A magazine employeeJohn Thackara blogs what he thinks of his magazine Fast Company being sold:
Quote from the Fast Company Weblog.:
“It’s indeed rotten news that Fast Company’s parent company, Gruner & Jahr, has put it up for sale. A magazine is one of those places - like a school, or town square (or an event like Doors of Perception) - that create far more value than is often apparent. That’s because they enable encounter and interaction that would not otherwise occur.”
Update: See comments for clarification. John is a guest host on Fast Company’s blog, not an employee. I’m happy to set the record straight. I also agree with him sentiments.
American idol finals: As I see
it, it’s down to mini-me Travis Tritt vs. mini-me Faith Hill. They
should get married and move to Nashville and record really awful music
together.
(Sidenote: It’s cool hearing a song that was first performed in your living room before about 40 people will be performed a few years later before a 50,000 million-viewer audience.)
Update: I watched it via DVR (the only way to watch American Idol is to watch it on a DVR), but Rafat blogged the finals live. Some folks will go to extreme measures to out-blog the rest of us.
Take this prediction to the bank: Let’s review some history, first.
- September 28, 2004 (Day 1 of the Era of Podcasting): If you Googled
the word “podcasts” you would get only 24 results. For the record,
there was podcasting before this, but that was the day Doc Searls blogged the concept and he was clever enough to do that google search.
- February 25, 2005 (Day
140 of the Podcasting Era): An article appears in the NY Times (abstract) announcing the creation of an “eBay of Podcasting.” (My post on that day, “Podcasting needs no eBay.)
- May 24, 2004 (Day 238 of the Era of Podcasting, 98 days since that NY Times
announcement, or 41% percent of the Era of Podcasting has passed since that NY Times announcement): Business Week publishes an article about the product that’s no longer going to be the eBay of Podcasting, but now is going to be a “a one-stop
Web site where the masses can find and subscribe to podcasts, and
create new podcasts with ease” and will appear next month.
Here is my prediction: By the 365th day of the Era of Podcasting, a
company named after a fruit will, in addition to other-related announcements, announce “a one-stop website” where
“the rest of us” can find and subscribe to podcasts, and create new
pocasts with ease.” And soon thereafter, the podcasts created there can even be given away or sold
(if that’s what you want to do) via their already existing 800 lb.
gorilla music store thing.
Also, by Day 365 of the Era of Podcasting, I also predict that Yahoo!
will have one. And that dozens of open-source, grassroots, students in
dorm rooms and others will have one-stop websites where we can do that
easy podcasting thing.
As for me (and I hate doing this as I’ve sworn off mentioning them),
since I use Garage Band, iTunes, Safari and an iPod, I’ll probably be
podcasting on an as-yet-announced .Mac version of those one-stop websites.
I predict they’ll all be as cool as Odeo’s hype.
What Peter Horan told Staci: (via PaidContent.org)
Quote from the new president of Allbusiness.com:
“I’m
not 100-percent familiar with what hasn’t worked in this space. When I
go from the New York Times to AllBusiness, I will immediately become a
small businessperson…A lot of the stuff that I’ll be focused on in
the short term is creating almost content paths for what type of
business you’re in and what the nature of your question is.”
If this weren’t so fun,
I’d promise to make this the last post I’ll ever make on this
topic. However, I felt the (evil, perhaps?) urge to snidely
comment that being recruited by a head-hunter to become CEO of a
company that has $10 million in VC funding and feels the need to
urgently hire 40-50 people is, based on my conversations with thousands
of small business owners, not the best way to “immediately become a
small businessperson.”
Dear Jacobs Posse guys: Don’t try this. Okay, call me strict.
Always the last to know: More on the Meredith purchase of G-J USA magazines from Matt Kinsman, Bill Mickey and Dylan Stableford at Folio:
“Talks of the sale between the two companies had been ongoing for about a year, Kerr says, and that the interest was “mutual.” However, Russell Denson, who replaced Dan Brewster as G+J USA’s president and CEO in June 2004, was unaware of the pending sale until it was close to final. “I was not aware of this until very recently,” Denson told FOLIO:. “I am personally disappointed that this was the outcome. I thought we had made a lot of progress restoring confidence in our titles.”
(A walk down rexblog memory lane regarding this topic.)
