BoSacks Launches Mag Consulting Firm

Bo Sacks Launches Mag Consulting Firm
Thursday, September 13, 2007
http://www.foliomag.com/viewmedia.asp?prmMID=8047#
By Jason Fell


Publishing veteran Bob Sacks wants to help your magazine succeed. With help from two other industry professionals, Sacks this week co-launched mediaIDEAS, a global research and consultancy service providing magazines of all sectors with analysis and advice on a range of topics, including the effects of technology on magazine publishing.

“The industry, now more than ever before in its history, needs to understand the dynamic changes in electronically coordinated information distribution, or what I call EL-CID,” Sacks wrote in an e-mail to Folio: Alert. Sacks, who also goes by “BoSacks,” is president and publisher of The Precision Media Group and produces “Heard on the Web: Media Intelligence,” what he says is the world’s oldest e-newsletter.

“It is a matter of taking our true franchise of content and reapplying it with profitable methodology,” wrote Sacks. “We are focusing on every potential level of information distribution, be they circulation techniques of ink on paper, or pixel distribution through the use of the Internet or eventually e-paper deployment.”

“[F]aced with rising costs, falling revenues, and criticism from environmentalists, the magazine publishing industry has to quickly embrace new technology if it is going to survive beyond the next decade,” mediaIDEAS co-founder and digital publishing specialist Nick Hampshire said in a release.

Hampshire, Sacks and consultant David Renard created mediaIDEAS after a year and a half of researching the magazine publishing industry. In that time, the men have advised and worked with a number of publishing groups and individual magazines, including Condé Nast, Crain’s Communications and Folio:.

“We have worked with the largest corporations and universities, to the more humble start-up publications,” Sacks wrote. “They all share a common denominator, and actually have the same needs and goals … they all wish to make a reasonably fair profit with the dissemination of their words and ideas. We help them do that.”