Just like the magazine industry itself, reporting styles are evolving. Aggregated and link journalism is plentiful; yellow journalism will most likely never go away; long-form journalism holds a nostalgic power, despite increasingly Tweet-ified attention spans; and now, the era of “me” journalism appears to be here for the long haul.

Preceding this burgeoning journalism trend is the Me generation, a phrase that often refers to those born in the latter half of the 20th Century. Iconic journalist Tom Wolfe explored this phenomenon in More...

This post is republished with permission and originally appears here. 

Click-through rate (CTR) is often used to describe the advertising performance on a publisher's site. CTR for an ad is defined as the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of times the ad is shown (impressions), expressed as a percentage. If the ad sales team for a publisher claims 1 million monthly unique visitors with 4 million page views and a CTR of 0.2% (or 8,000 click-throughs), the buyer might think those click-throughs are all distributed across the million unique users to yield 8,000 unique conversions. The buyer and the More...

Given the plethora of solutions available, publishers are seeking the best tools to help monetize their audience beyond display advertising. Yet, even as data becomes pervasive, it is also more highly scrutinized than ever before amid growing privacy concerns. The challenge for publishers is to find the right mix of monetization without risking audience exploitation.

In working to strike this balance, many publishers fall into traps that leave advertisers, audiences and themselves unsatisfied. It’s easy to see why: the market keeps exploding with new technologies and new opportunities. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, yet another evolution blows your model out of the water.

To help bring clarity to t More...

Click-through rate or CTR is often used to describe the advertising performance on a publisher’s site. CTR for an ad is defined as the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of times the ad is shown (impressions), expressed as a percentage. If the ad sales team for a publisher claims a million monthly unique visitors with 4 million page views and a CTR of 0.2% (or 8,000 click-throughs), the buyer might think those click-throughs are all distributed across the million unique users to yield 8,000 target audience members. The buyer and the seller are wrong.

Here’s the problem: CTR doesn’t take into account audience composition. To demonstrate the weakness of CTR to communicate performance, let’s assume a singl More...

Software giant Apple is losing its figurehead, as Steve Jobs (pictured) announced his resignation as CEO yesterday. And as the company loses the man who serves as both its leader and a major part of its brand, people are starting to wonder what is fated for Apple, its software and its policies.

In a letter to Apple employees released Wednesday, Jobs tapped Tim Cook, current COO of Apple, as his successor. Jobs will act as board chairman and director at the company.

Jobs himself is followed by an almost cultish group dubbed “fanboys” in the media; supposedly, More...

The number of magazines folding or going digital-only just within the last 72 hours has us flashing back to 2009.

Linux Journal--which launched in 1994 serving the Linux computing market--is yet another publication whose August 2011 issue will be its last in print. "The big computer-industry trade magazines from the '90s have either disappeared or gone digital," writes senior editor Doc Searls in a note to readers. &qu More...

The speed of the newsstand sales slide is intensifying. And that's very scary. In the first half of 2011 the unit sales of audited consumer magazines fell 10.7 percent to 329.7 million and retail revenue declined 10.6 percent to $1.272.0 million. Since 2001 unit sales have declined 47 percent and retail revenue has fallen 30 percent.

The decline is breath taking, but by now it's certainly not news. The newsstand channel is seriously troubled, but even in its darkest hour there's opportunity for publishers that are not faint of heart. There will be rewards for publishers that can read the tea leaves, properly interpret the trends and act decisively. Let's look at some recent developments as a means of achieving future insight.

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It's time for the young guns to shine.

As the magazine industry evolves, many of the people leading the charge are part of a crop of young, fresh talent (in fact, at the recent Yale Publishing course, Dwell Media president Michela O'Connor Abrams quipped that only she and one other staffer are over 30).

For the October issue, FOLIO: will be profiling 13 of these rising stars, looking at how they're redefining traditional roles such as editorial, sales,production, design and audience development, as well blazing a trail in new types of positions in social media and e-commerce.

And every one of them will be younger than 30.

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Since the news initially broke that British newspaper News of the World staff had continuously hacked into phone systems to scoop stories, the media is still rolling in controversy/pious/Twitter-ready tidbit glory. Legions of reporters and bloggers continue to offer up comment on the scandal; all the while sanctimoniously shaking their heads, “Who could ever do such a thing?”

While I believe the majority of my peers in the media industry stick to their journalistic guns (and I have to; if not, my own morality would be questionable by reporting on the industry), it’s hard to ignore some of the bigger implications of this media circus. < More...

When you deal with a lot of people in a lot of places and have a lot of conversations, along with the brilliant stuff comes very dumb stuff as well.

Inexperienced voices should be forgiven but when the big and powerful make appalling statements you have to ask yourself how they ever got their jobs in the first place.

Here are some of the ones that have left me most incredulous.

10. CRYPTIC HEADLINES DRIVE SALES.
This very respected intellectual quarterly just couldn't manage more sales in bookstores and it was clear that using a single vague cover line consisting of either one word or two (including the usual gerund) was the culprit. The editor was presented with a re-worked cover consisting of a longer main More...

The Borders bankruptcy has been a long time coming. It was well over a year ago when a Borders executive walked away from a conversation in which I asked, in a less-than-diplomatic way, about the long-term chances of the chain. So we’ve had plenty of time to go through the stages of grief, and also to modify our budgets and business plans, and to think about where we would sell our copies when the giant was gone.

All the preparation hasn’t made it easy. For many of my publisher clients Borders was the second biggest source of distribution and sal More...

"Content is king" once again, at least when it comes to marketing services (original content for many dedicated publishing brands is largely giving way to more cost-effective options such as aggregation and curation).

"What's interesting is [clients] want our expertise as content producers, not our audience," says Dave Newcorn, vice president of digital and custom media at Summit Media, which earlier this year launched its own dedicated custom media group.

But if marketing services are where the investment is going, does that necessarily mean there is an opportunity for "traditional" editors, many of which have endur More...