Most magazine designers have come across references to the legendary Aspen—a multimedia-filled “magazine in a box” published between 1965 and 1971—though few have actually seen a copy. In addition to articles, Aspen included phonograph records and several issues came with Super-8’s. (For our younger readers, Super-8 was kind of an early Quicktime.) Well, the folks at Ubu have provided a tantalizing look at some of those Aspen pages. The images are not as large as a designer would ask for, and some of Ubu’s attempts at recreating the magazine as Web pages fall flat, but they do provide m More...

I just returned from a sales trip on the West Coast. I am always looking for ways to keep fighting the wacky perception that print is dead, as is regularly reported in print media-Doh! One of the problems was typified by a large client who said he wants to measure the success of a marketing effort on the very next day, and since you could not do that with print, he was only using online media.

Now there are many things one can respond to here, but I want to focus on the metrics. It is very difficult to measure the results of a print ad campaign in a trade publication on a daily basis. It's not how they work. You don't measure the speed of a glacier More...

A tip of the knit hat to my pals at Boston magazine, who did the right thing when the Boston Bruins tried to buy a little love:

"That’s when Wendy Watkins, a marketing executive from Delaware North—the company that oversees the Bruins and all of the various other Jacobs family business concerns—called one of the magazine’s sales reps to ask whether or not the story about Jacobs was going to be “positive.”

If so, Watkins said, the Bruins might be interested in buying a series of ads. If not, however, the deal would be unlikely."

Beliefnet editor Steve Waldman, whose spiritual Ellie-award winning site just got sold to News Corp., More...

Over at Media Life, Rachel, the chatty career advice columnist, gives her best advice for migrating to new media to those "Stuck in Traditional Media."

It seems that for people on the selling side, migrating to new media is less stressful. No need to change jobs as for we sellers the media comes to us! Most often it is just handed to us to be integrated into our product mix.

But when you read Rachel's column it is clear that some view interactive media buying as a fundamentally different skill set from buying traditional media:

"'Some interactive agencies will value y More...

Both Yahoo and Google have released their answers to magazine editors' fun-yet-ultimately-meaningless year-end lists: the Top 10 Search Terms of 2007. And, in what qualifies as a non-shocker, no magazine-specific terms apply. (Although celebrity magazine publishers are no doubt thrilled to learn that "TMZ" was the #3 most Googled of 2007, ahead of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.)

The lists:

1. Britney Spears
2. WWE
3. Paris Hilton
4. Naruto
5. Beyonce
6. Lindsay Lohan
7. Rune Scape
8. Fantasy Football
9. Fergie
10. Jessica Alba

More...

I looked at NYTimes.com briefly this morning before leaving for work. Nothing interesting. Some bishops.

Then I got to the Cold Spring Harbor Deli and glanced at the physical print edition of the Times and was surprised to see the headlines on Iran’s nuclear program screaming out at me. READ ME, it said. This is IMPORTANT!

And I did read it. And it was important. If I only read the Times online, it would have just flown right by. Print is really good at providing context. The Internet is not.

If you are selling print, you need to pay attention to these ex More...

We've all gotten used to the idea of the e-mail interview, the interview via instant messenger (the "IMterview"), even cover story interview conducted via Blackberry (see: Lindsay Lohan, GQ et al). But what about using the Blackberry logs to back up investigative reporting? Definitely never thought I'd type this sentence, but here goes: It appears as though In Touch magazine has become the first major magazine to reprint photo evidence of a Blackberry text message exchange to back up claims in a reported story-specifically, that Brit More...

You don't often see the admittedly arcane subjects of postal rates and magazine circulation strategies debated in the mainstream media, but the U.S. Postal Service's recent rate hikes are back in the spotlight.

Here's pundit Eric Alterman:

"Back in March, the Commission voted to approve a plan pushed by a coterie of major magazine publishers that will likely increase mailing costs for small periodicals everywhere by as much as 30 percent—a crushing burden for many small, editorial operations. Big magazines like Time and Vogue, however, may act More...

This has been building up in me for a long time. All of this BS about publishers fearing the future, worried insanely about going out of business. They can't figure out what is happening and where their place in the future of information distribution is going to be. Damn it all, guys grow up. The future will take care of itself. It always has.

Ask the old parchment makers. Do you know that it took over three hundred sheepskins (parchment) to make one fair sized bible in the 1600s? You do the math. Publishers found a better way to distribute their information. It was called paper. They did it and they did well. Did the public love par More...

"Destitute" may be a bit strong, but this little nugget from FOLIO:'s recap of a Fall MRI report came as a bit of a shock:

Surprisingly, readers of Esquire magazine-which distinguishes itself in its online media kit by touting "while other men's magazines are written for highly aspirational readers, Esquire is geared towards men who have arrived"-have the lowest median household income for adults ($53,783) among five of its top competitors. (To be fair, Esquire's readership has seen a marked increase in affluence since 2002, when it had a median income o More...

Scientific American's recently redesigned Web site is sleek, choc-full of all the bells and whistles (blog posts, slide shows, videos, multimedia, podcasts et al) normally associated with Web site relaunches in 2007.

Probably the simplest feature, though, is the coolest: A cartoon dialogue bubble below nearly every story in which to leave your comments. Check it out at right.

Simple, juvenile even, but it works.

(Side note: I enjoyed the site so much that I'm considering a print subscription-and I hardly ever subscribe to magazines. Take from that what you will.)