People-to-people solutions: Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for helping me learn more about the work of Spirit of America (You can learn more in Dan Gillmor’s Sunday column about it.} Frankly, as someone who reads a fair amount of history, especially early American history (a benefit from part of the day job), it is frustrating to witness the shrilly defeatist realtime coverage of the aftermath of the war in Iraq. Pick up any of the great books written in recent years about our nation’s founders (my current favorite is Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow) and it will strike you as miraculous that our nation survived the decades following our own Revolutionary War. The aftermath of any war is hell. It is chaos defined. Why those who analyze and report this war think it should be any different boggles me.

Yet rather than stew in my frustration, I have decided to join forces with Jeff and other supporters of Spirit of America…to at least do something positive about helping to the address the current chaos. First, I will be contributing (and encouraging others to join me) to the organization’s efforts to match the needs of everyday Iraqis with the generousity of everyday Americans. These are people-to-people, grassroots efforts. Spirit of America has already responded to many requests of in-country U.S. military forces and other U.S. personnel for humanitarian, educational and technological resources needed by Iraqi citizens surrounding them.

I hope you will join me in supporting Spirit of America and in letting others know about its (or better: ours, yours and mine) efforts.

Is Google bad for business (to business publishers)? A big chunk of Google’s revenue is business-to-business advertising dollars. What is the dramatic growth of such online advertising expenditures doing to traditional print-based business-to-business publishers? Frankly, no one knows the answers yet, but Pat Kenealy, CEO of IDG, is at least asking the questions…and suggesting other business-to-business publishers start asking the same. This may seem like an esoteric issue, but it is important for publishers to follow the nuances of this issue. As Pat leads one of the world’s largest business-to-business media companies, one that has always been an aggressive leader in putting its content on the web, free for all Internet users to access, it will be important to watch what IDG does if Google gains a larger and larger piece of the budget pie from traditional IDG advertisers. Would it be too far-fetched to imagine a day in which IDG and other business-to-business publishers who offer their content free to web users not allow Google to index their websites? If IDG cuts off their content from Google, would they be shooting themselves in the foot…or would they be making the only decision that makes sense? I know some people believe, “you don’t exist if you don’t allow Google to index you,” but the content produced daily by the hundreds of technology writers and analysts employeed by IDG will be found by those in the IT world who depend on it, Googled or not. I don’t know the answers, but this will be interesting to follow.

Moon-writing: When Kate White isn’t doing editor-in-chief stuff at Cosmopolitan magazine, she writes bestselling murder mysteries in which the “spunky sleuth” is a crime writer for a Cosmo-like magazine. (via iwantmedia.com)

Give it to her, or give up: Martha Stewart will ask for community service, says Newsweek (via Bloomberg). If this weblog were the judge or prosecutor, this weblog would jump at the chance to settle in this way vs. the obvious overturning and exoneration she will get if they don’t accept.

To blog or not to blog: This weblog will be somewhere today that may or may not have web access. So there may or may not be much weblogging on this weblog today.

P&G’s new custom magazine is yellow journalism: MediaDaily News’ Michael Shields reports that Procter & Gamble is testing in the U.K. a new magazine for mothers called Mustard. (Not to be confused with this Mustard Magazine.)

Quote:

We are always looking at developing new marketing tools to deepen the relationship with our consumers, and given the way that magazines engage with their readership, this is a communication channel that we are interested in testing,” said Judith Russell, a P&G spokesperson. While the company declined to say whether the magazine is part of a larger push into the consumer publishing business, Russell confirmed that there are currently no plans to launch this magazine in the United States. “We are taking one step at a time,” she said.

Mustard will be delivered to some consumers at home, with 1 million additional copies being distributed via the Saturday Express starting May 29th. Print media mavens at some non-P&G shops say they are intrigued by the move, and think it may be a smart move. “My instinct is, a lot of branded publications have been slightly slanted, but P&G stands for a lot of good things,” noted Steve Greenberger, senior vice president-director of print media at Zenith Media. “If it has usable information that helps make people’s lives better, I think it’s okay.”

Greenberger added that P&G’s considerable research strength in the United States might make the company particularly well-suited to launch a U.S.-targeted magazine. “The question is how overly blatant it is,” he said. “We have to wait and see what it looks like.” Since little is known about Mustard, at this point any judgment may be premature, and several agency executives declined to comment.

The new book may be no different than run-of-the-mill custom publishing, which has been a common practice by marketers for years. “This is nothing new,” said Mike McHale, senior vice president-group media director at Optimedia. “There are lots of brands that have custom magazines.” It’s also not unheard of for brands to attempt to launch “objective” magazines. After tobacco manufacturers began withdrawing ad dollars from many consumer magazines a few years ago to avoid targeting younger readers, Phillip Morris began to publish lifestyle magazine Unlimited in conjunction with Hachette Filipacchi. In addition to Phillip Morris brands, Unlimited has featured ads from major brands such as Altoids and Maxwell House.

Of course, P&G has been in the original content business for quite some time. The company is credited with inventing the soap opera back in the early days of radio and television. Procter & Gamble Productions, Inc. currently produces “Guiding Light,” and once produced longtime soap “Another World.”

I apologize for the long quote, but I needed to do so in order to commend Michael Shields for anticipating every nit-pick I would have made about his story had he not been so diligent in providing context for this news. Because of his stellar reporting, I will forgive his minor run-of-the-mill jab.

Vaporzine weekly? In an adjective-rich story, Folio: reports that David Bradley, chairman and owner of Atlantic Media, is “actively researching the prospect of creating” a national weekly news magazine. (”Actively researching the prospect of creating.” Parse that. While I can’t determine exactly what the phrase means, I am actively considering the prospect of making it a part of the definition of the word vaporzine.) According to the article, Bradley apparently has actively researched the prospect enough to know that the new title won’t be associated with the company’s “venerable” flagship book, Atlantic Monthly, often referred to by the less-venerable-sounding name, The Atlantic. What a shame, however: Atlantic Weekly would have worked so well.

Sources have told Folio: that the “nascent” magazine may be based on the “well-respected” German magazine Der Spiegel, which this weblog finds puzzling as I doubt very many Americans can speak German, much less read it. I think Folio: has this story confused: More likely, Atlantic Media is considering the prospect of creating a weekly shopping magazine based on the venerable and well-respected Spiegel Catalog.

(via the venerable and well-respected Romensko.)

The young & the wordless: As reported on this weblog last December and predicted even earlier, Abercrombie & Fitch didn’t really “kill” A&F Quarterly, they merely renamed it “Young”, took out all the words and let Bruce Weber shoot in black and white rather than in color (or did they just use some outtakes of his late 80s work for Calvin Klein?).

You gotta love this quote:

“Unike the quarterly, ‘Young’ is a collection of black and white photographs of models wearing our brand clothes and there’s no editorial content in it at all,” (spokesman Tom) Lennox said. According to Lennox, the retailer quietly began distributing the publication in April to a limited list of its former quarterly subscribers.

There is no mention of Young on the Abercrombie site (unlike all the press releases about Colors on the Benetton site), but you can find samples of it on eBay.

Hammock man update: To answer the flood of e-mails asking me (okay, the one e-mail asking me), I will not be blogging another meeting with the President tonight. While he is currently a few blocks away from rexblog headquarters and will soon attend a fund-raiser at the home of one of this weblog’s closest friends, a sentence from a story in today’s Tennessean will answer why I won’t be blogging this time around:

Bush will end the day with a fund-raiser at the Hillsboro Pike home of Cathy and Clay Jackson: $2,000 per person or couple at a reception, $10,000 to pose for photos and $25,000 for dinner.

Gee. I didn’t realize how valuable this was.

What magazines do the candidates’ backers read? Proving once more that most research provides little insight, a recent study from a company I won’t embarass by naming, came up with this gem: the top five magazines read by the two major presidential candidates’ supporters: