Baseball is the cover theme of HIU (Health Insurance Underwriter) magazine for no reason other than that October is a big month for the sport.

"There's no deep meaning behind the cover," says freelance illustrator Bruce MacPherson. "It may be the only light part of the whole thing."

Since MacPherson started working with HIU, which serves the National Association of Health Underwriters, the magazine's covers have had very little to do with its content. "I don't read it. I flip through it," he says. It's an intentionally light-hearted approach.

"The magazine is about health insurance," says More...

There's nothing like a practically naked woman to grab a man's attention. That said, it struck as somewhat odd when we noticed this photo as part of the annual gift guide featured in the December issue of Men's Health, on newsstands Tuesday.

The editors used a number of photos from a shoot with Dania Ramirez-a star on the hit NBC television show "Heroes"-throughout the gift guide package. The best way, apparently, to display Fender's new VG Stratocaster guitar was to have Ramirez strip off her clothes and wear it.

"We love women and, of course, we're goi More...

At the SNAP conference today in Chicago, Richard Creighton, principal and co-founder of The Magazine Group, said that association publishers need to look to models "from the other side" in order to create a 360-degree platform to surround members with relevant, authoritative information in the same way that custom publishing surrounds customers.

Creighton suggested association publishers rate themselves in ten categories heavily drawn upon by successful custom publishers to communicate with their target audiences:

1. Print
2. Web site
3. E-newsletter
4. Blog
5. Podcast
6. TV/Video
7. Wikis
8. Mobile
9. Webinars
10. Multiple Languages

A 360-degree platform will wi More...

Gordon Hughes and company at ABM fashioned their Top Management Meeting held this week out in Chicago around a concept Hughes coined as “Brandscape”: Leveraging a publisher’s brand (i.e., the magazine) across an ever expanding product platform.

Hughes noted that member companies are reporting relatively flat growth for their print brands in 2007, around 2 percent to 4 percent, while other products are growing at a much faster clip: digital at a 14 percent average, custom at 18 percent and events at about 6 percent. Events are expected to pull even next year with print, achieving revenue parity. So it goes without saying that there should be some consideration of how publishers are both leveraging their brand identity and co More...

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch announced this week that he intends to make access to The Wall Street Journal's Web site free-a move he believes will attract "large numbers" of big-spending advertisers.

"We expect to make that free, and instead of having one million [subscribers], having at least 10 million-15 million in every corner of the earth," Murdoch said.

News Corp. has signed an agreement to acquire Dow Jones & Co., and the deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter. A special shareholders meeting is scheduled for Dec. 13 in New York.

WSJ.com currently has about one million subscribers and generates about $50 million in annual user fees.

In an October 25 story in the New York Post, Keith Kelly reported that merger talks were underway between American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker and Ron Burkle of Source Interlink Cos. At the time, the two sides were thought to be close to inking a deal, but neither party would confirm or deny the report.

The Post is reporting today that a price of $1.2 billion has been agreed upon, the only stumbling block being that the banks want Source to put more equity into the deal. David Pecker and Evercore Partners bought American Media in 1999 for $850 million. In 2003 American Media bought health and fitness magazine publisher Weider Publications for $350 million. AMI titles include The National Enquirer, Star Magazine, Globe Magazine, Co More...

Spend last week wondering how Entertainment Weekly would treat the Writer's Guild strike? Neither did I. But it appears by putting the strike on the cover [above], the magazine took a bit of a gamble. The strike could've been over by the time the magazine hit newsstands (this morning), and could still be resolved before the next issue wraps, however unlikely. (This is the one time EW has to think like its Time Inc. brother Time.)

As the strike moves into its second week, though, the EW cover looks better and better.

"Mr. Magazine" would like to be known as the "Magazine Police," too. 

At last night's Pearl Awards, put on by the Custom Publishing Council, co-presenter Samir Husni told an amusing story, which we'll summarize here:  

In a supermarket, he watched a woman flip through and read parts of People magazine, then put it back onto the shelf. Husni caught up with her and asked, "Would you open a box of Rice Krispies, dig your hand in, stuff some in your mouth, and then close up the box and p More...

This year's ABM Top Management meeting featured some of the best content I've heard at the annual event (which I've been going to on and off since the late Nineties), thanks in large part to the refreshing openness of many of the speakers, particularly ABM chairman and Hanley Wood CEO Frank Anton and Hanley Wood Business Media president Peter Goldstone, who not only acknowledged the challenges they are facing in developing multimedia platforms but also offered detail on how they are addressing those challenges. Anton made the point that going digital won't be a cheap and easy fix and that publishers need to take the offensive. "Since 9/11, this is an industry that's played defense," Anton said, noting Hanley Wood has invested $ More...

You can't say Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner is a big fan of digital media. The CEO of Wenner Media, which also publishes US Weekly and Men's Journal, recently told BusinessWeek's Jon Fine "we never lost tons of money chasing down ridiculous online ideas." Nevertheless, Wenner has finally chased down what many publishers have been tinkering with for the last few years: digital editions. The last in a three-edition 40th anniversary series is More...

When he took over as MPA chairman in 2005, Hachette Filipacchi CEO Jack Kliger's first movewas to call for the magazine industry and its advertisers to pursue a new way of measuring and evaluating magazines. "Circulation-based metrics are irrelevant to proving advertising effectiveness," Kliger said at the time. "There is too much focus on ratebase rather than distribution. Every other medium deals with audience, we deal with circulation. Why should a magazine advertiser care if a magazine is paid or non-paid?"

This week, at t More...

Moderating a panel of tech media publishers and bloggers yesterday at the Future of Business Media conference in New York, Hammock Publishing CEO and blogger Rex Hammock asked panelist Bob Carrigan (IDG CEO) outright if IDG was indeed quietly planning to relaunch The Industry Standard, the once high-flying magazine that covered, and famously mirrored, the stratospheric highs and crushing lows of the Internet economy circa 1998-2001. After some demurring, Carrigan said that yes, the brand would relaunch in a "blog format" More...