I can’t make this up: Felix Dennis, the mogul behind laddie magazine Maxim, is spending lots of time and money writing and promoting poems that rhyme. Dennis knows that if he’s successful at something, he’ll have lots of imitators. (Someone should tell him that lots of people in Nashville make their money by writing poems that sorta rhyme.)

Proudly, a custom-published association magazine: A new magazine from Hammock Publishing officially launched over the weekend: the rebranded, redesigned and re-engerized Ride PWC Magazine, the bi-monthly magazine for members of the American Watercraft Association (AWA).

Here’s what the official press release says:

The AWA represents the owners of personal watercraft (PWC), including customers and dealers, and is the only consumer-based organization committed to defending members’ right to ride. As the primary benefit of AWA membership, Ride helps members get the most out of their PWCs.

“We believe the new Ride better captures the fun of the PWC lifestyle with features on family vacation spots, day-trip suggestions, heroes in the PWC community, safety tips, racing news and much more,” says Rex Hammock, president of Hammock Publishing, the custom publisher of the magazine on behalf of AWA.

Unofficially, I’ll proudly (and shamelessly) give major kudos to the Ride Magazine team at Hammock Publishing and their counterparts at AWA who have created a terrific new magazine that is being enthusiastically received by PWC owners and advertisers, alike. (Here’s a page where you can see some sample spreads.) Better yet, they have provided me with a respectible excuse to leave the office and head to the lake. I know: It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

Help Steve interview me: Steve Rubel, who has started a weblog on the topic of “blogging and PR” has posted a request for questions that he will ask me in an interview. While the five regular readers of this weblog already know more about me than they care to, perhaps you can think of something he could ask.

Did I miss something? Mediaposts’ Larry Dobrow profiles the weekly newspaper-supplement magazine American Profile using this opening paragraph:

Callers to the New York headquarters of American Profile are greeted by a chipper voice that describes the weekly title as “the magazine for and about the millions of Americans that cherish hometown life.” And while any number of publications that celebrate small-town living make similar boasts– usually with strings swelling in the background–American Profile makes the description seem less cliché than mission statement.

How come on the publication’s website, it says American Profile is published by Publishing Group of America (PGA), a Franklin, Tennessee-based media company if their “headquarters” are in New York? The magazine is a celebration of small-town America. Wouldn’t it make more sense, even if the advertising sales and business decisions are handled in New York, to claim the small-town of Franklin, where you’ll find the editors and designers of the magazine, as your headquarters and pretend that New York is, well, a spot where the “suits” hang out?

(Later: I’ve thought about it and the advertising people who read Media Post may prefer thinking it is a New York-based publication. It reminds me of recently walking off a busy street near Times Square into a building and up the elevator and stepping into the offices of “Country Living.”)

Blog lite day: Sorry, but I’m slammed today. However, I wanted to point to David Carr’s story in the NYT about David Carey’s breakfast schedule (reminds me of a breakfast I had with him three years ago)…and how the advertising rebound hasn’t reached magazines yet, except for some magazines. In another part of the Times, perhaps a more significant article appears, one about the advertising revenue stream (in and out) revealed in Google’s IPO filings.

Quote:

In the first quarter, Google paid $252 million to other companies that display its ads, 76 percent of the total revenue from such ads. In some cases, it disclosed that it pays more than 100 percent of its revenue to some sites because it had agreed to guarantee minimum revenues that its ad sales did not cover. In the first quarter, those excess payments totaled $9 million.

In the fog of coverage of the Google IPO, it may be lost that much of this revenue is going to the online properties of “traditional” publishers: A quarter of a billion dollars in the first quarter alone, leaving the coffers of Google and entering the coffers of traditional publishers like the NY Times. Something to think about.