Hearst, continuing to execute its aggressive digital strategy, has officially launched its Cosmopolitan mobile site-as Folio: reported back in August-with all the expected bells and whistles, including something called a Dude Decoder, the "ultimate body language guide to find out what he's really thinking," as well as a fake calls service that "calls your cell phone and provides you with excuses to get out of a bad date."

Goofy, "men suck" gimmicks aside, mobile executives at major magazine companies like Hearst-and minor ones, too-say mobile sites like Cosmo's are a "real business."

Here's a quote from Olivier Gri More...

Fresh off its partnership with Nintendo to revive the 19-year-old Nintendo Power, Future US, niche publisher of music and gaming magazines, has announced it is reviving-or "exhuming," as pseudo-rival Game Pro called it-Playstation magazine.

The move comes a year after Ziff Davis ceased production on the custom magazine. The new official Playstation will be published 13 times per year.

With Playstation, Future US now publishes all official of the official video game console magazines in America: Official Xbox Magazine, PlayStation: The Official Magazine and Nintendo Power.

Here's a magazine event that is scandal-proof and UAB-free: the Australian version of Cosmopolitan attempted to set a Guiness World Record last week by gathering
over 1,000 bikini-clad babes-1,010 to be exact-on Australia's Bondi Beach.
The magazine advertisements recruited the beauties in Cosmopolitan print
advertisements and a micro-site, 30 Days of Fashion and Beauty.

The girls, of course, spelled out "C-O-S-M-O."

As Folio: previously reported, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post launched the latest glossy iteration of Page Six late last month as a Sunday insertion with guns aimed at the hated Gray Lady's New York Times Magazine. What we didn't report: the tabloid's marketing push. The Post has thoroughly (if annoyingly) blanketed subway cars and Metro North trains with display advertising, like the placard above, playing the obvious alliterative "sex" theme. They're even running an ad on local New Yo More...

I took the headline above directly from Paul Conley's September 30 blog entry about the severe cost-cutting measures undertaken late last week by Cygnus Business Media.

Those cuts -- made in response to projected revenue shortfalls -- included salary cuts through the end of the year for all employees, plus a reduced workweek for hourly employees, and, according to a couple of e-mails I got over the weekend, some unsubstantiated and probably exaggerated additional steps. In his post, Paul outlined all the details, and pointed out how unfair it is to enforce a pay cut on em More...

From the Folio: Show, Day Three: In a well-attended (20 or so people) and excellent presentation on the structure of building an M&A transaction, the conversation turned to "add-backs," the kinds of items a seller will tell the prospective buyer that he can discount on the expense side because they won't be there after the sale. It's often things like club memberships, cars, or if the owner is paying himself an unusually high salary, some portion of that. Naturally, the seller wants to throw in as many add-backs as possible, because taking out costs means profits are higher, and higher profits (or EBITDA) means a high More...

The Economist puffs into the print-is-dead smoke-screen with a story noting that consumer magazines ‘have problems.' And you'll never guess the culprit: The Internet. Apparently people are ‘spending more time' there and an ‘even greater share of advertising spending' is moving online. How much? We don't know, the writer doesn't provide any metrics.

Worse: ‘Magazine units are mostly a drag on growth for their parents.' How much of a drag? Still don't know. But apparently they're a drag on at least two parents-maybe, and possibly more-because Time Warner is fending off rumors of a Time Inc. divestment and ‘people in the industry' are More...

An odd moment happened Sunday at the Folio: Show during a pre-conference session. Doug Harbrecht, director, new media, for Kiplinger's, effectively dissed the viability digital magazines. "They're doing nothing for us," Harbrecht said. "They're static ... I think people are realizing that they just don't want their content that way.

(Consider, of course, that Harbrecht also admitted that one of the most common refrains heard outside the office is "Oh, my Grandfather used to read Kiplinger's.")

A few minutes later, an energetic team from Nxtbook, one of the show's sponsors, gave its sales pitch to the same room about how digital is growing, vibrant and why people "just do want their conte More...

Editors are faced with not only a demanding and ever-expanding list of must-have skill sets, but also a change in mindset. Two of the smartest editors we’ve spoken to over the last year—one from the consumer side, one from b-to-b—talk about what they’ll be looking for in editorial talent over the next few years.

Alfred Edmond, Editor-in-Chief, Black Enterprise

“At least three skills will be key across the board for people in editorial. First, we’ll need to be better than ever at spotting and developing talent, especially people with the right attitude and degree of intelligence and flexibility.  Print journalists will end up needing to be able to help develop a television show, content for a Web site, podcasts More...

Paradoxically, the magazine industry is obsessed with online media. Advertisers are flooding the online channels, with some publishers telling me they can't create e-media channels fast enough to sell.

Even in my market, where we cover the magazine industry, the growth of advertising online is so significant that it will rival the size of the monthly print magazine in the not-too-distant-future.

That obsession, then, is not all that surprising. In fact, I have in the past predicted that print-weeklies on the b-to-b side are dinosaurs. Especially in the IT space, there is a lot of evidence to suppor More...

The New York Times today announced that it will drop its paid online subscription program, TimesSelect, effectively admitting its two-year attempt to charge its Web site users to access premium content and archives had failed.

TimesSelect, which charged $49.95 per year ($7.95 a month) for access to its columnists and the newspaper's archives, drew an estimated 227,000 paid subscribers and $10 million in annual revenue. Beginning at midnight, the newspaper will open up access to its entire site to readers. So what

changed?Many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to More...

JANE PRATT: Tell me about the new record.
MICHAEL STIPE:  There's two of them. We're putting out our first live record, which comes out in mid-October. Our first ever live release, it's a DVD so it's a feature length film that was shot 2 years ago. That comes out in October, and I am going over to Europe to do press for that. But then I'm working on the new album that comes out in March probably.  And ... the band, it's been a really tough ten years for us.  We at times, we're not communicating on the level that we should have been and we were trying to keep a real brave face public More...