This week, music magazine SPIN announced its decision to run the lion’s share of its music reviews on Twitter in 2012. Under the handle @SPINreviews, SPIN’s eight staff editors (and a team of freelancers) will weigh in on over 1,500 albums in 140 characters or less throughout the year. The decision comes amidst other changes at SPIN, including an editorial realignment marking a heavier focus on digital.

On SPIN’s blog, senior editor Christopher Weingarten makes valid p More...

The MPA released full-year 2011 PIB numbers today and, as individual consumer publishers already know by now, the third and fourth quarters were not very kind.

There were some exceptions among specific titles of course, which I'll get to in a bit, but in 2011 overall advertising revenues were flat and pages fell about 3 percent compared to 2010.

In the first quarter of 2011, pages jumped 2.5 percent and revenue was up 6 percent compared to same period 2010. In Q2, in hindsight, you can see the slide beginning. Pages were flat at a .3 percent gain over same period 2010 and revenue was up only 2.4 percent.
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In an interesting move, TIME magazine will run the cover art from its December 12, 2011 issue again on its January 16, 2012 issue. The photo of Mitt Romney’s picture is the same in both treatments, but the headlines and positioning of the image covering the upcoming edition will change. See the covers, and read TIME managing editor Rick Stengel’s letter about the Iowa caucuses as well as the cover decision, below.

Why Iowa Matters (Even If It Shouldn’t)

Iowa is an outlier. The 122,000 people who showed up to vot More...

This post is republished with permission and originally appears here.  

In paid content, one of the challenges for corporate sales is finding demand for content that can be monetized – finding a good lead. Our research shows one of the best sources for leads is within existing individual subscribers where several individuals are sharing the access to the paid content. The charts below show a typical example of how to identify an individual subscriber that is a lead for an up-sell to a corporate or group agreement.

The first chart shows the daily use profile for two different individual su More...

Hearst Magazines president David Carey addressed the past year and what’s next for the publisher in a letter to employees sent out this morning. According to Carey, Hearst’s aggressive growth in 2011 (including the acquisition of Lagardere and Hachette Fillappacci; the launch of HGTV Magazine; the debut of brand supplement Marie Claire @Work; and purchases of Red Aril and More...

From delayed IPOs, to buyouts, burnouts, layoffs and more, 2011 proved to be a volatile year for the daily deal industry. The business model for profitable group buying remains out of reach for many, and the industry is racing to figure out where to place their bets for growth. Publishers, merchants and business owners want to know what’s next in the social commerce space.

After the phenomenal maturation of the daily deal industry seen in 2011, a new paradigm will usher in programs that merge content with a seamless deal delivery experience. The industry focus will evolve from deal sites and daily emails to other messaging formats, providing relevant deals where, when and how consumers want them. The year 2011 was just Phase On More...

2011 was a year of redesigns and relaunches, as magazine covers aimed to provoke (and as a result, to sell). Some efforts amounted in positive buzz and hiked newsstand numbers; others inspired seemingly unending rounds of media heckling (Newsweek’s July 4th cover, which featured a very Photoshopped image of the late Princess Diana, here’s lookin’ at you). Here, FOLIO: asks three of our 2011 FaceUp participants to weigh in on their favorite covers of the year.

TIME
October 17, 2011

Publisher:< More...

For the magazine industry, the holiday season thus far has been mixed. The first full week of December brings two pieces of sad news (not including the holiday party budget reductions reported earlier this week—the horror, the horror).

Get Married Media is closing down within upcoming weeks, and Utne Reader is relocating to publisher Ogden Publications’ headquarters in Topeka, Kansas from Minneapolis, Minnesota. The physical mo More...

As you probably already know, if Facebook were a country it would be the third largest country in the world, more than double the size of the United States, with more than 800 million active monthly users. News circulated More...

As far as inflection points go, this is a good one. In a Reuters story, the Financial Times Group says it's expecting content revenues (subscription and single copy sales) to at least equal, and possibly overtake, print advertising revenue for the first time this year.

During the London portion of the Reuters Global Media Summit, FT CEO John Ridding acknowledged the rough advertising climate, which has put extra pressure on digital to perform. The FT's online operation, says the report, now accounts for 30 percent of its revenues.

In the first half of this year, the group More...

If you're in the business of creating, recreating, designing or, God forbid, rescuing magazines on life support, you need to know what the state of the art is at this point.

You don't have to look very far. The dozen or so titles that define the latest details in packaging are on your newsstand.

Some sell well and some very well. And some very well for the past few decades. Examining them amounts to a master's degree in magazine crafts from how to construct a great cover to what's sexy with fashion photography and trendy typography thrown in.

1. Typography
If you want to l More...

Free samples, whether from a grocery store, makeup counter or a newsstand, are largely welcomed by consumers. Give people a chance to sample great products without putting down a dollar and watch the line of waiting customers curve around the block. Aside from the free good itself, consumers will often experience a warm feeling for the manufacturer supplying it, “They really do care!” Companies (retailers, publishers, etc.) know this, and maintain the freebie as an act of goodwill, opposed to what it really is: a bite to inspire consumers to buy the entire package.

Today, The Wall Street Journal opens the gates of its paid wall, allowing viewers to access ever More...