Did you see the new Apple Newsstand magazine called Huffington.? Arianna (I don’t know her but that is how she signed the introductory editor’s letter so I guess we are on a first name basis) tells us that “Huffington’s content will emphasize the rich—and richly rewarding—interactions that come from uninterrupted time spent in the company of creative minds.” Oh, dear. That grand statement comes after a 2-page ad for Prius V that, because as in true print magazine format, Huffington. must be read vertically (no turning of yo More...

Granted, there’s not many things more certain than death and taxes but I found one more: any time I started off a declaration with the phrases “Back in my day…” or “When I was YOUR age…” with one of my classes of Introduction to Writing & Reporting at the University of South Alabama, I could pretty much guarantee a room full of collective eye rolling. “Is that when you drove your Model T to school?” one of the class clowns would invariably smirk.

In this particular instance I was explaining to the room of Gen Y-ers that in my first job as a newspaper reporter I went to what is known as a public library and did research…in BOOKS! Well, they were largely unimpressed, and why shouldn’t they be? For the unin More...

Hearst can’t catch a break. Shortly after the dust settled (more or less) around the Seventeen/Photoshop controversy, a new crusade against another female-centric title (Cosmopolitan) began. According to a press statement released this week, Victoria Hearst (granddaughter of Hearst Corp. founder William Randolph Hearst) partnered with Projectinspired.com founder Nicole Weider in an “Anti-Cosmo Mission.”

The Mission requests Cosmo not change its content, but “take responsibility for it,” according to Weider. More...

Publishers have always known the foundational role content plays in engaging an audience. However, with content now playing a starring role for all digital strategies, as well as demand generation campaigns, clients and agencies are beginning to ask a lot more questions about content.

Marketing executives are looking to build their own content libraries and are turning to their publishing partners for guidance and support creating the right content, and distributing it successfully to support both their branding and revenue initiatives.

To better understand how emerging technologies and media options influence audience behavior, our DemandGen Report publication recently conducted a More...

Remember Quark? Not so long ago, when InDesign was just a rumor, it would have been unthinkable for a publisher to design and create a print magazine without QuarkXPress. Those who clung to PageMaker were scorned as being hopelessly behind the times. Even some at Adobe were privately worried that Quark’s hegemony could not be challenged.

Fast forward to the print/web/mobile/tablet/whatever era. InDesign rules in many publishers’ minds and budgets. Quark—both the company and its products—are disregarded, even disdained. “That’s just the way it is; some things will never change,” as the song goes.

Nothing is permanent, least of all in publishing technology. On More...

It’s sad but true, Virginia—less than half of IT decision makers consider the marketing content they receive from the vendor community to be of any use. How do we know this? We polled them of course! Surveys never lie, but there’s reason to believe that this one was particularly accurate. For one thing, the sample was quite sizeable—over 860 corporate IT buyers. For another, its conclusion is supported by droves of anecdotal evidence: Literally dozens of formal interviews, casual conversations and email exchanges that we’ve conducted with corporate IT managers during the past year echo this view. (A survey and whitepaper, “Tech Marketing Best Practices: The Complex Purchasing Process” can be downloaded More...

In my May article, Creative Suite 6 and the Bottom Line, I described Adobe's new Creative Cloud (CC) approach-licensing its applications under a subscription model as an alternative to a traditional shrink-wrap license. Benefits include convenience, early access to incremental releases of Creative Suite (CS) applications, as well as access to newer applications not part of CS. What was discussed but not fully defined was the concept of "team licensing."

In a nutshell, CC team members have the same access to Adobe applications as individual CC subscribers, plus additional benefits, including more online storage, increased access to the Typekit Web font li More...

Jason Pontin, editor of MIT’s Tech Review, recently announced that, after much pain and expense, the Tech Review is abandoning native apps for the iPad and other mobile devices. Describing the publications experience with app development—which involved spending $124,000 on software development and selling only 353 iPad subscriptions—Pontin reports that, “Like almost all publishers, I was badly disappointed. What went wrong? Everything.”

It didn’t have to be this way. Tablets like the iPad offer rich possibilities for telling engaging stories that take readers well beyond the print experience, with the portability to enjoy that experience an More...

Journalists get a bum rap these days if they don’t “write for the Web” in an optimized manner, or if they write stories that are too long and detailed (I still miss the twenty-page profiles of Amazon butterflies in The New Yorker from decades past).

There are just too many rules about writing, these days. We have all of the Twitter-pated editors and publishers spewing out 140-word stuff, which is sometimes nonsense (I am guilty of this, too—felt kind of dumb last weekend, so I tweeted about the weather).

So I guess—as a businessperson with a J-degree—I pity the journalist who is being bombarded with figuring out ways to make a buck. It used to be that they could write smart things and the sales folk w More...

On May 12, TIME managing editor Rick Stengel spoke at Indianapolis’ Butler University graduation ceremony. While such a large media presence likely excited the recent grads at first, some of what Stengel said must have left the crowd a bit...perplexed.

As FOLIO: sister publication min points out, one quote shows promise for an insightful speech, as Stengel reflects on the difference between information and knowledge: “Information is data; knowledge is understanding. Information is statistics; knowledge is insight. Information is foreground; knowledge is background.”

But then he quickly takes More...

Piano playing cat viral videos, engaging TedTalks on renewable energy, killer blogs and real-time information feeds are creating a transformational shift that continues to redefine the boundaries of advertising. Agencies today are actually spending money in the hopes of creating the next cheap-looking viral video, as shown in a recent episode of The Pitch on AMC. But these are short term tactics, with an inherently short shelf life in many cases; one that can be quickly replaced by the next viral video. These strategies don’t build a cohesive brand or identity – something that you want to be remembered for.

At UBM TechWeb, we share many of the same challenges most marketers face. But we are in a unique position in that we hav More...

If TIME's latest cover sets the newsstand a-buzz as much as it has the social web it should have a hit on its hands. The May 21st U.S. edition touts a cover story about "attachment parenting" by featuring a young mother nursing her 3-year-old son who's standing on a chair and attached to her left, mostly exposed, breast. Both stare straight into the camera with practiced ennui.

With the main cover lines shouting "Are You Mom Enough?" the cover is casually confrontational while subtly daring you to judge the concept itself.

More...