FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

That magazine ad pages are down is not news. That they are down in January is not news either, considering it’s always a slow month for ad sales, and many publishers close their January books in October and November—when the reality of the U.S. financial crisis was setting in.

What is news is how a publisher like Condé Nast deals with such a decline.

According to the New York Times, Allure’s January ‘09 issue saw a decline in ad pages of 41 percent. Condé Nast’s tech title, Wired, took the worst hit of all, down 47 percent from a year ago to 43.6 ad pages, while Architectural Digest fell 46 percent, to 63.2, from 116. More...

On the heels of scaling back Portfolio, folding Men’s Vogue and zapping its teen girl creation, Flip.com, Condé Nast announced that it will close the company’s blog network created by Susan Kaplow, director of syndication and development.

Launched in 2007, the under-the-radar network boasted three bare-bones sites, Product Fiend, Elastic Waist and Daily Bedpost, a small staff and network of freelancers; while the three were originally billed as being separate from the company’s magazines, all display links to Condé Nast’s Glamour, Allure and Self. CN has decided to do away with this network in the face of slowing ad revenue growth.
< More...

Get your popcorn ready.

Britain’s MP Claire Curtis-Thomas is demanding that lad magazines be forced to carry cinema-style age ratings. Her Top Shelf report cites titles like Maxim, which are, she said, “little more than pornography and should be classified as such.”

The reason for the guidelines now, said Curtis-Thomas, is that many U.K. retailers are displaying lad magazines at the average height of a nine-year-old boy. The ratings system will indicate those magazines that should be displayed on the top shelf, out of reach (and sight) of children.

If the U.K.—which tends to be more lenient when it come More...

Have college students put down their beers, signed out of Facebook and stopped reading trashy celebrity magazines? Well, not quite, but according to a recent survey, they just may be opting for more highbrow reads.

Since 2005, Anderson Analytics has posed a series of open-ended questions to college students about their favorite brands and activities. This year, the surprising find from a survey of more than 1,000 students across the nation: Time ranked as their number one magazine read, displacing perennial winner Cosmo and beating out last year's second place winner, People.

Tom Anderson, managing partner at Anderson Analyt More...

While there has been plenty of coverage of magazines misrepresenting women since the advent of the airbrush, a study published recently by the University of Missouri shows that the sexy, idealized women in magazines may impact men just as negatively as they do females.

Women have struggled with unrealistic body image representations since the beginning of time (read: the birth of Photoshop). However, the University of Missouri study shows that men also find women between (and on) the covers of laddie mags, like Maxim, FHM and Complex, to be emasculating and intimidating, yet again pointing out the need for more “real looking” femal More...

While stopping to fill my gas tank (I’m from Connecticut—I pump my own gas) for the Thanksgiving holiday, I couldn’t believe the price—a “reasonable” $1.89 per gallon. While gas prices have been steadily declining nationwide from the huge spike this summer, I was still pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t going to cost me $50 to fill my tank.

CircMatters, the circulation newsletter, recently conducted a study that found single copy sales of celebrity magazines are inversely affected by gas prices. The results of his study beg the question: do lower per gallon gas prices mean the resurgence of single copy sales?

By compari More...

CHICAGO—During a day one session at American Business Media’s Top Management Meeting  here, the Jordan, Edmiston Group presented the key findings from the ABM Financial Trend Report, 2005-2007. The report—which showed revenue from all branded sources as relatively flat and print as 84 percent of average b-to-b publications’ income in 2007—already felt like old news.

But noteworthy discussion did eventually come when the moderator, BtoB/Media Business editor Ellis Booker, asked panelists if once the economy straightened itself out, whether the world would be changed permanently. And by world, he was referring to the possibility of More...

“I think the conclusion that we’ve [the panelists] all come to is that the challenging economy is neither good nor bad for publishers,” said New York Times reporter Lisa Belkin, “it’s just a reality.”

Belkin, who moderated Mediabistro’s sixth annual “Dinner and Discourse,” held last night at 24 Fifth Avenue, challenged six senior-level women’s magazine editors to discuss the future of digital strategy and online content development. The talk, though, shifted to some of the nuts and bolts of cultivating an online audience—and the growing pains that come with it.

Erin Dailey, Hearst Digital Media's Web site managing editor, has been shocked to see the kind of response that some of Hearst’s bl More...

It’s too depressing to enumerate the layoffs that magazines have experienced in the past month or so. [If you’re looking for them, just scroll through FOLIO:’s latest news headlines.]

As print publishing has been hit hard, many companies have made the move to reorganize its resources with an online focus. As Lloyd Trufelman, the president of Trylon SMR, noted in a recent PRWeek story:

“I'm not aware of a single major magazine, especially a trade magazine, that hasn't realized that its future is on the Web, and [publishers] are grappling with how to make that transition,” adding that while More...

The world’s largest store, Macy’s, has decided to cut its entire magazine spend for the first half of next year. This, according to several publishers who were impacted by the retailer’s 2009 media plan.

This news comes amid Macy’s marketing binge, which includes its 150th birthday celebration (complete with fireworks and a gala last week), its annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, and an overflowing holiday marketing plan. A Macy's spokeswoman declined to confirm the print cut, or disclose specifics of the company’s media-buying strategies. Macy's media agency More...

Reality television has shown us that anyone can be a star. So it makes sense that Details announced plans to team with an indie film producer Larry Meistrich for its next promotional venture: a movie based on its best reader submission.

There seems to be few things that Details knows: New York-based indie producer Meistrich ("You Can Count on Me" and "Sling Blade") will help choose the winner. And submissions can take virtually any form, from a few sentences to a finished screenplay.

And that� More...

Magazine cover design is cyclical. When every magazine is trying to be innovative—be it E-ink or loaded with cover lines and type, as Esquire has done—there’s always an urge to move in the opposite direction. The latest (but not new) trend in cover design? Minimalism. Specifically, no cover lines.

It’s a route normally reserved for political figures or prominent global personalities. Time magazine’s famous 1993 cover shot of Bill Clinton might be the most prominent example, but Rolling Stone has also dabbled in the art of no cover lines with its July Obama cover and More...