click here for the full report.)

Shortly after the interview, two of the industry’s leading M&A brokers, Reed Phillips and Roland DeSilva, walked into the lobby and were whisked by Davis to a closed-door meeting in a penthouse conference room.

This story, as they say, is developing ... per More...

Two of the major b-to-b news stories this week—the restructuring at Ziff Davis Enterprise and the massive downsizing at Nielsen Co.—have interesting back stories.

When Steve Weitzner was named CEO of Ziff Davis Enterprise in January, he announced a major restructuring within days. The move surprised observers, but included no downsizing. The downsizing came this week.

But the cuts may have been foreshadowed More...

A year apart, and in two different management regimes, two executives use remarkably similar language in describing remarkably similar priorities.

When Colin Ungaro [pictured, left] came on board as president of the magazine division of F+W Publication in April 2007, he was brimming with ideas and priorities in e-media, events and more. He predicted significant growth for the 60-title company and described a business with a strong bond to its readers, poised for great things.

He left the company in December 2007. Now David Nussbaum [above, right] has co More...

ABRY Partners is a private equity firm. David Nussbaum is a publishing company executive. But right now, it looks like Nussbaum's the most influential advisor at ABRY.

Right now, Nussbaum's got ABRY under a spell. Or vice versa. He's the de-facto magazine publishing troubleshooter for the financial firm that owns F+W Publications and Cygnus Business Media, and in the past held a controlling stake in Penton Media.

Boston-based ABRY named Nussbaum as CEO of its F+W unit earlier this week, replacing David Steward. Prior to that, Nussbaum was CEO of Penton Media, More...

I've been scratching my head for some time over American Business Media's practice of charging speakers whom they invite to speak at their events. Working for a company that produces dozens of events a year, we recognize that speakers are taking time from their schedules to speak at our events. And we wouldn't be able to have high-caliber events without high-caliber speakers. We do not charge our speakers.

I've questioned people at ABM on this practice in the past and their attitude has been, hey, it is what it is. But I wondered, does anyone else think this is odd, especially for an organization that is supported by companies that pay very high dues (our company's annual dues to the ABM are in the five-figures, and larger compani More...

... and it's not just the sounds of Ace of Base wafting from the cube of our online editor. In recent weeks, we've heard CMP describe a new Web site as "investigating the future of the Internet." Nielsen Business Media debuted an online resource center for small businesses that it claims "is like no other"-except it is kind of similar to a site attempted by Hammock Publishing several years ago, notes our own Dylan Stableford.

More and more, we're starting to hear the big proclamations that accompanied the early moves of Web 1.0. Part of it is the confidence publishers have gained as they learn from their online experiments and their mistakes. Part of it is that we also seem to be on the verge of a major shift, More...

I took the headline above directly from Paul Conley's September 30 blog entry about the severe cost-cutting measures undertaken late last week by Cygnus Business Media.

Those cuts -- made in response to projected revenue shortfalls -- included salary cuts through the end of the year for all employees, plus a reduced workweek for hourly employees, and, according to a couple of e-mails I got over the weekend, some unsubstantiated and probably exaggerated additional steps. In his post, Paul outlined all the details, and pointed out how unfair it is to enforce a pay cut on em More...

From the Folio: Show, Day Three: In a well-attended (20 or so people) and excellent presentation on the structure of building an M&A transaction, the conversation turned to "add-backs," the kinds of items a seller will tell the prospective buyer that he can discount on the expense side because they won't be there after the sale. It's often things like club memberships, cars, or if the owner is paying himself an unusually high salary, some portion of that. Naturally, the seller wants to throw in as many add-backs as possible, because taking out costs means profits are higher, and higher profits (or EBITDA) means a high More...

Paradoxically, the magazine industry is obsessed with online media. Advertisers are flooding the online channels, with some publishers telling me they can't create e-media channels fast enough to sell.

Even in my market, where we cover the magazine industry, the growth of advertising online is so significant that it will rival the size of the monthly print magazine in the not-too-distant-future.

That obsession, then, is not all that surprising. In fact, I have in the past predicted that print-weeklies on the b-to-b side are dinosaurs. Especially in the IT space, there is a lot of evidence to suppor More...

There was a time in the summer of 2006 when Folio: ran an article about ABC's new rules for Verified Circulation, and, because of a last-minute change in the map, an ABC ad fell right next to the ABC story. It was my responsibility to catch the unfortunate juxtaposition, and I didn't.

Then in Circulation Management last year, we ran a story about fulfillment services from outsource providers. A couple of months before that, I had lunch with the president of one of the fulfillment companies, who asked me to use him as a source-where appropriate. No press More...

For the second year in a row, Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue features a photo shoot that includes naked woman and fully-clothed men. This year’s March issue is for a story on The Sopranos, breathlessly hyped on the cover as the “best show in TV history.” Umm…hyperbole, anyone?

On the fully-dressed Tony Soprano’s lap is a nude woman, her face turned away from the camera. On Tony’s left is one of the other male characters, also fully dressed.

Last year’s Hollywood issue featured Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley nude on the cover with the issue’s guest creative director, Tom Ford, who was fully clothed. Rachel McAdams was also supposed to be on the cover, but she declined to appear nude. Anyway, that i More...