FOLIO: Personalities -- The Blog People Page

Remember last winter when Google announced their print ad sales program? The search company bought ad space in magazines and newspapers, chopped it up into smaller sizes and began selling it to its AdWords customers. Well, Tom Phillips, with the somewhat incongruous title of director of print ads at Google, sat for an interview with Paidcontent.org’s Rafat Ali at the DeSilva + Phillips Media Dealmakers Summit last week and revealed magazines no longer fit the formula.

Phew, I think.

Newspapers, however, have become the preferred partner for their program. “One of the things we learned was high frequency was better. Daily newspapers are a better partner for us than other media,” said Phillips.

Phillips added More...

Fellow b-to-b magazine blogger, Paul Conley, emailed me a note about his latest post. It seems Ziff Davis’s eWeek has begun using IntelliTXT’s keyword linking technology in its Web site editorial. I’ve written about this before, as has Conley, who this time suggests that pressures stemming from owner Willis Stein’s efforts to sell Ziff Davis have resulted in a revenue-at-all-costs Web site strategy:

Ziff Davis has had a dismal performance of late in print. But online revenue has risen. And that has given investment bank Lehman Brothers, which is advising Ziff Davis on a sale, something to push. And when you have a private equity company and an investment bank both intent on boosting online revenue in the short term to hel More...

Interesting blog commentary and reporting out there recently involving Gawker Media and Weblogs, Inc. -- networks started by Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis that share a famous rivalry. The upshot? How both of these early movers in blog network business models are suffering old-media growing pains. It’s an art-imitating-life moment.

Valleywag, a Gawker Media blog, is reporting that AOL, which bought Calacanis’ Weblogs Inc. in 2005 as the first major blog M&A transaction for an estimated $25 million, is shutting down a collection of its smaller blog sites to focus attention on bigger revenue bread-winners like Engadget, Autoblog and Joystiq. Calacanis points out in a comment reply to the Valleywag post that “Niche blogs More...

I’m writing a story for the February issue on writer’s contracts and how magazine editors are setting them up in light of online’s growing influence. Contracts, and how the magazine’s – or Web site’s – use of content plays out are an interesting reflection of where the industry is pursuing their product opportunities – or should be. The models are varied – some publishers have retained separate online content producers, while others combine print and online editorial production teams. Consider MacWorld, which test-drives some if its content online before it makes it into the print title. (Kind of like what I’m doing here, to a lesser degree, for a story that’s scheduled for February.)

But it’s more than tha More...

Private equity investors are chomping at the bit for more M&A action in 2007 after making headlines in 2006 as the new media M&A rainmakers. Indeed, private equity players are making a splash across many markets, not just magazines and media. Even as small to mid-sized companies are bought out and rolled up into operating platforms, large public companies are taking advantage of the active market to go private – to find relief from Sarbanes-Oxley, among other motivators.

But even as the reporting continues to examine private equity’s boom, there’s a building undercurrent of speculation on when the good times will end. At ABM’s Top Management Meeting in Chicago last November, bankers were marveling out one side of t More...

Chris Anderson, Wired editor, Long Tail author and Folio: cover subject, blogged about his ideas on ‘radical transparency’ in magazine publishing: “If the key word is ‘participation’, how could we encourage that to the fullest? If trust comes come from transparency, how might we open the entire process?”

Anderson takes the ideas of reader participation and transparent, ‘open source’ journalism to the wall, setting up a scenario where, among other ideas, writers expose their stories during the development stage and readers get to help – with downside comments, too. For example:

2) Show what we're working on. We already have internal wikis that are common scratch pads for teams working on projects. And mos More...

Rodale announced today that they’re making some big changes in their org charts. Namely, by giving individual publishers their own dedicated online sales staff while simultaneously training print staff to sell online.

They’re also reassigning online editors to their respective editors in chief—this is particularly interesting to me because it puts online content control squarely in the hands of a magazine’s editor. It eliminates the content divide that separates the two editorial realms. At the end of the day, if you’ve got enough editorial staff to rationally support the operation via print and online, why not unite the vision under one content and policy guru? In Rodale’s case this seems to be not just the editor in More...

It was announced today that Prism CEO John French will become CEO of the soon-to-close merger of Prism and Penton Media.

Penton CEO David Nussbaum has decided that he will leave the company when the merger is complete sometime during the first half of next year. Until today, the b-to-b industry was abuzz with speculation about which exec would get the new CEO spot. Given Nussbaum’s hefty golden parachute, it’s not terribly surprising he’s decided to move on.

Penton filed an 8-K form with the SEC today that included copies of the press release announcing French’s CEO appointment, and a letter from Nussbaum to Penton’s employees announcing his planned departure. Here’s what he had to say:

Hi Everyone, More...

The Bivings Group, a Washington, DC-based Internet marketing and information firm, released a study Wednesday called “Analyzing the Presence of Magazines on the Internet,” which follows up an earlier study on newspapers.

The magazine report examined the top 50 circulated titles in the U.S., benchmarking their progress in “Web 2.0” initiatives: RSS, mobile content, podcasts, blogs, and message boards among others.

It’s a shallow study, interesting for, well, what the 50 widest circulated titles are up to on the Web. Nevertheless, the report falls victim to broad conclusions: “After finishing the research, it became clear that magazines are not making use of Web 2.0.” Granted, the titles examined in the study w More...

Another article covering in-text ad links recently ran on WSJ.com. It’s one of those radioactive subjects that gets its fair share of love-hate coverage. The technology is not new, and allows advertisers to buy keywords within an article that are hyperlinked via mouse-over to a pop-up text or video ad. Advertisers pay a prearranged price when a user clicks on the ad.

There are several vendors that broker this service between publisher and advertiser, selling keywords on a pay-per-click basis – anywhere between $5 and $20, according to the report. In fall 2004, Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT product caused a minor sensation at Forbes.com when the editorial staff rejected its brief implementation.

There’s a place for this More...

Time Inc. has announced that Time will be reducing its ratebase from 4 million to 3.25 million. The magazine will also boost its newsstand cover price by $1.

The statement takes an overtly gushy tone, billing the move as a “bold attempt to revolutionize the way mass magazines sell advertising.” Ed McCarrick, Time’s president and worldwide publisher assures the public (read: advertisers and train wreck enthusiasts) that they’re making a “groundbreaking move from a position of strength.” Freshly installed managing editor Richard Stengel says it’s a “bold step.”

There’s a reason for all the hyperbole: cutting ratebase has traditionally been seen as sign of weakness – or the result of a circulation snafu More...

We’re all back from the Folio: Show, which concluded on Wednesday in New York. And we’ve more or less decompressed from an event that, by all accounts, was a home run -- despite the fact that there was another magazine event in sunnier Phoenix.

Interestingly, and gratifyingly, this was the first year that the show picked up a fair share of blog coverage (FishbowlNY in particular). This is a good thing, because while we could have blogged from the event in realtime, we obviously didn’t. Which goes to show that yes, we all know there’s a place for blogging in our content mix, yet actually organizing our time around all the other behind-the-curtain event responsibilities – from moderating panels, introducing speakers, writ More...