Back in 2007, FOLIO: ran a Q&A titled "E: Paper: Closer Than You Think" with Ken Bronfin, president of Hearst Interactive Media and chairman of electronic paper developer E Ink. While some of Bronfin's predictions may have been a bit premature at the time, over the last month, two significant developments may indicate that promise could finally be fulfilled.

First, E Ink announced in early November the release of its next generation display technogy, E Ink Triton, which enables color ePaper solutions.

Next, researchers at the University of Cincinnati may have laid the groundwork for the development of More...

Don't get me wrong, content marketing strategy is critical to the success of a content marketing project. Not having a content strategy is like playing baseball without the bases (envision people running everywhere...not a pretty sight).

That said, I've seen a multitude of content strategies die for the following reasons:

■ Lack of support from the executive team. They fail to understand why they can't talk about themselves all the time.  They don't "get" the idea of content marketing. The brand ends up producing mediocre content without real organization and continues to think that content marketing doesn't work.
■ Lack of setting success criteria. This happens more often th More...

In terms of online copyright issues, if you thought the Cooks Source fiasco that went viral recently was completely ridiculous, then what happened with—yes—Dairy Goat Journal should prove nearly as disturbing, although perhaps slightly less weird.

I’ll get back to the goats in a moment. First, for those who somehow missed it, a small Western Massachusetts-based cooking publication called Cooks Source was jettisoned out of obscurity and came under fire this month after writer Monica Gaudio discovered that a story she wrote in 2005 was repurposed by the magazine, without Gaudio’s c More...

We've all heard by now the merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek—tricked you, didn't they?—into The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, which everyone's already ignoring for the more fun variations of 'NewsBeast' and 'BeastWeek', etc. (How many games of rock-paper-scissors it took during that "coffee-mug toast" to determine the brand name order we'll never know.)

Speculation is now focusing on how the JV is going to More...

NEW YORK—TIME's editors have their work cut out for them this year.

It was apparent that there is no clear frontrunner during the "Who Should Be TIME's 2010 Person of the Year?" panel here last night. "It's been kind of a crazy year in which people couldn't control events like the oil spill," said managing editor Richard Stengel. "Human efforts seemed negligible and that's what's frustrating."

Panelists pretty much stuck to their own themes: blogger Meghan McCain nominated the Tea Party; Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society of Muslim Advancement, named mayor Michael Bloomberg for his supp More...

Negative advertising in politics has become an expected, albeit contemptible, practice of the campaign season. The only thing that seems to change from year to year is the amount and intensity of the attacks.

But politics isn’t the only sector that embraces it. Consumer and b-to-b marketers have employed negative tactics, headlines and copy to persuade and sell, too, including magazines and publications.

Like the sly serpent, negative advertising needs to be handled deftly. Using a broad definition of the term, here are some perspectives and applications.

In his seminal textbook on direct marketing, Bob Stone observed that yes/no offers generated a higher positive response than those without a negative option. The More...

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement yesterday that he had named Hearst Magazines chairman and former longtime president Cathie Black as chancellor of New York City Schools had a number of people in the media industry, as well as a few NYC-based parents, scratching their heads. Granted, Black had a lot of success overseeing Hearst, one of the largest consumer magazine publishing companies in the country. But how does that qualify her to lead NYC’s public school system?

Just look at this morning’s NYC newspaper covers [pictured]. As the New York Daily News pointed out, Black—a Manhattan resident—sent her two More...

I’ve seen my share of advertisements on magazine covers over the last couple years. I’ve seen corner page-peels, belly bands and ad “windows” of varying sizes. I’ve also seen false, glued-on covers and gatefolds.

Something like this, however, I haven’t seen.

The cover of the October 7 issue of Canon Communications’ EDN magazine [pictured right, top] features the EDN nameplate as it usually would, but the remaining two-thirds—which normally is devoted to editorial—is all advertising. The space is shared by an ad from a company called Avago Technologies and a corner page-peel ad from Digi-Key Corp (which also has a More...

This fall, the MPA, the trade organization that once was the Magazine Publishers of America, took an early jumpstart on the surefire newsstand trope by changing its focus and logo, dropping “magazine” from its name, pushing it to its tagline, and essentially stating that the M, the P and the A no longer mean anything.

Short of using a symbol akin to that of The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, I don’t think the MPA could have devised a better update. The insiders-only acronym, followed by the vaguely inclusive tagline, perfectly reflects the state of the industry the association represents.

Yes, it has gotten that head-spinning out there. W More...

The New Yorker subscribers got an unusual e-mail Wednesday explaining that the magazine had reset the passwords for those who never bothered to change the default user name/password they were assigned when they subscribed. Why? It turns out different default settings were needed to keep non-subscribers from being able to access the archive for free.

Here’s what happened: The New Yorker set the default usernames and passwords for subscribers to its digital edition and archive as that subscriber’s e-mail address. Sounds harmless enough, right? But according to More...

The success and popularity of the iPad has spurred publishers from all over the world to adopt the medium, creating a new audience for their printed content. However publishers that depend on subscription sales have struggled to find the right delivery model for the iPad.

Apple's terms and conditions have caused concern within the publishing industry. Many publishers are reportedly unhappy with the lack of data Apple provides on app buyers (their readers), which makes it difficult to deliver subscriptions, and many object to the 30 percent commission Apple charges for app store sales.

Another challenge is that there has been a dearth of More...

That phrase was the title of one of the presentations at Samir Husni’s recent conference, called “Reimagining the Future (While We Still Have Time),” and held at the Magazine Innovation Center in Oxford, Mississippi. The presentation was made by Thomaz Souto Correa, the vice president of editorial at The Abril Group in Brazil. And while Correa discussed many things, there is a particular idea in that title worth thinking about.

Perhaps the future doesn’t exist because no one, and I mean no one, knows what it’s going to look like even two years from now. Think about More...