After an acquisition, some staff turnover is expected. But when that acquisition also means moving the brand halfway across the country, you'd better be ready to do some significant rebuilding of personnel.

This rings especially true when a magazine relocates from, say, New York to Wisconsin—as happened with Discover magazine after Waukesha-based Kalmbach bought it.

Privately-owned Kalmbach, an enthusiast, craft and hobbyist publisher with titles such as Astronomy, Model Railroader and Cabin Life, among others, More...

NEW YORK—At MPA Digital’s Social Media Summit Thursday, Ethan Grey, vice president of digital with the association, revealed results from its latest study slated to be released in January.

The data, which was conducted with Gfk MRI and surveyed 796 adults aged 18-plus who owned a tablet, shows that in general, tablet owners prefer to buy yearly subscriptions to digital magazines. About 56 percent of respondents prefer to purchase a one-year subscription, 31 percent prefer to buy monthly subscriptions, 11 percent normally buy half-year subscriptions and just 2 percent prefer multi-year subscriptions.

Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  He could have been describing today’s publishing landscape. We work with many publishers, and are continually reminded of the importance of sales planning. There is no final answer:  The situation is fluid and plans must be updated, revised and, sometimes, jettisoned.

There are more ways for a publisher to generate revenues today than ever before. There is much more for salespeople to learn and remember, and far more ways to go wrong in areas only tangentially related to traditional publishing. It is unclear which will be the winning strategies as magazine brands extend beyond the p More...

The U.S. Postal Service appears to be gearing up for an entrance into the magazine retail market, according to meeting notes from the Mailers' Technical Advisory Committee (MTAC) quarterly meetings over the past year. Traditional newsstand sales have been discussed, as well as digital options via USPS.com and mobile devices.

A summary of the group's most recent November gathering--first mentioned this weekend on the blog Dead Tree Edition--notes: &quo More...

Media companies, and especially those in the b-to-b space, are increasingly reliant on events as a vital way to diversify a portfolio. Yet, as reported by FOLIO: today, even growth in the events sector seems to be slowing.

However, harnessing the power of social media is one way that media companies can hold the attention of customers and consumers beyond the week or month a magazine is on sale--or an event is in session. That was one takeaway provided by Eric Ly, the co-founder of LinkedIn and keynote speaker at the International Association of More...

Whenever you do a promotion, it is always worthwhile building in a test—you can learn so much from testing and there are so many different things you can try.

While $60.00 can sound like quite a lot of money, expressed as 60 cents per 100 issues can somehow seems far cheaper. How do I know this? I recently got this offer from The Economist and I subscribed straight away. In fact, my eyes were so focused on the “60 cents” when I got to the check out page and saw the amount of $60.00, I had a moment of panic—but I subscribed all the same.

If you cannot test a price, test a term—$60.00 for one year or $35.00 for six months. A test of this type will tell you lots about your readers and if the test More...

An essay by Craig Mod has been making the rounds lately among media watchers. It's a terrific read. Mod, a current independent writer and former Flipbook employee, touts what he's calling the Subcompact Manifesto, which places a premium on a minimalist approach to digital publishing.

His manifesto emerges out of one of the main criticisms 'traditional' publishers have received for their tablet magazines and apps: They're unwieldy, hard to use, have too many bells and whistles and take up too much room. But most importantly, they're tied to print production schedules, desi More...

Business-to-business marketers are underutilizing social media and its potential, according to new data from Eloqua, a marketing automation company. Of 548 b-to-b marketers surveyed by Eloqua, about 40 percent say they are not yet using social media marketing. Additionally, about 25 percent of respondents say they don’t know how their company plans to use social media marketing in the future.

Although many departments may contribute to social media, respondents say that social networking platforms are most often managed by a public relations department (26 percent), followed by a variety of departments (23 percent) or a website team (11 percent). Still, about 23 percent of More...

Media buyers who buy the products publishers sell now divide the media they manage into three categories:

• Earned media, largely social media where organizations "earn" exposure by posting content on services like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

• Owned media, media a marketer owns like their company website, newsletter, or blog.

• Paid media, third party media, which is most of what publishers sell to marketers.

But consider the emotional message these labels send.

"Owning" your own media makes marketers fee More...

For much of the last year, my colleagues and I have been working through a redesign of the home page of our flagship site, TheAtlantic.com. From whiteboard sketches and Google docs to Dunkin’ Donuts and the occasional conference-call squabble, we completed the project thanks to the standard tools of 21st-century workplace collaboration.

What was surprising, though, is how quickly the undertaking turned from “sprucing up the home page” to “what is our mission and how should we achieve it?” Midway More...

By 2017, about 600 million televisions worldwide will be connected to the Internet, at least according to the Connected TV Forecasts report from Digital TV Research.

At the start of the decade there were an estimated 48 million Internet connected televisions in the United States or 45 percent of the global total. By 2017, it is expected that there will be 147 million Internet connected televisions in the U.S., which will account for 25 percent of the global total. China will have 93 million connected TVs by 2017, up from a mere 2 millio More...

If your sales staff sells traditional media, understanding how paid search works is a big plus. Today, about half of all online ad dollars go to search, so it is important to understand where most of online money now goes.

The first step is for media reps is to ask clients how much of their ad budget goes to search. Many are surprised at how much of the marketing plan goes to a format that started in its current form only 12 years ago—2000 was the year Google first started selling advertising based on keywords.

The year search really broke out was 2008. In that year Google indexed a trillion web pages, but more importantly, More...