Where Mail Goes To Die

By KITTY CAPARELLA & DAVE DAVIES
TWO WEEKS after the Boothwyn Fire Company, in Delaware County, mailed fundraising letters for its volunteer ambulance service last summer, director Tim Murray noticed that no checks were coming in.

The reason?

His fundraising appeals wound up in the U.S. Postal Service's Southwest Philadelphia distribution plant, where mail goes to slow down, and sometimes to die.

And it wasn't only the fire company. Customers throughout the region have complained of late deliveries and lost mail.

No wonder.

In interviews with the Daily News, postal service employees and a manager have described chaotic conditions in the chronically understaffed plant, which processes nearly six million pieces of mail a day on Lindbergh Boulevard near Island Avenue.

In recent months, a manager and several employees said, unsorted mail sat for weeks in overflowing bins on the plant floor or was stuffed into trailers in the parking lot and - in some cases - even shipped in desperation to other distribution plants, from where it often returned for sorting days later.

In some cases, the mail was destroyed, the employees said.

The postal employees and a manager spoke to the Daily News on condition of anonymity, saying they feared retribution if they spoke publicly.

The workers interviewed by the Daily News said the severe staffing shortages were the result of a year-long overtime ban.

A complaint filed by the postal workers' union with the USPS Office of Inspector General alleges that a senior manager and others ordered clerks to falsify the daily mail report, undercounting the volume by hundreds of thousands of pieces of mail, to save costs and overtime.

"The mail is here. You'd have to be blind not to see it," said a veteran employee.

"What really hurts me is the [possibility] that these [fake] numbers were used in determining how many employees were outsourced in Philadelphia," said Byron Murtaugh, APWU assistant clerk craft director and a 20-year postal employee.

In August, USPS officials here announced that 162 employees are to be transferred in January.

A lead senior manager and other managers received performance bonuses that were "fraudulently obtained, through the systematic falsification of official government reports, the diversion of mail, and the destruction of mail," the union complaint alleged.

"These [are] serious allegations of misconduct," said Nancy B. Lassen, the attorney who filed the complaint on behalf of American Postal Workers Union Local 89. "It is so systemic that it has become institutionalized at the Philadelphia plant."

The complaint also charged that the daily color codes on mail bins were changed to make it appear as if mail was not late.

Several veteran postal clerks told the Daily News that they were aware daily mail reports were being falsified and the daily color codes changed.

A union investigation, initiated by Gwen Ivey, Local 89 president, reached the same conclusion.

It appears the OIG has taken the complaint seriously.

After it was filed, investigators seized the computer assigned to a clerk identified in the complaint as having been directed by a senior manager to falsify the daily mail reports, postal employees and an independent knowledgeable source said.

Agapi Doulaveris, spokeswoman for the Office of Inspector General, said the OIG is conducting an audit of the plant "to see that service and performance standards are being met."

If auditors find wrongdoing, they would notify OIG investigators, Doulaveris said. An audit usually takes about two months.

Doulaveris declined to comment about a seized computer, and had no information about any bonuses managers may have received.

Locally, Postal Service spokeswoman Cathy Yaroski said the Postal Service is "proud of the service its employees are providing its customers," but declined to comment on the allegations of doctored records, and declined to make three managers available for interviews.

The Postal Service's high-tech, $300 million processing center opened on Lindbergh Boulevard in 2006, replacing the central sorting operation at 30th Street.

It was soon plagued with problems, exacerbated by the elimination of jobs and transfer of 656 postal workers.

Last year's delays were documented in a report by the OIG, which concluded that operations had improved earlier this year. The report was released on July 10, as the unsorted mail bins multiplied on the floor, blocking passageways, employees said.

Daily mail reports and corresponding handwritten worksheets reviewed by the Daily News support employees' claims that mail at the plant was being undercounted.

A majority of them showed that a lower volume of mail was processed than indicated by worksheets the reports were drawn from.

On Sept. 28, for example, the daily report understated the mail processed at the plant by about 750,000 pieces.

"In the past, the mail was curbed a little, but not by a million pieces," said an employee. Senior managers "are more concerned about their bonuses than the customers."

USPS records reviewed by the Daily News also showed a steep decline in overtime at the plant this year.

The backlog grew worse during employees' summer vacations, creating what a manager called "a snowball effect."

"I feel bad the mail is sitting there," said the manager, who was unaware of the alleged undercounting. "It's not fair to customers."

Veteran employee and union steward Nick Caselli, who worked on the dock, said some nights he's seen from two to four trailers parked, stuffed with mail that should have been unloaded and processed.

During the day, another employee said, as many as six to 13 trailers were parked on the lot. If mail is in a trailer, it's not included in the daily count.

In September, Caselli said, three 38-foot trailers of unprocessed mail were diverted to a distribution plant in Horsham, only to return unprocessed two days later.

In addition, some first-class mail was left in unsorted "waste bins" with second- and third-class, including time-sensitive periodicals and circulars, employees said.

After these sat for weeks, the mail was destroyed, say employees and a manager.

In a written response, Yaroski, the USPS spokeswoman, said the Postal Service has "procedures in place to ensure our mail is processed timely and delivery standards are met."

Yaroski noted that a study conducted for the processing center showed that 96 percent of first-class mail arrives within one day, though she acknowledged the survey didn't say how late the other 4 percent might be.

Asked about on-time performance of second- and third-class mail - the main problem at the plant - Yaroski said the USPS recently began collecting that data, but none is available for release.

While workers at the southwest plant struggled to cope with the chaos, customers in the 191- and 190- zip codes in the Philadelphia area were paying a high price, with late deliveries, delayed bill payments, missed department store sales circulars and even lost wedding invitations.

An Oct. 21 regional USPS memo reported that Philadelphia ranked dead last in the country in delivery times for J.C. Penney mail, for example.

Publications, such as Time, TV Guide, and the Catholic Standard and Times, were chronically late, and time-sensitive circulars from supermarkets and other businesses were sometimes destroyed, the manager and employees told the Daily News.

When the Boothwyn Fire Company's Tim Murray complained to the Postal Service about his missing fundraising letters in August, he got nowhere.

"It wasn't until after I contacted [U.S. Rep.] Joe Sestak's office that some of the mailing started arriving," Murray said. "It finally showed up five and a half weeks after we mailed it, but it was only part of it."

About the time the Boothwyn mailing disappeared last summer, overtime at the plant was virtually prohibited, despite 30 or more employees on vacation each week, according to a manager and employees.

Murray always includes a mailing to himself. It finally arrived in November, four months late.

The fiasco cost the ambulance company between $4,000 and $6,000 in lost revenue, not to mention the $500 cost of the mailing.

Others have reported mail problems: A Philadelphia plumber whose payment from a customer arrived a month after it was postmarked; a well-wisher whose get-well card was returned three months after it was sent; a lawyer who sent invitations to a reception that arrived eight days later, after the event had occurred.

A manager explained that "third-class, or standard, mail backs up mostly - sale circulars, advertisements, credit card offers . . ."

Companies "pay money to send time-sensitive offers, and they get discounts for bulk mail. But if the mail sits, that's false advertising," the manager said. "They are not getting the delivery standard they expect.

"A lot of times, it isn't getting to homes until two, three weeks later, and a lot of times [homes] are not getting it at all," the manager added.

Chip Lillie, a senior vice president at Elwyn-based Choice Marketing Inc., said he's become so frustrated with delays at the Philadelphia plant that he now takes mail shipments to the Postal Service Center in Bellmawr, N.J.

"Mysteriously, mail headed to Philadelphia-area addresses seem to get delivered from there without much delay," he said.

Some companies track their mail on a computer, the manager said.

"They throw a fit when it's not on time. Those companies know how to put a fire under somebody to get mail delivered." *

BoSacks Speaks Out: ASME Sets New Edit-Ad Guidelines

BoSacks Speaks Out; As the article suggests, the jury is still out on whether ASME will tighten or loosen the rules for keeping ads and edit apart.

Here is a firm promise and a prediction from BoSacks: if they loosen the rules, I will go editorially and ferociously ballistic. The industry has been on the edge of having or not having integrity for years. If the American Society of Magazine Editors takes the low road and decides that honor and integrity need have no place in the magazine industry, then they will surely reap what they sow.

There are reasons for the separation of church and state in both government and publishing. Integrity is a simple thing, and I make it a practice not to do business with those to whom integrity is a missing component. It's a simple rule and one that the public understands as well. It seems that the various divisions of our beloved industry each has their own nail for the coffin of our demise.

What do you think? Should we loosen the rules? Should we at last finally become known as advertorial media?


I ran the wrong kind of business, but I did it with integrity.
Sydney Biddle Barrows, ''Mayflower Madam' Tells All,' Boston Globe, 1986

Mag Bag: ASME Sets New Edit-Ad Guidelines
by Erik Sass,
http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.san&s=95213&Nid=49647&p=263991


The American Society of Magazine Editors is tweaking the rulebook for keeping edit and ad content separate, according to a story in Adweek earlier this week. The new rules should be ready for approval by ASME's board by the middle of next year.


The exact substance of the changes--stricter or looser standards--is unclear. On the one hand, ASME's current chief executive Sid Holt conceded: "We've had situations where we've seen violations of the spirit of the guidelines, but not the guidelines themselves"--seeming to suggest that new stringency is in order. On the other hand, "we want them to be more industry-friendly in that they make sense to editors and advertisers alike."

So what "makes sense"? If recent moves by ASME members are anything to judge by, the new guidelines will loosen restrictions on integration of advertising into magazine cover art and headlines. This is one area where advertisers have been especially aggressive with their demands for more mingling of advertising and editorial content.

For example, the September issue of Esquire featured a blinking, flashing electronic display designed by E-ink and sponsored by Ford, although Ford was not mentioned on the cover. The high-profile cover led directly to a Ford ad spread in the front of the magazine that takes credit for the innovative front. The August 10 issue of The New York Times Magazine came with a cover wrap purchased by U.S. Trust, Bank of America's private-wealth management division, to promote its philanthropic financial products.

Last December, New York magazine sold a four-page cover wrap to the New Museum. Last year, Harper's Bazaar delivered 5,000 VIP copies that came embedded with "crystals"--courtesy of Swarovski, also an advertiser. In 2005, The New Yorker produced a single-sponsor issue for Target that incorporated the Target logo's distinctive red-and-white coloring on the cover as well as inside the magazine.

Requests for integration are attractive to magazines, given the drop in ad revenue. Through November, total ad pages are down 8.5% at over 200 weekly and monthly titles tracked by MIN Online.

Magazines Get Clever with their Advertising

Magazines Get Clever with their Advertising
By Stuart Elliott
NEW YORK: A financial crisis, two wars, a presidential election - when there is so much for readers to think about, how do magazines aimed at thoughtful readers attract their attention?

In a new U.S. marketing push, one such magazine, The Economist, is spoofing the game Twister, distributing pizza boxes that improbably bear its name and sponsoring a performance of political satire.

Another such magazine, The Atlantic, plans to advertise on the muffin displays in New York City convenience stores, on restaurant menu boards and on the shampoo shelves of drugstores.

The Atlantic is also producing video clips that show what happens when people on city streets are invited to answer questions like "Is Google making us stupid?" and "Why do presidents lie?" - questions that, to make them stand out, have also been reproduced as neon signs.

In seeking readers and advertisers, publications like The Atlantic and The Economist - alongside competitors like Harper's, Mother Jones, The Nation, The New Republic and The New Yorker - have long tried to make up in cleverness what they lacked in wallet power.

The campaign for The Atlantic, with a budget estimated at $1.5 million, carries the theme "Think. Again." The campaign, which will also include a section of the magazine's Web site (theatlantic.com/thinkagain), is to begin Monday.

The campaign for The Economist is arriving this week in Philadelphia after stopping in eight other markets, including Boston and Washington. The campaign, with an estimated budget of $5 million, carries the theme "Get a world view."

Both campaigns are indicative of the increasingly unusual efforts by the traditional media to catch the wandering eyes of younger readers as well as younger employees of media agencies who help decide where marketers buy ads.

The theory is that they "should be jolted," said Justin Smith, president for consumer media at Atlantic Media in Washington. "We felt there was a great opportunity, right now, to further inspire our readers and advertisers."

His counterpart at The Economist, Paul Rossi, who is based in New York, echoed Smith's decision to seize the moment, fraught as it might be with uncertainty. "I think it's the best possible time" for a campaign, said Rossi, executive vice president and managing director for the Americas at The Economist. "What we have to say has never been more relevant. We write about the world, about connections between business and politics."

The questions appearing in the campaign for The Atlantic are from articles published in the magazine.

The ads are meant to reach media buyers where they eat, buy takeout food and shop. Those are "places where people's brains are most at rest," said Michael Fanuele, managing director for strategy at the magazine's creative agency, Euro RSCG Worldwide in New York, part of Havas.

The video clips, aimed at readers as well as advertisers, will be available on the Think Again section of The Atlantic Web site, and plans call for additional content to be added monthly.

Previews of the clips offer a variety of responses from the passers-by on the streets. On the question "Why do presidents lie?" the replies ranged from "Why do we let them?" to "There'd be more problems if we told the truth."

The neon signs, which also appear in print ads and posters, will decorate events sponsored by The Atlantic and eventually end up at the magazine's offices. "We hope to keep one or two for ourselves," said Jose Cabaco, chief creative officer for North America at Euro RSCG.

Other agencies working on the campaign for The Atlantic are Cleverworks, for media buying, and the Rosen Group, for public relations.

Several agencies are working on the campaign for The Economist: BBDO Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, for the creative content; PHD, also part of Omnicom, for media buying; Kinetic, a unit of the WPP Group, for outdoor ads; and Tentpole N.Y. for public relations and events like the satire performance, by the Second City theatrical troupe.

"It's always a good time to read The Economist," said Andrew Robertson, chief executive at BBDO, "but if there ever was a good time to be reading The Economist, it's now."

Originally, the ads run by The Economist in the United States were adapted from a popular campaign for the magazine created in London by the Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO unit of BBDO. Headlines from that campaign - called the "white-on-red campaign" for its color scheme, borrowed from the logo of The Economist - include "Great minds like a think" and Robertson's favorite, "Would you like to sit next to you at dinner?"

The idea behind the British campaign "is that if you read it, you'd be better informed, and therefore more successful," he said, "which evolved into, you'd be better informed, and therefore more interesting."

The new ads with the Twister parody and the like are from the BBDO office in New York, so they will more directly address American sensibilities, Robertson said, and provide "a more specific explanation of what you'll get from reading The Economist."

"If you look at some of the titles that compete with The Economist, their perspective is from the U.S. looking at the world," he added, "whereas with The Economist, the focus is the world view."

The state of publishing and digital media

The state of publishing and digital media
Written by Gary Howes
Today PriceWaterHouseCoopers (PWC) releases their report on the current state of the global publishing industry with a focus on the ongoing debate as to whether digital has spelt the death of print.

The global consumer magazine market is currently worth about £43 billion - up from about £38 billion five years ago.

Advertising accounted for most of this rise. Between 2003 and 2007, revenues from print advertising increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4%. Conversely,
circulation revenues grew by just 1.9%.

PWC Entertainment and Media Practice suggests that the consumer magazine market will reach about £51 billion by 2012, and that advertising will once again generate most of the increase.

It is however expected that revenues from digital advertising will grow at a very much faster rate than revenues from traditional print advertising.

Between 2004 and 2008, global expenditure on Internet advertising rose at a CAGR of 38.1%, whereas print advertising in consumer magazines and newspapers grew by just 4.4% and 2.4%, respectively.

The pace at which online advertising expands is likely to slow over the next five years. Even so, PWC believe that revenues will increase at a CAGR of 19.5% - three times more than the rate at which expenditure on any other form of advertising is projected to grow.

Consumer trends

PWC says the global publishing industry is undergoing major changes. A growing number of people are migrating from the printed page to the Internet for information and
entertainment. So what should consumer magazine publishers and media buyers do to succeed in the digital age?

The research shows that:

Most consumers still prefer to read hard copies of magazines, but many are also interested in reading digital content (by which we mean interactive materials, not
PDFs or other static formats which can be viewed online) - and younger consumers would rather access content digitally.

A significant number of consumers also express interest in using new digital devices to read digital content, once these devices are commercially available.

However, consumers expect to pay more for printed content than for content distributed electronically. Indeed, the research suggests that they are not prepared to pay more than half the sum they would pay for a printed magazine.

Moreover, many consumers see digital-only content as a substitute for printed content. So any magazine publisher which launches digital content connected to its brands risks cannibalising subscription and circulation revenues from its traditional print magazines.

However, there is no evidence thus far that consumer magazine print products have been cannibalized by the presence of digital versions of the magazine on the title's website. This fear may therefore be groundless.

A number of magazine publishers have responded to the digital revolution by reshuffling their portfolios through acquisitions, disposals and new launches, or by forming strategic alliances to get access to the skills they need.

As progress in developing digital media is being made in mainland Europe, Britain and in North America, Eastern European publishers continuing to build up their print portfolios, as this relatively new industry develops.

British and North American magazine publishers expect to generate as much as 20% of their total revenues from digital platforms within the next five years, whereas mainland European publishers expect to generate only 10% of their revenues from online activities. This reflects consumers' willingness to pay for digital content in these markets.

According to third party research, smaller publishers in Britain and in North America are far ahead of their mainland European counterparts in digital investment and development.

And it is those that have been able to leverage strong brands across multiple media platforms and generate revenues from online advertising, search-engine marketing and e-commerce that have proved most successful.

Finally Some Uplifting News From BoSacks?

BoSacks Speaks Out: Finally Some Uplifting News From BoSacks?
www.bosacks.com
I received a letter from a reader who said that some of his friends have stopped reading BoSacks because of all the bad news. I wasn't shocked at the note, but I admit that I was a little disappointed. I thought that my position was clear. I wrote back that I did not think that the industry is in death mode, nor has that ever been the intent of my coverage. And I also wrote that I try my damnedest to find positive and uplifting news.

Indeed I am very upbeat about our industry, and I see a bright future for the industry and the people in it. But there are a few things that have to be stated. The industry is never going to be the way it was; it is not even going to be the way it is. But I think the stories I send out give our readers a chance to see how the future may bend, blend and re-form, and hopefully offer a place of steady employment, if you are smart enough to read between the lines.

The industry is radically changing. So what? Why do you find that so depressing? I do not. Change is an elixir, and should be treated that way. The possibilities of information distribution in the next few years will be nothing less than staggering. Quite possibly we could be heading into the great, golden years of publishing. Is that a downer? Not in my book. There is more reading material available now, to more people than ever before in the combined history of man.

There are no age qualifiers on my web site when you sign up, so I'll ask this question: What were you doing five years ago? If you were in the business, what were you doing ten years ago? Are you doing the same thing now that you were doing then? I doubt it. What do you think you will be doing ten years from now? Do you think it is possible your job description and responsibilities might change? What might they be?

Our technology is growing exponentially. What used to take ten technologic years to advance now takes five, perhaps even less. My advice is to be very prepared to face the future with full frontal aggressiveness and make it your friend, not your combative enemy. If technology and the future are not your friends, you are fighting a battle you can not possibly win. As I have said before, the future is here now; it is just not widely distributed yet.

There are two options -- we can stick our heads in the ground in denial and hope that the industry problems will somehow go away and we will be able to continue to do what we have been doing, or we can do our very best to stay informed about the industry as it changes and grow with it. The choice is ours. Information is our power. That is why I am bullish about the publishing industry. We own the content. I do not care how we distribute that content. Some of it will always be on paper and some will be distributed electronically. So what? Once writers needed quill pens to write. Many years later came fountain pens, and then typewriters. Now we have computers. Are my words typed on a laptop and distributed by electrons, any less important because of this method of delivery? The reading of the written word is what is most important, not the pathway to receiving them. The truth is those words are more important when they are as fresh as possible and only a few electronic minutes old.

The bottom line for us all is to try to stay employed as long as we wish to work. The only way to that end is to work hard and be as informed as is possible.

Oh, yes, and I might mention that I do try my hardest to find articles that are positive and uplifting about our industry. They do exist from time to time; it's just that they are very few and far between. When I find them, I send them. I also think most negative articles are not fully understood by the authors and are written with a very narrow perspective. But what I do send out is important to anyone in the industry. That is my criteria and the only reason I send anything out. I think it is important to know. Remember, this industry's future is your future. The world of publishing is not going to evaporate. I think it will grow and prosper, in fact, I guarantee it.

Well, there you go. Am I wrong? What do you think?

Second Half Magazine and Media Industry Predictions

Second Half Magazine and Media Industry Predictions
'Us will go to them. Radar will blink. OK! might not be.'Posted by Dylan Stableford
FolioMag.com
http://www.foliomag.com/2008/second-half-magazine-and-media-industry-predictions

Layoffs. Lawsuits. Shutterings. Salary freezes. Ad page declines. Budget reforecasts and slashings. Abrupt resignations. Oh, and that whole recession thing. In short, it wasn't a pretty first half for the magazine industry. Yet, judging by some of the 2008 predictions FOLIO: solicited back in December [0], it wasn't unexpected. We again asked people from all corners of the magazine (and media) world to weigh in with their second half predictions. Here they are, lightly-edited, in no particular order.

NAME: Larry Burstein
TITLE: Publisher, New York Media
[1]SECOND HALF PREDICTION: Those magazines that harness the tremendous power of the Web for their brands will thrive. But only if they build dynamic Web businesses. Many magazines believe simply having a Web presence is enough; a site for value add opportunities or subscription offers. It's not. Readers, visitors, and advertisers are demanding more.

NAME: Reed Phillips
TITLE: Managing partner, desilva + phillips
[2]SECOND HALF PREDICTION: We're not seeing a rebound in valuations yet. The demise of the credit market continues to depress the multiples buyers are willing to pay and now the U.S. economic downturn and higher costs of oil are also eroding confidence among buyers. I guess since my prediction was for year-end 2008 I might still be right, but I'm much less optimistic at this time.

NAME: Emily Gordon
TITLE: Managing editor, Print [3]; editor, Emdashes.com
[4]SECOND HALF PREDICTION: AOL repositions as AWESOMENESS OVERLOAD! All caps, exclamation point. Content from, and click-approved as awesome by, millions of 10-year-olds (there is also a portal for infants) uploads every second; as you might expect, there are plenty of baby hedgehogs. The new AOL has it all-news, shopping, sports, social networking, how-tos, tickets, casinos, messaging, radio, weather, polls, ads, apps, maps, dating, PSAs on STDs, candidate soundbites, horoscopes, music, video, ringtones, games, and e-mail. It just all goes by in one second. It's pretty painless, actually.

NAME: Bob Sacks [5]
TITLE: President/Publisher, Precision Media Group
SECOND HALF PREDICTION: As atoms get heavier and more costly to move the industry finally realizes that computerized digits do not need to be picked up by fuel burning trucks for either initial delivery or as the dreaded return and thrown into a land fill.

Us will go to them. Radar will blink, and OK! might not be.

B-to-B will move to make digital editions the default choice for subscribers. Production managers will change their job descriptions to Coordinators of Data Distribution, sometimes called the living D.E.A.D. ("Distributors of Edit & Ads Department") ending centuries of the need to understand putting ink on paper. More publishing dinosaur management who don't already have their own Facebook page, nor the knowledge of how to build one, will be asked to either jump from the executive terrace or take what's left of the money and run.

NAME: Henry J. Boye
TITLE: Publisher, Harvard Business Review
SECOND HALF PREDICTION: The economy will soften further (at least in the US) causing a continued drag on all of us that serve consumers. The staffs and budgets supporting advertising and marketing efforts will be pinched even further, greatly increasing the focus on effectiveness of spend. This will increase demand for integrated offerings that drive value in the practical and proven (versus simply intuitive) sense.

NAME: Mark A. Newman
TITLE: Editor-in-chief, Southern Breeze
[6]SECOND HALF PREDICTION: Sadly, I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. When salary and hiring freezes are the "good" news of the day, I feel that there's going to be a lot more closings, layoffs, buyouts, etc. And with Starbucks shuttering 600 U.S. stores, where are all of the out-of-work magazine staffers going to hang out and be bitter or work? Editorial types will have to update their skill sets and become well versed on the electronic aspects of publishing more and more by becoming the in-house web editors, web reporters, and bloggers. And I wouldn't be surprised if surviving staffers-especially at smaller pubs-are going to have to really expand their skill sets and become pros at everything from buying and pricing paper to IT. Those with secure jobs (as secure as they can be, that is) are likely going to stay put longer before climbing that corporate ladder or venturing to another company where you can find yourself out of a job in 6 months due to cutbacks. I also think that before the end of the year, a long-time big name consumer book publisher is going to undergo major overhauls that will send the industry reeling to the point that top editors will start considering the priesthood as a more viable option than publishing! And when it DOES start getting better, it will just mean no more layoffs or shutdowns; there will be new pubs launched hither and yon but not at the same levels as before.
NAME: Patrick Gavin
TITLE: Editor, mediabistro's FishbowlDC
[7]SECOND HALF PREDICTION: I predict that a white male will be selected to replace Tim Russert.

NAME: Bob Eckstein
TITLE: Cartoonist [8], New York Times, Time Out New York
SECOND-HALF PREDICTION: As magazines have officially become leisure items for seniors (eg. most healthy magazines have been AARP, Reader's Digest, Modern Maturity, Playboy, etc.), TV will follow suit and expect to see more shows for seniors this upcoming season:

NAME: Kyle du Ford
TITLE: Freelance writer
SECOND HALF PREDICTION: 10 Guaranteed 100% Accurate Predictions or Your Money Back! 1. Jann Wenner will fire somebody.2. Men's Health will put an actor on the cover with great abs.3. Jack Johnson will make another superfluous cover. Sans shoes. 4. Due to travel constraints, staff writers will change their titles to researchers, if only in spirit.5. Outside Go will replace Best Life on stylish men's coffee tables.6. Paper costs will increase.7. iPhone will make another superfluous cover. Sans shoes.8. Maxim will feature more breasts in 2008 than 2007.9. Readymade will make you feel stupid by introducing a product you could never build if you had 1,000 men and $500,000.10. FOLIO: will not even make mention of 1-9. Can you believe these guys?

'Buy Safe' Campaign Organizers Rebuke Criticism

'Buy Safe' Campaign Organizers Rebuke Criticism
By Bill Mickey
http://circman.com
Publishers weigh in; BPA, ABC Defend Initiative.
Buy Safe Media, the BPA and ABC-backed campaign warning marketers against buying ads in non-audited b-to-b publications, has faced unusually harsh criticism since its launch last week.

Industry pundits, including consultant and noted columnist Bob Sacks, were among the first to weigh in on the program, calling the initiative "an attack at the heart of the entrepreneurial publishing business." Sacks wrote: "The new pathology actually disgusts me."

Samir "Mr. Magazine" Husni lamented "how low some folks in our industry are willing to sink in order to make their business flourish."

And it wasn't just pundits who were disturbed. At Access Intelligence, where several prominent titles remain un-audited, including CableFax and MIN, Sylvia Sierra, SVP, corporate audience development, downplays the need for an audit. "Some of our strongest brands are not audited and take advertising. It is hard to argue the $1,000-per year subscription value that readers place on the information and advertisers place on reach."

A 'Legitimate Beef'

Yet, Ted Bahr, president of BZ Media, and an official supporter of the Buy Safe campaign is more concerned about the publishers that fly under the radar and push inflated or inaccurate metrics.

"I am spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to acquire and maintain the circulation I am claiming, then I spend the money maintaining it in BPA required formats, then I pay BPA between $10,000-$15,000 to audit my books," he says. "That's the ethical standard for publishing in this industry. My competitors are therefore able to spend way less than I do, and compete with me by cheating and lying to our mutual customers. My only recourse is to try and educate the advertisers that they need to pressure these outlaws into auditing."

BPA CEO Glenn Hansen adds, "Publishers that have made that investment have a legitimate beef with those that cannot demonstrate from an independent verification that they have made that same investment."

Ditto for the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which also backs the Buy Safe program as a partner. "The campaign site specifically notes that auditing is not a necessity for all publications," says Neal Lulofs, ABC's SVP, communications and strategic planning. "I can't fathom why the promotion of media auditing would 'disgust' someone. We are an auditing firm and we are promoting the benefits of auditing-for publishers and buyers alike. We are not 'forcing' anyone to become audited. But in competitive environments, buyers usually insist on it. For instance, there isn't a single paid-circ newspaper above 25,000 in the U.S. that isn't audited. That's not because we force them to do that, but because audited newspapers attract more ad dollars."

A Question of Demand

Yet smaller ad buyers-as BPA confirmed when it was surveying client-side media buyers prior to launching the campaign-may not care or even know about audits. At Hanley Wood, which has several un-audited titles in its stable of more than 30 magazines, auditing is more of a case-by-case consideration. "It depends on the advertiser market," says Nick Cavnar, VP circulation and database development. "Advertiser markets dominated by small advertisers that don't work through agencies aren't that familiar with the statement format. They don't understand it so there's not a great demand for it."

This is precisely why BPA launched the Buy Safe Media campaign, but Cavnar focuses on the practicalities of auditing. "If we don't have advertisers asking for one, then we may not audit the magazine. We work according to what advertisers are looking for. We run the circulation the same way whether it's audited or not. It's a question of whether it's something that helps in the advertising sales."

Audit Landscape Getting Complicated

Sacks and Husni took the Buy Safe program to task because they say it's magazines attacking magazines, and that energy could be better applied to arguing the print medium's viability against other media-TV, radio, and online.

Yet Hansen circles back to accountability and the advertiser's demand for it. "In a perfect market, where all magazines are audited, I think Bob and Samir are justified in saying, 'Don't fight among yourselves, fight against other media. But in a market where we're not all yet at the same level playing field, I think that's an unfair expectation on their behalf. It's not the fact that it's BPA or ABC-it's the fact that they've made the investment in developing quality audience and they can prove that and that gives the advertiser accountability."

But, according to Access Intelligence's Sierra, there is a bigger picture to be focusing on-the mash-up of media platforms. "We are now media companies whose portfolios include print magazines and many other assets," she says. "Most of the other assets (Web sites, e-letters, trade shows, Webinars, paid information) are not audited, and yet, revenue is shifting from print magazine advertising to the other assets. Advertisers want to know 'Who are these people?' and the audit bureaus are not showing reach, only numbers. I can't think of a single reason to pay for the current audit offerings given their shortcomings."

Print Ads Come out Top of the Charts

Print ads come out top of the charts with UK consumers
http://www.creativematch.co.uk/viewNews/?96125
Print advertising generates the most positive reaction with UK consumers and is seen as having the most relevance, according to a study.
Dynamic Logic's latest AdReaction study gauges consumer's opinions of advertising. Newspaper ads top the chart with 53% of consumers considering them as "very" or "somewhat" positive.
Christina Goodman, Director of Global Marketing & Business Development, Dynamic Logic, said: "When asked about their overall attitudes towards general advertising formats, consumers feel very differently about the various media platforms.
Certainly, if asked, most people will never say they would like to have more advertising in their lives. However, the results show that there are certain types of advertising that people may be more receptive towards.
"More interruptive or intrusive formats, such as telemarketing and SPAM (Non-opt-in email) are towards the bottom of the list in terms of consumer appeal. Print advertising (Newspapers and Magazine) as well as TV and Outdoor advertising rate most positively.
"What is surprising is the breadth of feelings about different advertising formats. This research shows there is a significant difference between how consumers feel about Mobile ads (70% negative) versus Newspaper ads (9% negative)."
Mobile phones
Mobile phones are considered extremely personal to the consumer and the perception may be that ads on mobile phones will be intrusive and interruptive - like SPAM, even more so than telemarketing and non-opt-in emails, according to this ranking.
Therefore, there is an opportunity for advertisers and brands to change this perception by connecting with their audience when the message is relevant. It is also likely that many of the people have not yet seen mobile ads, so this perception may vary with exposure.
Online ads
Online search ads fall among the middle of the list, perhaps because search remains a relatively new ad format compared to Newspaper and TV (where people are trained to expect advertising).
Search ads - designed to be informative within an information-seeking environment - tend to strive for relevancy, thus one might expect for that reason alone to see search higher on the list of consumer preference.
http://www.dynamiclogic.com/na/

It's not all grim news in magazine land

It's not all grim news in magazine land
Some titles are showing strong gains in ad pagesBy Diego Vasquez http://www.medialifemagazine.com/

It surely seems the worst of times for consumer magazines, suffering as they are from the ad recession and increasing competition from other media. Indeed, over the first quarter of 2008, consumer titles experienced their worst tumble in years, with ad pages down more than 6 percent. Still, a number of magazines are showing strong gains, in some cases double-digit increases in ad pages over the prior-year period.

They include The Economist, OK!, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Women's Health, Wondertime, Men's Journal, Guideposts and Parents, among others. One might write off some of those gains to good fortune, a title being in a category of magazines that's somewhat insulated from the spending cuts that have swept through media and magazines in particular. But that's only a small part of it, if at all. In fact in many cases the gaining titles are in some of the worst-hit categories. By far the bigger factor is what the magazines are doing for themselves. They're investing dollars, they're repositioning, they're creating new voices that reach readers in new ways, they're building staff, they're adding features to their web sites, they're selling aggressively, they're taking chances.

They're heeding an age-old maxim of magazine publishing: Invest during downturns, as others cut back, and you'll win market share. In some ways, the Economist best exemplifies this aggressiveness. The title competes in two of the roughest ad categories, newsweeklies and business titles, which were each down nearly 14 percent over the quarter, yet its ad pages were up more than 5 percent. For that, North American publisher Paul Rossi credits the magazine's ongoing push to build circulation in the U.S. market, which rose 13 percent in second-half 2007, to 720,882, over the year-earlier period, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. "Circulation helps push up our rate base, which is good, but what it really does is grow the readership numbers," he says.
That in turn had made the magazine more attractive to more advertisers. "It allows us to go into other categories. Historically we would get luxury import cars, but now we have more Detroit cars. We can now go deeper into personal finance." "People want to know why we're up in pages," says Rossi. "At the end of the day we have a product that's never been more relevant, and more and more people are finding it."

*** In the case of Women's Health, whose ad pages were up 51 percent over the first quarter, its growth comes from a different way of talking to its readers. If the old mantra of women's titles was to prey on their insecurities, the new mantra, exemplified by the Rodale title, is that it's just fine to be who you are, and we're here to help you be even more. "We're all about it's good to be you. We encourage women and give them all the information we can," says publisher Mary Murcko. "We empower them to challenge themselves a little bit and have the confidence to do what they want and not to be afraid." It seems to be the language women relate to. A sister publication to Men's Health, the title launched in October 2005 with a rate base of 400,000, and that was quickly bumped to 850,000 and then in January to 1.1 million. "We've found our voice and our perspective pretty early in the plot," says editor Tina Johnson. "We've been speaking in the same voice women use to speak to themselves."

***At Every Day with Rachael Ray, where ad pages were up 38 percent in the first quarter, there were several factors at work. Certainly one is that Ray is all over television, and yet viewers never seem to tire of her bouncy good humor. But also the title launched in late 2005 with a very practical approach to cooking: putting interesting meals together in little time, and that set it apart from the traditional culinary titles, where growth had slowed for the most part. But publisher Anne Balaban says it goes beyond that. "Rachael brought a different point of view to the marketplace. She's about 'have fun and if there's something you want to do, it doesn't have to be perfect, just go ahead and do it.'" Thus the magazine's tagline, "Take a Bite Out of Life" "In this economic environment, marketers want to align their brands with something that puts a smile on customers' faces, and that's what we do," Balaban says.

*** At Guideposts, ad pages were up nearly 37 percent in the first three months of the year. Publisher Amy Molinero says sales have slowed for second quarter but are still ahead of a year ago, and that's for several reasons. The magazine has pushed deeper into food, with editorial support, and it's added to its sales staff. "Also, we've done well in the travel category, which is also new," says Molinero. Though the magazine has published for more than 60 years, it only began taking advertising in 2001. It has a rate base of 2.345 million. Says Molinero: "People had never heard of us, and they couldn't believe how long we've been publishing. While everyone else was coming down we were going up. We only had up to go."

*** In the crowded celebrity category, conventional wisdom had OK!, the British import, failing without much ado. The feeling was that it had come too late to the market. Nearly three years later, OK! is still here, and it's showing strong growth, with ad pages up 38 percent in first quarter at a time when the category grew just 2.7 percent in pages. Publisher Tom Morrissy credits that growth to the staff-building that went on in 2007. "We hired 20 sales and marketing people, and we were building programs and planting the seeds. And now they're just starting to sprout. So a lot of the work you're seeing now was accomplished a year ago." He says newsstand sales are up 22 percent so far this year, and the title has now been measured by MRI for the first time. The title has also been adding special issues. That's created a momentum for the sales team. Says Morrissy: "Presenting growth is fun for both the seller and the buyer. It really resonates with buyers who are looking for rays of light in the market."

*** At Men's Journal, which was up 21 percent in pages in the first quarter, publisher Will Schenck credits several factors: "We made a decision last year to try to capitalize on all aspects of the lifestyle of the reader. We've done a good job of developing some new categories, financial services and pharmaceuticals in particular. We've also done well in Detroit." But also helping, says Schenck, is a new corporate department at Wenner Media. "We now have the power of Rolling Stone and the power of Us Weekly to benefit us." It's given the magazine momentum with marketers, he says. "Our magazine is for a guy who's confident, and that breeds sales. Marketers seem to appreciate that. You go into meetings and you talk about it from the perspective of momentum. At the end of the day they don't give a hoot if you're up in ad pages. You're defined by the company you keep."

*** For Diane Newman, publisher at Parents, which is up 19 percent for the quarter, it's all about staying current and in touch with the new moms as they come along. "If the brand doesn't stay current, people can go other places. So we really acknowledge the new mom. We literally target Gen-Y moms. She's very different from the Gen X moms who preceded her," says Newman. "We walked away from what might be traditional sentimental editorial and photography and made it much more relevant for this generation," she says. "Keep it fresh for readers and advertisers, and they totally get it."

5 Key Future Magazine Trends and 8 Ways to Prepare for Them

BoSacks: The Profit Prophet
5 Key Future Magazine Trends,
and 8 Ways to Prepare for Them
Publishing Executive Magazine
http://www.pubexec.com/docs/currentissue.bsp
Last month, I had the pleasure of delivering a lecture at the Publishing Business Conference & Expo with David Renard, my partner at Media-Ideas. Addressing a packed room, we examined the five key issues that will affect our industry over the next decade and provided actionable advice to prepare publishers for that future.

The trigger to these key issues is, simply put, "change." We are faced with changes unprecedented in history. The "screenagers" have been a digital demographic from birth, growing up after the dawn of cellular (1983) and with the Internet (1993). They are a generation comfortable with immediate interaction and virtual access. This is fostering a new generation of readers, naturally adept with technology and comfortable with virtual access to friends, family and the world at large. It also is fostering a change in reading habits. Pixels are being increasingly accepted as a way of life.

Another element of change is the access to connectivity. Wi-Fi and mobile phones allow people to stay connected to friends, family, work and information immediately, almost anywhere.

We have the ability to deliver information to multiple platforms in an instant, on a global basis and, most importantly, in any format the reader requires.

Key Trend #1: Magazines are not changing, how you read their content is.
What is a magazine? We at Media-Ideas believe that for a magazine to be a magazine, it must be metered, edited and have designed content, as well as be delivered periodically to the reader in a format that is date-stamped and permanent. We accept that a digital magazine with those six attributes is a magazine. We further believe that over the next 15 years, digital magazines will grow to become 30 percent of the magazine market. Within 25 years, they will represent more than 75 percent of the market for periodicals.

Call to Action: Publishers must create a specific road map today toward multiplatform magazine publishing and content distribution.

Keeping the structural integrity of a magazine online, with the six components necessary to be a magazine, will help to protect publishers from the leveling force of content aggregation that exists on the Internet today. This will greatly limit a magazine's exposure to the content-dilution factor that is increasingly being played out in the realm of information distribution on the Web.

Key Trend #2: Costs are increasing faster than the traditional magazine business model allows.
Raw-material acquirement is causing paper, ink, printing and shipping costs to increase over the long term. These will be further impacted as ecological concerns grow. The lack of attention to ecology is going to be a major cost. Imagine having to pay carbon offsets for each copy returned.

Call to Action: Sky-rocketing costs will force publishers to become more efficient with distribution. The goal has to be 100-percent efficiency or zero returns (and zero returns means a massive reduction in a publisher's carbon footprint).

Call to Action: Crippling costs will force publishers to offer better-quality, more-targeted print products at even higher price points.

Call to Action: Ballooning costs will force publishers to further espouse digital delivery.

There is little choice. Digital infrastructure is not free, but it is also not burdened with rising paper and other associated analog costs.

Key Trend #3: The control and branding of digital content is a critical battle.
XML, content aggregators and search engines are growing in importance and acceptance. This type of online distribution should principally be considered as a marketing tool to attract new readers. Only the very largest magazine publishers and publishers of addictive niche titles will manage to retain their brand awareness through this information-
distribution model. Digital magazines must become a critical piece of a publisher's digital content-distribution plans over the next two years. Because they preserve the core characteristics of a printed magazine, they are best equipped to retain reader loyalty in a digital world.

Call to Action: The formula construction of a magazine's distribution will become a central battle for relevance. If publishers do not take an aggressive stance, outside forces will steer a solution away from the interests of the magazine industry.

Key Trend #4: E-paper is rapidly developing flexible, color displays.
Although the Amazon Kindle is not ready for prime time, it is a prime example of where we are headed. Our Media-Ideas researchers predict that by 2020, e-paper's worldwide market will be worth more than $20 billion. We further predict that by 2020, the annual global production of e-paper displays will be 500 million units with a unit price of $50. Imagine a piece of paper that is a screen, plasticized at first, but becoming more and more like the pulp we have all grown to love.

Call to Action: If digital magazines have not made sense to you, your readers and advertisers, they will with full-color e-paper. Publishers must be acting on their digital magazine implementation plans today or risk irrelevance.

Key Trend #5: The corporate structure of traditional publishers cannot keep pace with technological changes, causing a misalignment between internal organization and business needs.
In every corner of the publishing organization, employees need a larger skill set-one infused with technology-such as writing a blog, shooting and editing video, and repurposing content. Today's IT departments are ill-equipped to act upon consumer-imposed requirements. It must fall on the business unit to provide the necessary guidance and forward planning.

Call to Action: Type A publishers need to assign business-technology "visioneers" within each unit of the organization who report directly to a C-level executive.

Call to Action: Visioneers are responsible for planning necessary technology and functionality over five years. Both the business units and the visioneers must be partially compensated on each other's success.

Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He is also the co-founder of the research company Media-Ideas (Media-Ideas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator and almost every other job this industry has to offer.

Social Networking Spawns New Print Mags

Social Networking Spawns New Print Mags
Former Conde Nast VP Mitch Fox Named President of 8020 Publishing
By Nat Ives
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Two months after Condé Nast let go Mitch Fox -- the former Vanity Fair and Details publisher who had risen to group president and publishing director -- he is returning to the magazine business, but in a very digital, user-generated way.

'Participant publications' like JPG aren't subject to mag industry rules about maintaining the division between editorial and advertising, so they can, and do, let marketers sponsor editorial sections.

Mr. Fox is moving to San Francisco as president-CEO of 8020 Publishing, whose high-polish travel and photography titles consist entirely of content submitted online and voted into their pages by online readers.

"The thing that appealed to me most was that all of the fundamental components that needed to be proven, to show whether or not this kind of modern media company could work, have already been proven," Mr. Fox said. "I just spent 18 years in the traditional magazine business, and it was exciting and I loved it, but now I want to be part of a media business that builds its properties in a whole new way."

Because 8020's "participant publications" are created by crowds, aren't part of the American Society of Magazine Editors and aren't subject to society rules about maintaining the division between editorial and advertising, they can and do let marketers sponsor editorial sections. The 16th print issue of JPG magazine will include themed sections such as "Fresh," "Human Impact" and, sponsored by Pentax cameras, "On the Go." Users who have joined jpgmag.com post fitting photos, then hope their fellow users vote their image into the bimonthly magazine. The themes in the third issue of Everywhere magazine will include "Jetset Weekend," sponsored by Expedia.

Samsung used JPG's site and print edition to advertise a new cellphone with a high-end camera, porting reader submissions to its own microsite and sponsoring a section called "Emotion Capture."

"What marketers are looking for are engaged audiences," said Chris Andrew, VP-group director for media at Digitas, where he is responsible for Samsung. "We're looking for beyond-the-banner advertising. For the type of atmosphere that we live in right now where everyone wants a little bit of fame, JPG and Everywhere make everyone a content generator."

BoSacks Speaks Out: Marketers to Mags: Give Guarantees or We'll Walk

BoSacks Speaks Out: Marketers to Mags: Give Guarantees or We'll Walk

Some of the concepts delivered herein are filled with BS, hot air, fluff, smoke and mirrors. Large publishers just don't get it. There are two things that a magazine must have to survive and prosper. A passionate and devoted readership, sometimes known as great content, and really honest and accurate accountability. That is it!

As I read this article I see all this old style posturing by the publishers on record in this article. DUH!

You are truly finished if you keep that up. Who are you kidding? Or are you just waiting for retirement and intend on ducking out the back door? This is now somehow like global warming, or a gazillion dollar deficit . . . fix it now, don't leave it to your grandchildren.

It is time to stand up and deliver. Deliver the facts, not the bull. Have confidence in your titles and let the accountability drift to real levels, in real time, in a real world. Truth is I don't think you really have a choice. There is way too much competition in the advertising world today, and you will either join the solution revolution or be nothing more than a footnote of a past and forgotten problem..


"If you don't want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won't have to work"
Ogden Nash (American Writer of humorous poetry who won a large following for his audacious verse. 1902-1971)


Marketers to Mags: Give Guarantees or We'll Walk Exclusive: MediaVest Wields $900 Million to Land
Issue-By-Issue Circ Promises
By Nat Ives
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article? article_id=116544



NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Kraft, Wal-Mart and Coca- Cola are among the marketers that are prepared to stop spending in magazines if they don't get issue-by- issue circulation guarantees.

Media buyers long have been frustrated with many magazines' insistence on guaranteeing only average paid circulation -- instead of guaranteeing the paid circulation of specific issues in which ads actually appear. But now MediaVest USA has gathered support from heavyweight clients to make issue- specific guarantees a reality.

"Let me be clear that I am a print champion," said Robin Steinberg, senior VP-director of print investment and activation at MediaVest. "However, we believe that all publishers should make this guarantee, and we will walk away from business for those who don't." MediaVest spent about $900 million in consumer magazines on behalf of its clients last year.

New leverage
The new power play reflects the growing demand for precision metrics in the media business, a drive fueled by an internet model that seems to promise instant accountability. It is also, though, part of a broader regime change in the industry, one that has delivered dominance to advertisers from media owners. Marketers now have too many options and have found too many ways to sell themselves, beyond traditional advertising, for publishers or broadcasters to keep setting the agenda. There's a reason commercial ratings on TV have arrived at last: Advertisers seem to finally have enough leverage to force the issue.

"As somebody who's ultimately paying the bills, what I'm looking for is accountability and transparency," said Donna Campanella, executive director for global media at Avon, a MediaVest client. "We want to make sure that the impressions we were hoping to get for a particular issue have been delivered. Because what we advertise is coordinated with what's in our brochures, timeliness is important."

"In this age when there are so many choices out there, particularly in the digital arena, traditional media needs to step up and really prove their value, good or bad," Ms. Campanella added.

But change still doesn't come easily or instantly. Time Inc., the country's biggest magazine publisher, guarantees most advertisers an average paid circulation across the issues in which they buy space; if you buy into five issues, the company promises those five issues will achieve a certain average paid circulation.

Pressure
Anything else would only hike costs for everyone, said John Squires, senior exec VP at Time Inc., because publishers would pump up print runs to make sure not one issue falls even a percentage point shy of its rate base. "They want all guarantees and all protections at all times," he said of marketers and media buyers. "That just kind of forces a completely unrealistic expectation on our business. We do have to concentrate on some efficiencies."

Publishers don't get any reward when magazines sell more copies than guaranteed, Mr. Squires noted. And swings of 50,000 copies in newsstand sales at magazines that consistently sell millions can't be the top challenge in marketing right now. "In these times, in this world, with the kind of competitive pressure that there is on publishers already and the intense pressure on rates, is this really a big issue?" he asked.

Ms. Steinberg said advertisers need protection against tactics publishers can use to meet average guarantees. A few titles have made up for shortfalls early in the standard six-month reporting periods by drastically increasing their use of copies -- called "verified" by auditors -- that are distributed in hair salons, doctors' offices and so on. "Verified circulation was put forth with the notion that publishers would use and place these copies strategically and with transparency," she said. "However, we believe the proper use is not taking place, and the current use is to make up for rate base underdelivery from newsstand decline."

A challenge from Hachette
Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., publisher of magazines such as Elle and Car and Driver, already has started selling its men's enthusiast titles against issue-specific guarantees and is considering doing the same across its portfolio next year. But if Jack Kliger, president-CEO, is going to meet the buyers' challenge, he has one of his own for them.

"Issue-specific circulation-based pricing, to me, is an interim step to issue-specific audience-circulation guarantees," he said. That is to say, once the industry can better measure how many people see an issue, whether they borrow it from a friend or read a public- place copy, media buyers should drop this obsession with refining paid-circulation metrics. "It's like trying to make the kerosene lamp produce more light because that's what we're familiar with," Mr. Kliger said, "and don't trust this newfangled electricity thing."

A Beloved Mag's Painful Lessons

"We want only loyal workers who are grateful from the bottom of their hearts for the bread which we let them earn"
Gustav Krupp


A Beloved Mag's Painful Lessons
What media companies can learn from the rise and fall of the much-beloved teen mag Sassy

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_2 0/b4034031.htm

Not every magazine that rarely made a buck and died young gets a wet kiss of a book written about it, so tip your hat to Sassy (1988-96), the teen title whose story is recounted and memorialized in Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer's new How Sassy Changed My Life.

During Sassy's brief, underfunded existence, it shot to a circulation of 800,000 pretty quickly, but didn't score ads as easily (and went through three owners). Sassy came and went while a subset of young America remade media via indie music labels and photocopied 'zines. Despite its glossy-mag garb, Sassy resonated with this culture, which gave the mag a similar secret-handshake signifier of status among its acolytes.

There is something heartbreakingly familiar, something very "After School Special," in Sassy's saga. Smart young outsiders start something, do a bang-up job-and remain marginalized by the mainstream. Sassy taught a difficult lesson that remains valid: What's culturally significant can be lousy business, and often requires a pivot from a property's founding vision to be successful. For those who bonded most intensely with Sassy, this lesson was all the more painful because that bond was so deeply felt.

PLAINLY GEARED TO OUTSIDER TEENS, Sassy was born in a pre-Web world, when there were no fancy interactive ways to find like-minded souls, back when such teens needed a campfire like Sassy's to encircle. These teens found each other with a giddy relief, and also shared a grievance against those not in their club. Both qualities were never far from Sassy's surface. These traits, and being simpatico with the indie movement, endeared it to twenty- and thirtysomething white urban hipsters, too. This ensured geek-chic status, but even some Sassy-ites wondered how hipster cred helped a magazine intended for a mass-market audience of teen girls. "I don't think it's the only factor, but one could argue that Sassy cooled itself to death," says Kim France, a former staff writer who now edits shopping magazine Lucky.

There are media properties that mark cultural moments and ones that go on to become good businesses, but one cold reality about mass media is that what draws purists and early adopters is often not what equals boffo box office. Histories of other zeitgeisty magazines confirm this. Wired, which I admire, is today far removed from the utopianism and outré layouts of its early issues. Now, much of it is about business and tech toys. Today's Rolling Stone is light-years away from its overtly underground beginnings. (Its debut issue was packaged with a roach clip.) Sassy's turn toward more mainstream mores was clumsy and late, courtesy of an owner that in essence (foolishly) fired all veteran staffers. Sassy's founding editor, Jane Pratt, who now hosts a talk show on Sirius (SIRI ) Satellite Radio, tweaked her formula when she started young-women's title Jane. "I made a conscious decision to do a different kind of magazine-one that was an alternative to what was out there, but in such a way to be appealing to advertisers," she says today. A rare recent teen-mag hit, CosmoGirl!, hit it big by wrapping Sassy's geek- friendly vibe in a more mainstream sheen.

Today, an autumnal chill has descended on teen magazines as readers flock to the Web. Two of Sassy's three main rivals, Teen and YM, are gone, as are Teen People and Elle Girl, two titles that followed Sassy. But nothing, then or since, looked or sounded like Sassy. (Perhaps they learned from Sassy's failure to expand a tightly proscribed niche.) Pratt recalls conversations with Sassy-ites in which everyone agreed it's better to be a fondly remembered, defunct magazine than "an O.K. magazine that sticks around for a long time." In the end, Sassy was a band, not a brand. A moment, not a media business. And what cultural moment is more keenly remembered than one that's irretrievably lost-one you can pine for forever, like a lovesick teen alone in the night?

For Jon Fine's blog on media and advertising, go to www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia

Publishers Hear Digital Fingerprinting Pitch

Publishers Hear Digital Fingerprinting Pitch
by Karlene Lukovitz
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm? fuseaction=Articles.san&s=59820&Nid=30069&p=204 904

WATCHING GOOGLE AND VIACOM DUKE it out in court is interesting, but in the real world, publishers and other site owners are more interested in finding a practical way to monitor who's using their content and either get some reimbursement or get it off the Web.

As the business world read about Google/YouTube filing for a dismissal of Viacom's $1 billion copyright infringement suit earlier this week, a group of publishing executives gathered at a Magazine Publishers of America "Meet the Innovators" session to hear a pitch for one potential answer.

Attributor Corp., a privately held Redwood City, CA company started by Silicon Valley executives, is testing technology that scans and captures digital "fingerprints"--or identifying characteristics--of text, images and audiovisual content and then continuously scans its index of the Web to pick up matches.

The company claims that the system can spot content reuse within just about any Web area/format, including RSS feeds, self-published sites, social networks, advertising networks, search engines and aggregators, based on a few text sentences, bits of an image, or seconds of an audio/video clip.

Attributor doesn't claim to know exactly what is and is not "fair use" under the evolving legal precedents surrounding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; rather, the system employs a site owner's own specified criteria to generate automatic responses to identified instances of reuse, explained CEO Jim Brock, a former Yahoo copyright counsel who co- founded Attributor in 2005 with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Pitkow.

Depending on the scenario (the percentage of content used, whether it's being used for commercial purposes, etc.), a content reuser might, for instance, receive a request to remove content, or a proposal to allow continuing reuse of the content in return for giving the originator a portion of advertising revenue or licensing fees. A single console provides the site owner with ongoing monitoring of each issue's status until there is some kind of resolution.

Site owners can also employ a searchable public registry that allows anyone wishing to republish content to identify the owner and seek a licensing agreement.

In short, Attributor may present a more streamlined and wide-ranging solution than existing content monitoring systems like Indigo Stream Technologies' Copyscape, which relies on Google's search engine to seek out unauthorized uses.

Attributor is now in beta with several "large, international publishers," and is taking requests to generate free trial reports for interested publishers while the development phase continues, Brock said. Between 40 and 45 million Web pages per day are being added to the system through RSS feeds and periodic content scanning/conversions, he added.

In December, the company announced that it had received $10 million in funding to date from investors including Sigma Partners, Draper Richards LP, First Round Capital, Amicus and Selby Venture Partners.

Where does Brock think digital fair use definitions are headed? "At this point, nobody can say that a certain percentage of an article equates or does not equate to fair use," he says. "It's still subjective under the law. But once we have the systems in place for transparency, we believe those standards will evolve."

Meanwhile, he says, "if from a business standpoint, it's not fair use by your standards, you can address that, negotiate, respond as you see fit." For example, if no attribution is provided, a significant portion of a given piece of content is being used, and it's being used for commercial purposes, "then you've got three indicators that might set off a 'ding, ding, ding,'" Brock notes.

'Mr. Magazine' Believes We'll Always Crave Ink on Paper

"Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."
Mark Twain (American Humorist, Writer and Lecturer. 1835-1910)


'Mr. Magazine' Believes We'll Always Crave Ink on Paper
by Mark Glaser
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/05/digging_deepe rmr_magazine_beli.html

When Lebanese journalist Samir Husni was teaching students at the University of Mississippi about magazine journalism in 1986, one student had trouble pronouncing his Arabic name and took the simple route, calling him "Mr. Magazine." The student eventually gave Husni a plaque with the moniker engraved, and the name was so apt for the lover of print magazines that he eventually trademarked the Mr. Magazine name and launched a website with the same name.

Now almost every news story about the magazine business includes an expert quote from Husni, whether it's about Teen People closing shop online or about Garden & Gun magazine's awkward name. He's done consulting for magazine companies, and he's written the popular Magazine Guide profiling each year's magazine launches for 22 years running.

So I wondered how this master of the print magazine world, who is chair of the University of Mississippi's Department of Journalism, thought magazines would cope in an increasingly digital world. How should magazines adapt, or should they adapt?

In a wide-ranging phone interview, Husni said he believed people would always want print periodicals, even as new media and online sites gain in popularity, but print publications should shift to more analysis and add more photos. He says he's not anti- technology and even launched a blog recently, yet he remains staunchly old-school in his belief that you can't do journalism on a blog.

"When I started blogging I said, 'Blogging is not journalism, it's a different form of communication,'" he told me. "In no way, shape, or form is it journalism. A journalist can be a blogger. But a blogger is not a journalist."

Husni believes one of the biggest mistakes being made in the magazine industry is shoveling print content onto the web, where he believes interactivity and original content should be the rule. And he railed against magazines that consider only their advertisers to be their customers - and not their readers.

The following is an edited transcript of our conversation, which ranged from his early days covering the civil war in Beirut to his thoughts on e- readers and the future synergy of print and the web.

Tell me more about your background, where you grew up, and how you became interested in journalism and magazines.

Samir Husni: I was born in Tripoli, Lebanon. When I was 8 or 9 years old, I bought a copy of the first issue of the Arabic Superman magazine. I fell in love with the ink on paper more than the blue and red cape. I knew I wanted to be a journalist and a magazine person from that age. I used to spend my time at home creating my own magazines and newspapers using whatever was available. I used to rub candle wax on paper so I could lift off the pictures from newspapers. I was multi- tasking at that age, listening to news on the transistor radio in one ear and writing it down with a pen, taking down the news of the world before there was an Internet.

I took my hobby to college where I started studying journalism at the Lebanese University in Beirut. I started at a music weekly magazine and moved to a movie daily magazine. A friend of mine started a newspaper and I was doing you-name-it: part design, part reporting, part journalism. In school I studied more journalism than design but design was always my hobby. The first issue of that newspaper in Beirut came out in March 25, 1975, and the civil war started on April 13. We didn't have even three weeks until we were in the midst of civil war. As awful as it sounds, those were great times to be a journalist if you survived to tell about it. I lost a lot of my friends and colleagues at the paper.

The civil war ended and I finished my degree and finished as the top student in my class. At the same time, I was working at two different magazines and at the daily paper. I got married and I received a phone call from the university saying, 'Do you want to consider going to get a PhD scholarship?' It was our ticket. We were newlyweds, and the war had started again, and my wife was terrified I would be killed by a stray bullet. I didn't know until I reached Washington that University of North Texas had accepted me for my master's degree, and we landed in Texas in 1978. The first thing I did was go to a bookstore/newsstand and you talk about a kid in a candy store. I was, like, wow!

I did my dissertation in Missouri, and I started collecting magazines. I now have 23,000 first editions of magazines . . . Magazines have been my hobby, they became my education, they became my profession. Now it never ceases to amaze me that when I give a speech or consult with people, that they pay me at the end.

What does the future hold for print magazines in an age of the Internet and digital technologies?

Husni: As long as we have human beings, we are going to continue to have ink on paper. I'm not an ostrich who puts his head in the sand because I know there are some things that print cannot compete with the new technologies. But there are also ways that the new technology cannot compete with print. There will be room for everything. As long as we remember that we as journalists are not the readers, are not the users, we will continue to be in good shape, if we provide relevant content in the relevant medium to the relevant audience.

When you say that 'the journalist is not the reader,' you mean that journalists need to understand what the audience wants and not write for each other?

Husni: Yes. I was at the conference, We Love Magazines, in Luxembourg, and there were 200 editors and publishers there of great, marvelous magazines. None of them are making money, and you can tell, you can look at them. They are designing them to compete against each other, [to get] magazine awards, rather than saying, 'What's in this for the reader?' or 'Is this the best platform?'

That's why I say newspapers in this country are not dying, they are committing suicide. You go to speak in newspaper newsrooms, I've gone to speak about the future of newsrooms, and their first reaction is that 'You are the anti-christ. You want us to do what? Do more than just go to a board meeting and record it and spit it out? We have to analyze and go beyond that?' Even the Internet is too late to provide me the information. Whatever happens in the world now I get an alert on my Blackberry. The immediacy of news delivery can no longer be done in a newspaper.

We have to change the name of a newspaper to daily paper. We have to accept the fact that we have to go beyond the 5 W's and H [who, when, what, where, why and how] and start talking about 'what's in it for me?' and leave the 5 W's and H to electronic delivery because we cannot compete with that. Newsweek and Time are like a snapshot in time. Instead of giving you a summary of the news, they need to give you an in-depth analysis on a few topics.

I've noticed that the local newspaper here, the San Francisco Chronicle, is trying to make their paper more local and use more graphics, photos and color on the front page.

Husni: Two things we have to do. We have to use more narrative and more pictures. If you look at the Financial Times that was completely redesigned last week, a lot of their stories are a full page. But you read that story and you'll get everything you need to know about that subject. More magazines are moving toward more narrative. I tell my magazine clients we have to deepen the story and chase the photographs. For the service part, send people to the web.

The biggest mistake we've made in this industry is that we send people to the web, and we've left them there. We offered them something that's free, that's like a blizzard that surrounds them with information. But at no website do they ever say, 'By the way, you need to go back to the paper to read page 20 where we have this article that you'll only find on page 20 today.' There's no two-way street, we've created a one- way street and people get lost in the jungle [online].

You pick up National Geographic or Conde Nast Traveler magazine and read a marvelous 20-page article about Italy with gorgeous photography. At the end of the article, you [could] say, 'Interested in going to Italy? Check our website and see all the hotels and museums.' All the service aspects. Of if you go to the website you see all these services, and then it says, 'Interested in going to Italy? Pick up the magazine for this article.'

So you don't suggest that people put magazine content online at all?

Husni: No. The biggest mistake we are doing now, and I don't understand why, is we are duplicating magazine content and putting it online. Why would I have the exact same thing on the screen if it exists in print? If I wanted to have a magazine online I would do something like Monkey magazine that Dennis Publishing is doing that's designed specifically for the Internet. You look at one page at a time and there is no jump. Imagine if you were reading something on screen and you had to jump to page 24?

Yesterday I had the editor of Newsweek here and he was telling the students that 500 words is the max that people are willing to read on the Internet. He said if there are eight pages [of a story] on the Internet, 80% of readers don't even read page 2. The missing part is education in the newsroom and in magazines. Each medium has to respect the other mediums. People are looking for complementary media, and that's what's missing when I look at those magazine sites and newspaper sites.

In talking about Teen People going online-only, you said that that is the death knell for magazines. Do you think that's because what they're creating online is just shovelware from what they had run in print?

Husni: Yeah. And this myth that teens don't read anymore, only online. That's the biggest myth. They are still reading if you give them relevant information. I was speaking to a newspaper group and they were complaining, 'Teenagers never read newspapers.' I said, 'Show me a time in the history of newspapers in this country when teenagers were a big chunk of readers of newspapers.' And by the same token, you look at the same teenagers that we say don't read and they are reading Harry Potter which is 700 pages without pictures. It's something relevant to them.

Why would I wait one month and pay $3.50 to get Teen People when I can get InTouch Weekly for $1.99 on a weekly basis? A month in a life of the teen is a long history. Those kids live in the present time. If they are not interested in your content on a monthly basis, they won't be interested in it on the Internet. Print is still the cornerstone to take me to the web, show me the clip, show me the music, show me the video. You have to give me the cornerstone if you are going to link the two together.

What about someone like IDG, who came out and said they would launch new magazines online first and then later in print? Are trade publications different than consumer magazines in that way?

Husni: It's not a different case, it's a cheaper case. It's easier and cheaper [to launch online] but how are you going to brand it? If you have a lot of competition in print, imagine all the competition online. When Conde Nast launched Portfolio magazine, look how much they were investing to launch print and online. You have to have the cornerstone to build on. If they had only launched Portfolio online without the print magazine, it wouldn't have the same impact. It gives them the ability to go deep in the print edition and do snippets on the website on a daily basis.

What about online-only magazines such as Salon and Slate? Obviously it took them a long time to make money, but it is possible to go online without a print magazine.

Husni: Yes, and there are a lot of those online magazines coming along . . . Imagine for someone's birthday, saying, 'Hey John, I've given you a subscription for www.slatemagazine.com, which is a free magazine.' What's the value in that? Can you imagine giving someone a website for a gift? There's still a reason for that tactile feeling of holding something in your hand and having something you're proud of. And how many people have had the money that Slate and Salon had invested? And after all that money they've invested, if they had had a print publication, do you think they would have made more money by now?

I am not the anti-technology person. I am the one who tells people who want to dive into technology, 'Why start something online under a totally different business model?' I have someone who comes to me and says he is going to start a magazine. And you ask for a business plan, what the costs will be, what's the exit strategy. And someone comes to you talking about launching a website and that's the whole business plan, and nobody questions that! It's so frustrating because it's so cheap. If you have a laptop, you are a publisher . . . Everybody now can own their own press. But imagine reaching an audience of one for every publication we have.

What is your suggestion to newsweeklies? Their circulation is going down overall. Do you think it was a mistake to put all their content online?

Husni: Definitely. The day I cancelled my subscription to Newsweek was when I saw in print a snippet of an interview, and below that it said, 'For the whole interview go to msnbc.newsweek.com.' I am paying money and you are offering me less in print than what I can get for free on the web. That's why I was very happy when Time reinvented itself with more in-depth [strories] and more photography. They cover two or three topics, but I still need editors to figure out what my readers want each week.

There's been a lot of talk about having the readers get involved with reporting as citizen journalists. Is there room for that in magazines?

Husni: Oh yeah. The best example of that is JPG magazine, and they call their company 80/20. What they are saying is that 80% of the content comes from the wisdom of crowds, people submit pictures to them, other people vote on them. Then editors play the gatekeeping role, bring that professional touch, bring a journalist's objectivity to it. That's one reason when I started blogging I said, 'Blogging is not journalism, it's a different form of communication.' In no way, shape, or form is it journalism. A journalist can be a blogger. But a blogger is not a journalist.

How do you make that distinction?

Husni: I can write on my blog, 'I like this issue of Newsweek,' it's like writing it in my diary but I'm putting it up for anyone to read so they know what I'm thinking. I'm not getting an opinion here or giving objective analysis. With blogging, you're not required to do balance. I call blogging the virtual barber shop. Some years ago, you used to go to the barber shop and hear gossip.

In this age, which I call the 'Isolated Connectivity Age,' we are more isolated and connected than ever before. Our social skills are going to start appearing on the web. We live by our cell phones, computer screens and TV screens. It gives us a sense of connectivity but we are very isolated. I see my son watching a clip of a movie on YouTube and he's text messaging his girlfriend and she's watching the same thing on her computer. I say, 'What's wrong with the good old- fashioned way where you went to a movie theater and got popcorn and try to reach for the popcorn and miss?' They look at you like 'you're a weirdo, daddy!'

Do you find fault with the way magazine companies cater to advertisers?

The major problem in our industry is that we have not changed our publishing model in this country. We are very advertising driven. If I am a big magazine in New York I cater to 50 customers, the Chanels and L'Oreals, and we ignore the two million customers who are our readers. When Victoria magazine folded it had a circulation of almost one million, but Hearst killed the magazine because it didn't have enough advertising. People still write on my blog how much they loved Victoria magazine, a magazine that's been dead for four years. But Hearst and Conde Nast don't care about the readers of their magazines, they're just numbers to sell to those customers, the 50 customers they are catering for, throwing parties for, begging them to advertise.

There's something wrong with our publishing model. The industry always focuses on the wrong things. The MPAA is jumping head first about going digital, without first focusing on how people can make the printed edition connect with readers and go from there.

What do you think about e-ink and digital ink? Do you think it will be viable?

Husni: It will happen, we will have e-paper. But the beauty of print magazines, print on paper, is like a candy bar. Nobody needs them, but like a candy bar, you want to eat it fast so your wife doesn't see it, or your mother doesn't see you eating it before dinner. It's also disposable. If you left your newspaper on the train, you won't go back to search for it, but if you have e-paper or your iPod and left it on the train, you'll go searching for that iPod. The beauty of that disposable medium, the beauty of print on paper that we are addicted to is not replaceable with any other media. Yes we'll have all these other new media but it will have a different purpose, a different use, a different relationship.