Pulling together: National Country Market, an ad rep firm representing a network of magazines read by consumers of electric cooperatives is marking its 10th anniversary today.

Quote from the press release:

NCM… represents one of the largest circulating magazine groups in the country. “If you look at our group as one magazine, we have the fifth largest magazine circulation in the country, right behind Better Homes & Gardens,” says executive director George Macias. The 22 statewide magazines affiliated with NCM are produced by electric cooperative associations and most have been published for more than 60 years. In the past 10 years, NCM has generated $30 million in advertising revenue for the 22 publications, serving 7 million rural and suburban households. The cooperative organization should top $4.7 million in sales this year.

As NCM compared the coop magazines to Better Homes & Gardens, I will merely note that BH&G has advertising sales of over $600 million a year (a number that could be divided by 22 and still be a lot).

Right branding: The official magazine of the organization USA Hockey will be getting a new name this month. It will now be called USA Hockey Magazine instead of American Hockey Magazine.

According to the press release, the magazine is distributed as a membership benefit 10 times annually and reaches more than 600,000 ice and inline hockey players, coaches, referees, administrators and volunteers. TPG Sports, a Minneapolis-based company, will continue in its tradition of publishing the magazine since 1990.

This resource is your resource, this resource is my resource: The Music Library Association’s “Copyright for Music Librarians” resource, especially the “Socratic FAQs: “Scenarios and guidance about general copyright provisions, reserves, preservation, performance rights, issues for composers and authors, and video in the library.” (via Gary Price (ResourceShelf.com)

Delayed: I’d like to thank the fine folks at the Newark International Airport for providing wi-fi. While it cost $7 a day, it’s worth it when your flight is delayed for four hours due to the fact that someone heard it thunder somewhere and decided that all the airplanes east of the Rockies would be better off not going anywhere.

Market share of what? According to the NYPost, a Time Inc. spokeswoman says that a free preview issue of All You now slated to start landing in Wal-Mart stores today is only a “a sample issue” designed to build market share in advance of the first issue, slated to hit August 13.” There will be 500,000 copies of the free version. I wonder if they’ll use those sampling ladies who give out cut-up egg rolls and cut-up meat products on tooth-picks to hand them out.

An upscale Lucky? According to the NYPost’s Keith Kelly, Conde Nast is considering starting a culture magazine and would like to purchase Forbes (but they can’t get anyone at Forbes to say, “hi.”)

Another blog-lite day: I am enjoying a gathering of my colleagues from the world of custom publishing today and then head back to Nashville so I doubt I’ll be blogging much. Or, who knows: perhaps the wi-fi gods will embrace me along the way.

Identity crisis: This press release announcing a vaporzine in Canada called “Q” makes for some entertaining reading. It sounds like it was issued after the partaking of mushrooms.

JFKs: I try. I try really hard. I try really hard to eschew the political comments on this weblog as there is more than enough weblog server space devoted to that topic. But there was just something about that salute tonight that made me think of it in contrast to that earlier salute on the left: one a contrived photo-op that should embarass whoever came up with the idea; the other an innocent gesture that moved the world.

Update: Jeff Jarvis calls it the “john-john moment” in his insightful review of Kerry’s “competent” speech.

Make mook: Mark Frauenfelder, one of the BoingBoing gang announced today that Make, a magazine/book (or Mook, as the Japanese — and now, the rexblog — call it), will launch in January. Mark will be editor-in-chief. O’Reilly is the publisher of the do-it-yourself vaporzine for geeks.

Quote:

Make will have 5-minute tips you can use to improve your gadgets, networks, and computers, as well as much longer projects that might take several days (or weeks) to complete.

Finally. A magazine blog: I was just thinking to myself: There needs to be a weblog about magazines. And what do you know? I see that MediaBistro is about to launch one. Great idea. It should save me a lot of time.

Up in smoke: Favorite quote of the day about Ricky Williams (from The Sports Network):

Williams, who suffers from social-anxiety disorder and was a former spokesperson for the anti-depressant Paxil, claimed marijuana helped him once he had to stop using Paxil because it didn’t agree with his diet. Williams said that marijuana was better for him and did not see anything wrong with the drug since it was “just a plant.”

His diet?

Did we say ‘decline’? We meant sublime! Favorite editor’s update note on a news story today, from fool.com:

“Editor’s note: In the first version of this article published on July 27, McGraw-Hill’s Education Unit was characterized as “very much in decline.” This was not accurate, and the article has been updated to reflect this. We apologize for the mistake.”

Travel morning: Blogging lite today…and via Treo.

Jupiter Research’s Fuzzy Math: Since the Jupiter Research online ad do-over prediction is getting picked up by every newsite on the planet, I’ve decided to rant on it some more. You’ll recall the prediction: Online advertising to overtake magazine advertising by 2009. And recall, this is from a research company that predicted online advertising would be today about twice as much as it is. Their excuse for needing a mulligan after blowing it the first time around is failing to factor in the whole dot.com bubble bust.

Oh. I see. Well here are three things they are not factoring in this go ’round:

1. Their math sucks. First, I don’t understand where Jupiter Research comes up with that absurdly low prediction for 2007 that $13.8 billion will be spent on magazine advertising. Media investment banking firm Veronis Suhler, which has been tracking advertising spending for 30 years, predicts business-to-business magazine advertising will climb back to $11.9 billion in 2007 (which is still lower than the $13.5 billion record year, 2000). They predict that consumer magazine advertising will increase to $14.8 billion in 2007. Combining consumer and business-to-business advertisng, VSS appears to predict a total of $28.3 billion in magazine advertising spending for 2007 according to the back of my envelope. In other words, Jupiter Research apparently is predicting that all online advertising will be more than consumer magazine advertising in 2007, a rather significant apple-orange comparison consideration missing from all the press accounts I’ve seen.

2. Their predictions are based on CPM inflation. In other words, advertisers will be paying more for online advertising. I applaud this, believe me. I just don’t believe it. Last I checked, the law of supply and demand still works. Last I checked, if there is more demand for online content, there are rich, deep wells that can be tapped a mere few inches below the surface.

3. They assume advertising will cluster around four “properties”: Google, Yahoo, AOL-Time, MSN. So, where is every business-to-business media company in the universe? If the paradigm calls for every media company to fall in line with one of those networks, don’t count on it. This is 1996 Vertical Net goofy think. The business-to-business media paradigm is not going to see companies that own all the historical data in a trade, its major tradeshows, magazines and online properties and unmatchable understandings of their market niche subjugate themselves to the online networks predicted. If you don’t think IDG will cut off search engines from indexing its sites in order to undermine one or all of these “networks” then you’re not reading what its CEO is saying.

While I love magazines, I manage my business and a big chunk of my life via the Internet. I spend more hours each week using the Internet than on any other measurable activity (maybe “sitting” beats it). But I contend the whole “Internet is a ‘medium’” that should be perceived in metaphoric terms resulting in competitive comparisons to the magazine business model is a grand misperception.

Don’t get me wrong. From a business-opportunity standpoint, I would probably benefit more if Jupiter’s predictions come true. Frankly, I actually want more advertising dollars to be spent online than in magazines. But the notion that online advertising will overtake magazine advertising in five years is nothing more than Excel spreadsheet fantasy.

I’m going to stop there: No rants about magazines being an experience medium. No rants about how impossible it is to dislodge centuries-old media habit patterns. No rants about how magazines get displayed on coffee tables as an expression of how an individual wants to identify himself or herself to others. No, I’ll just stop there.