FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

I was thumbing through the November issue of Wired recently when I stumbled across an article on Demand Media, penned by senior writer Daniel Roth (one of my favorite Wired writers). It’s a detailed look at how the online network has successfully leveraged a user-generated content model and become the largest supplier of videos to YouTube. According to the report, Demand rakes in roughly $200 million a year and was valued in a recent round of financing at $1 billion.

Demand is reported More...

In this down economy, it isn’t any big surprise that automotive and financial have been two of the hardest-hit markets. Out of the 12 advertising categories tracked by the Publishers Information Bureau, they saw the steepest declines through the first nine months, with ad pages falling 47.3 percent and 47 percent, respectively.

Another industry that’s taken a beating this year is boating. I was reading the editor’s note yesterday on boating trade publication Soundings Trade Only’s Web site, written by Bill Siss More...

In his memo to staffers announcing the closure of Gourmet, Cookie, Elegant Bride and Modern Bride, CEO Chuck Townsend said that workforce reductions were “underway throughout the company.” He wasn’t lying. What he didn't mention was that the cuts would be made at a painfully slow pace.

The first to be let go, of course, were those employees who worked at the affected magazines. But then came news that its surviving bridal title Brides reduced its workforce by 12 people. Before the week was done, Condé Nast More...

It’s that time of year again. That’s right—turkey time.

I sat down at my desk this afternoon and began opening the stacks of magazines that are delivered here to the FOLIO: office daily. First on the pile was Condé Nast’s Bon Appetit, with a delicious-looking turkey resting gently in a roasting pan on the cover. Next came the herb-crusted masterpiece on the cover of American Express Publishing’s Food & Wine. Then I unwrapped the new issue of Martha Stewart Living, with its “simple and sensational” bird with glazed carrots and roasted vegetables, accompanied by a sweet potato casserole.

OK, I can’t go on. I’m More...

Is there a shortage of people reading “serious” magazines across the Atlantic?

Fifteen U.K.-based magazine publishers think so. They’ve formed the Cultural Publications Group, a joint marketing venture tasked with showing “the breadth of titles that are available at the more serious end of the market.”

The idea behind the initiative, so the group says, is to expose their magazines to a wider audience. Magazines participating in the collaboration include BBC Music, The Spectator, New Scientist, and The Week, among others.

Over the next several weeks, More...

Recently-appointed Playboy Enterprises CEO Scott Flanders told me during a phone conversation this week that he is planning to announce a “strategic repositioning” of the company before the end of the year. While he was mum on sharing any details of the repositioning, Flanders’ promotion of Alex L. Vaickus from executive vice president and president of global licensing to the newly-created position of president, overseeing all of the company’s business operations, shows his commitment to the licensing portion of the business. (In a More...

Ever since Condé Nast hired consultants McKinsey & Co. this summer to help the big consumer magazine publisher rethink its business strategy, news trickled out about all of the dramatic changes that were unfolding.

At first the changes seemed, well, trivial. The stocks of Poland Spring bottles vanished. Weekly deliveries of company-bought fresh flowers on editors’ and publishers’ desks disappeared. Vanity Fair chief editor Graydon Carter was seen—gasp—eating in the cafeteria More...

Brian Nutting showed his loyalty to the wrong group of people—or at least that’s what his bosses thought.

Following the round of 44 layoffs at the CQ-Roll Call Group—associated with parent company the Economist Group’s merger of recently-acquired Congressional Quarterly and Roll Call—the 27-year CQ editor sent an e-mail to CQ-Roll Call Group executive vice president and managing director Laurie Battaglia, editorial director Mike Mills and the entire newsroom, demanding an explanation from top brass in regard to the c More...

Magazine M&A has been rife with rumors and speculation over the last several weeks. One such report came from Newsweek on Friday, indicating that Chicago-based Johnson Publishing is shopping its flagship Ebony, the general interest African American magazine it launched in November 1945.

According to the Newsweek story, Johnson CEO Linda Johnson Rice—daughter of founder John H. Johnson—has approached a number of private equity firms and media companies, including Essence publisher Time Inc. and BET owner Viacom, about them buying the ailing monthly. Through the first half, the magaz More...

Another magazine publisher has tapped the power of the celebrity byline.

The latest: Katie Couric, anchor and managing editor of CBS Evening News With Katie Couric, was named a monthly columnist at Condé Nast’s Glamour magazine. Each month, Couric will write a Q+A on a subject—an athlete, musician, politician, you name it—who she thinks is inspiring to women and girls.

Couric [pictured] is going straight to the top for her first column, to be featured in the December issue: First Lady Michelle Obama.

"It's not just that she's a dominant figure in news to them, which she is,” Glamour editor-in-chief More...

South Carolina Republican representative Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s speech to Congress on health care. Tennis player Serena Williams’ on-court, expletive-laden tirade. Kanye West’s aggressive—however not altogether unusual—behavior during MTV’s Music Video Awards.

They all make good headlines. But the Hallmark Channel, a division of Hallmark Cards, wants to know: Has civilization lost its civility? In an affront to all the vitriol that continually makes up news headlines and TV news programs, the Hallmark Channel has created CelebrityGoodLife.com, a si More...

I know it’s a wild time in magazine publishing, but this is just crazy.

Lori Lippman, publisher of Tuscon, Arizona-based Fitness Plus magazine, is said to be considering shutting down the nearly 25-year-old free monthly after one of her employees was violently attacked outside the magazine’s office—twice.

On September 3, Lippman’s receptionist was stabbed in the parking lot by a man she said was trying to break into a co-worker’s vehicle. The receptionist was apparently attacked again on Monday, but was not harmed. The attacker, who she said again had a knife, ran off after she sprayed him with pepper spray. Poli More...