An announcement to this weblog’s seven readers regarding upcoming events : Beginning this Friday, August 13 and continuing through Sunday, August 22, I will be carrying out an experiment much like the one Steve Rubel tried when he went a week only getting news via weblogs. Except in my experiment, I’ll be trying to go a week without getting news from any source. (Except, perhaps, I may watch some Olympic softball coverage.)

My last post before my experimental blog-fast will be on Thursday evening when I will post links to a few sites where all the news here comes from anyway.

A few days after completing my week away from blogging (if successful, let’s call it a blogless coup), from Sunday, August 29 through Thursday, September 2, I will be in New York City and will be dropping the whole magazine news thing (for one week only) in order to blog about the folks I’ll be meeting during the Republican National Convention. While I will not be “credentialed” as a journalist or blogger (why bother?), I will be attending several convention sessions and will be reporting for NFIB.com, one of Hammock Publishing’s clients, and blogging here throughout the five days. I hope not to write about the things you can see on TV but will primarily focus on blogging about activities that will prove I’m a cyber-hayseed in the big city.

Always low prices. Always: The wait for Time Inc.’s WalMart channeled All You magazine is over on Friday, reports DMNews (via iwantmedia.com).

Quote:

“This is definitely not a partnership,” Oshin said. “This is definitely a Time Inc. initiative. Wal-Mart has no editorial involvement or financial involvement. So essentially this is not a partnership in the traditional sense. It is a Time Inc. title being distributed at a sole retailer. “It was not that we chose Wal-Mart,” she added. “It was that Wal-Mart was the largest distributor of magazines. An ongoing dialogue with them suggested that this was the first time a Time Inc. magazine would address their market.” A full-page, four-color ad in All You costs $13,470 — gross and non-negotiable. “You can call all 60 advertisers in this [premiere] issue, and they all paid the same rate, including Wal-Mart,” Oshin said.

Let’s do the math (as always, my math is strictly back of the envelop and as innacurate as, say, the math of most news reporters). Hmmm. Let’s see: 500,000 guaranteed circ. at $13,470 gross…equals, what, $27 CPM.

Now, reaching for the year-old SRDS on the floor next to my desk (the current edition is guarded by those who actually use it for something other than blog fact checking), I flip to section 49 and, again using the back of an envelop, I estimate the following 1-time, 4-color, published page rates (translation: “not non-negotiable”) for some of the other magazines in the All You space:

First for Women - $33
Family Circle - $48.50
Good Housekeeping - $52
Ladies Home Journal - $46

Apparently, All You is a bargain proposition for advertisers (who don’t want to negotiate) as well as readers. (PS. I wonder if any of the non-negotiation on pricing extends to non-negotiation on bundling the ads with other Time Inc. titles?)

Another sign of the coming apocalypse? A week after raising the advertising rate base of Lucky to one million, Conde Nast announced today it will boost the circulation of Cargo to 350,000 with the February, 2005 issue. Shop on, dudes.

Slate’s “In other magazines”: As always, a great round-up of what’s being covered in weekly magazines.

Absolutely, positively big magazine news: For most of the readers of this weblog, the interesting aspects of the magazine world relate to publishing and editorial. Yet, how magazines get from the printer to ones home is fascinating to magazine geeks (a term coined by the 17-year-old in my household) like me. So, here’s an alert to the folks who don’t follow this “post-press” life of magazines. The following is big news:

Quad/Graphics announced an agreement on Monday, August 9, to sell our Parcel Direct division to FedEx for $120 million, payable in cash. The transaction is expected to close as soon as possible after appropriate regulatory and legal conditions have been met.

“In six years, we have grown Parcel Direct from a tiny upstart into a leading parcel expeditor and now we are pleased that a premier company like FedEx will build on our record of growth,” said Thomas A. Quadracci, President & CEO of Quad/Graphics. “Our companies share similar business values, especially our commitment to customer and employee care. We have full confidence in FedEx as a growth-oriented business and top-level employer.”

Parcel Direct has built a profitable business by specializing in the consolidation and delivery of high volumes of lower-weight, less time-sensitive packages. Its unique business model capitalizes on the efficiencies of automated equipment and processes to expedite packages from businesses to consumers in two to six days using the U.S. Postal Service for in-home delivery. Parcel Direct employs approximately 450 employees from 12 distribution centers coast to coast and generated $250 million in sales in 2003.

In short, Quad has pioneered the means to combine and “co-ship” multiple magazine titles (and catalogs) in order to by-pass the U.S. Postal Service and drop the publications into the mail stream as close to your mailbox as possible. This strategy saves publishers both time and money. In the big picture of shipping and transportation, this may be a small transaction, but in the world of magazine distribution, it will be interesting to follow what can happen if Fed Ex applies its leverage and creativity to this facet of the business.

(Disclosure: Hammock Publishing has been a customer of Parcel Direct for a long time.)

Branded media update: I don’t typically blog magazine news outside North America (I don’t have the mental bandwidth), but I found this announcement of the launch by BBC Magazines of a new UK magazine that extends the Antiques Roadshow brand interesting in light of last week’s news that, in the U.S., Time Inc. is launching a magazine extension of the “Find!” brand, another PBS series from the U.S. producers of the colonial version of the 24-year-old BBC program.

Quote:

Publisher Brian Whittaker said: “The Antiques Roadshow is very much a great British institution, with a huge, and very loyal, following – and the magazine is the ultimate way of extending viewers’ enjoyment of this. “The combination of BBC Magazines’ expertise in the antiques and lifestyle field and an incredibly strong TV brand make the title a real winner.”

Also, apparently there is already a U.S. monthly using the AR brand, the Antiques Roadshow Insider.

Analyze that: After the rant in the item immediately preceeding this, I wonder if there should be a “time spent” vs. “results” analysis of this item regarding the Kerry vs. Bush newspaper reading practices. I’m guessing also that this will become an environmental issue as Kerry’s excessive reading of newspapers appears to make him responsible for way more destruction of nation’s forests than does Bush’s.

Analyze this: MediaDailyNews has analyzed some data collected by someone else (Veronis Suhler) and makes a grand leap to conclude there is something significant in finding “the amount of money Madison Avenue invests in (different) media is growing is growing increasingly exaggerated in favor of the oldest media. Print media outlets generate a far greater yield of advertising dollar relative to their share of consumer time.”

As I’ve said before, I’m beginning to think there should be a law against allowing reporters (who are notorious for avoiding statistics courses in college) to analyze data. For me, this “analysis” greatly exagerates any correlation between “time spent” and “return on investment” of media dollars. Unless some research is provided to show a direct correlation between “time spent” and “return on investment,” I don’t see how this matters.

If one were an analyst rather than a reporter one would drill down into the results of such faux-findings and ask, “why?” Chances are one would discover that a big chunk of newspaper revenues comes from grocery stores and automobile dealerships that can directly measure their ad-dollars spent to revenue generated (via coupons, for example) — the only metric that matters to them. Really, how much time do shoppers need to spend with the medium to dump out the inch-thick stack of Sunday newspaper advertising inserts (again, that have an ROI mechanism built in via coupons) as they head out the door to Target? On the other hand, automobile dealerships are surely learning how to divert ad dollars to the web…but only because of the direct results, not because of “time spent” analysis. Dealerships still spend a big chunk of their ad dollars on local newspapers…because it still works for them.

(And that doesn’t even take into consideration the whole time continuum issues raised when one tries to explain how total time spent with a medium even matters if advertisers merely purchase 30 and 60 increments of the total time.)