Spun sugar coating won't hide bad magazine news
Dylan Stableford, a columnist for Folio:, asks an apt question about the "happy talk" approach of such organizations at the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) and American Business Media (ABM) in reporting what are -- by anyone's definition -- lamentable information about the state of the U.S. magazine industry.
He says that the organizations do no one any good by "burying the lead", such as emphasizing a few pieces of good news while downplaying the 8.8% decrease in rate-card-reported advertising revenue in the 3rd quarter of the year.
(The only reason we don't see this in Canada, of course, is that we don't have the equivalent of the Publishers Information Bureau publishing such comparative data for Canadian titles.)
He says that the organizations do no one any good by "burying the lead", such as emphasizing a few pieces of good news while downplaying the 8.8% decrease in rate-card-reported advertising revenue in the 3rd quarter of the year.
(The only reason we don't see this in Canada, of course, is that we don't have the equivalent of the Publishers Information Bureau publishing such comparative data for Canadian titles.)
posted by D. B. Scott at
4:21 pm
2 Comments:
Uh, but we do have an entity that tracks ad sales on competing CDN titles -- LNA Canada. Right?
Actually, it's not exactly comparable. LNA data is nominally made available only to subscribing customers. (Although it is true that highlights of the data are published periodically by Masthead magazine.)The PIB data is freely and publicly available in detail on the MPA website.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home