Week in Review

Short reads on a Saturday morning:

•  Another week, another company filing for bankruptcy protection. This time it was Penton Media. While much of the talk, when these things are announced, is about the decline of print media, the reality is that the real culprit is usually the large debt loads dumped on these firms by the PE firms that buy them. If it sounds like a racket you've been paying attention.

•  Of course, just because a newspaper or magazine company is not in debt doesn't mean it won't close anyway -- witness The Daily Planet. In this case, the problem appears to be that the paper reflects its liberal readership . . . and not the advertising community that is needed to support it. Berkeley is a far more complex place than many understand. It has America's best wine shop, its best bakery, and one of the best cafés all within ten feet of each other.

•  The San Diego Union-Tribune has tapped the Orange County Register's V.P. of Interactive to be its top editor, Jeff Light.  Union-Tribune publisher Ed Moss said they were "looking for someone who brought more than a traditional newspaper background to the position. I wanted to have someone that really understood the electronic end of the business.”

•  Already a big player on the iPhone, Panelfly is ready to take on the iPad and tablet publishing.  This is a great example of how to grab a leadership position in publishing through first to the post positioning. Panelfly's iPhone app is rated fairly highly which gives them a good chance to be adopted by iPad buyers immediately.  On the iPhone, and I assume on the iPad, the app itself is free and gives readers access to a mobile store, organize and then share their views on the comics they purchase.

•  In the area of crazy speculation, there is this story, speculating about the possibility of Google buying T-Mobile. It's probably nonsense. But . . . what would this do to the mobile market? The same thing this company seems to want to do to couponing, bring the price down to zero and play by different rules.  It's a lesson that still needs to be learned by all old media pros, even those who are in total denial: what if the price of the products you offer goes down to $0?  Think Craig's List and classified; think Realtor.com and real estate.

Photoblogging Friday - 6

It's Friday, and that means the sixth edition of Photoblogging Friday.

For many years I used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, still my favorite place in American. While I could not afford to live in the city (after all, how many newspaper people can live in The City) I was lucky enough to eventually work there (thank you McGraw-Hill).

When I was recruited to Chicago to publish a transportation construction magazine, one of the last things I did was to visit numerous poster and photography shops to find myself a nice picture of old San Francisco to take back east.  I had seen a great old photograph of kids sledding down California Street in the old city a few years earlier and wanted that shot. It must have been taken sometime between 1882 and 1887 because three times during those years the city received measurable (and sled-able) snow falls. Sadly, on the day I wanted to buy the photograph I could not find it.  Even today, using a Google search, I can not find that shot.

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Newspapers: if you're going to die the least you can do is tell a joke; have we forgetten how to entertain?

I used to drive my B2B magazines crazy by telling them I wanted our magazine to be entertaining. It may have been something they agreed with in theory -- but in practice it seemed to them an impossible task. How do you make road construction entertaining? How is landscaping hilarious?

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☜ Ambrose Bierce, who defined "Representative" as "a member of the Lower House in this world, and without discernible hope of promotion in the next."

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The answer, of course, wasn't in writing funny asphalt paving stories, but in finding people who had a sense of humor and letting them have at it.  I always told my editors that I wanted, as a goal, for our magazine to be something someone in our industry took on the plane with them. I had noticed that business people generally took magazines from outside their field: general business magazines, or magazines that they found entertaining. Rarely did I ever find someone sitting next to me heading to the same convention as I reading Roads & Bridges -- and when I did I always shook their hands and told them I was the publisher -- then drilled them for the rest of the flight with questions about how they felt about the book, and their industry. Poor chaps.

I bring this up because newspapers seem to have lost their sense of humor. It is even worse online. Remember the attempts of the Washington Post with Mouthpiece Theater?

Humorists have a long history in the newspaper business.  Mark Twain had it right when he said “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”  Ambrose Bierce defined a reporter as "A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words."

In my lifetime we've had Art Buchward (“If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it.”), and Herb Caen (“One day if I do go to heaven...
I'll look around and say, 'It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco!”)

So, here is my suggestion: don't force your reporters to make funny videos. Find someone who is already humorous and let then have at it. Another suggestion: buy out or hire these guys in a hurry.

Outside.in signs deals with newspaper publishers to help aggregate and format hyperlocal news

Outside.in announced that it has formed partnerships with some a number of newspaper publishers to supply hyperlocal news services. The company said they have signed deals with The Miami Herald, Dow Jones Local Media Group, New York Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and properties of the Tribune Company, including Chicago Tribune, Chicago Breaking News, ChicagoNow, and the Baltimore Sun.

Publishers using the Outside.in Publishers platform "can create customized and curated hyperlocal news sections, add tagged news maps, and curate the aggregated news feeds to fit their editorial guidelines," according to the company's release.

The company's release explains that they have managed to get over 4,000 bloggers to be part of the network. I tested their site by searching for local news and found news from a number of newspaper sites, though I do not know whether these sites have "opted-in" or are simply having their news aggregated. This will be interesting to follow since aggregating with a third party could lead to competitors feeding each other content -- something that I have no objection to, though I know a lot of newspaper people who would still feel queasy about seeing their competitors content show up on their own hyperlocal news pages. 

First Questex Integrated VAC reports emerge; show decreases in circ levels, first year direct requests

Verified Audit Circulation (VAC) announced this morning the release of the first integrated audits produced for Questex Media Group LLC.  Questex, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October of last year, had previously announced they were moving their audits to VAC from BPA.

The integrated audit promoted by VAC for Questex's Hotel & Motel Management shows a sharp decline in print circulation: from 49,789 printed copies as shown in its last BPA audit of June 2008, to 42,120 printed copies for the audit period covered by the new VAC audit of April to September 2009.  Unpaid digital subscriptions increased from 4,486 to 5,901 during the same period.  Direct requests dropped dramatically with only 23,574 readers now directly requesting the print magazine versus 39,655 on the last BPA statement.

The new VAC audit for Hotel & Motel Management includes a page for web traffic, listing unique users and page views.

Trade publishers have, for the past few years, been questioning the value of their circulation audits in the wake of dramatic ad page declines and the move towards a greater emphasis on web readership. While Questex announced that they were dropping BPA as their audit bureau of choice, other publishers such as Pennwell and United Business also dropped BPA audits on select titles around the same time. Within the hotels category, Penton's Lodging Hospitality has resigned its BPA, while Reed's Hotels, and ICD's Hotel Business continue to be BPA audited.

All's well that ends well for Kirkus Reviews: finds new ownership under long time reader; editors to stay

The New York Times is reporting that Kirkus Reviews, closed down by the Nielsen Company late last year, will be reborn under the new ownership of a loyal reader -- Herb Simon, owner of the Indiana Pacers, and chairman emeritus of Simon Property Group, a shopping mall developer.  Simon will go into the venture with partner Marc Winkelman, chief executive of Calendar Holdings.

Simon and Winkelman are co-owners of a bookstore, Tecolote Books, in Montecito, Calif.  Winkelman formerly worked for the Barnes & Nobel book chain.

Simon has been a longtime subscriber of Kirkus Reviews. “With the growth of e-books and e-reading devices, no one can really see the future of publishing. But turmoil like this creates opportunities. At a time when even the definition of a book is changing, my love of books makes me want to be part of the solution for the book publishing industry," Simon said in a statement.

For editors Elaine Szewczyk and Eric Liebetrau this may be a dream come true: new ownership that loves the product and is not buying the property for its cash returns -- kind of like owning a local bookstore, no?  Best of luck to the editors and new owners.