At MagPub we see this problem all the time: a company hires us because they want to change their current Website, but the way their last contractors set things up makes change more difficult than it should be. Ian Lurie had too much good advice on how to avoid these headaches for us to include [...]
Category Archives: Management of a publications enterprise
Gourmet: Tasty Leftovers?
October 10, 2009Abridged and reprinted from ideaLaunch Blog with permission of the author and ideaLaunch. Gourmet, one of the most revered foodie magazines, recently announced it will be ceasing publication after nearly 69 years in print. As webizens, we can’t help but feel just a little bit guilty for perhaps playing a part in the demise of [...]
Also posted in Industry trends Leave a comment
10 Surefire Ways To Burn Money
September 30, 2009Reprinted from his blog Conversation Marketing with the author’s permission. Hire one contractor to design your site, then send the development work to an offshore company. Guaranteed to produce a Frankenstein monster every time. Make your IT/development team build the entire site, with little or no input from the sales, marketing, or fulfillment teams. You’ll [...]
Does PowerPoint Make You Stupid?
August 6, 2009We’ve alluded in the past to Edward Tufte’s screed against The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. To summarize, he argues that PowerPoint forces presenters to dumb down their arguments to bullet points, eliminating logical structure in favor of lists where everything carries the same weight, and to severely limit the amount of information the audience receives [...]
Also posted in Presentations and meeting coverage 1 Comment
Is Editorial Productivity Measurable? Yes
April 27, 2009The writer, who received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Business Publications Editors (ASBPE), contributes frequently to the ASBPE blog on techniques for improving editorial quality. This post is abridged with his permission. Given the staff cutbacks that face almost every type of publications enterprise, it has become more important than ever [...]
Also posted in Writing and Editing Leave a comment
Finding a Publisher and/or Agent
April 1, 2009We’ve written in the past about the PR value of publishing a book and about strategies for doing so. In that spirit we bring you this post from Britta Alexander, President of EAT MEDIA. The post originally appeared, in a longer form, on the EAT MEDIA blog. As a former literary agent, friends and family [...]
Also posted in Marketing and promotion Leave a comment
Lifehacking: How to Do More – of Nearly Everything – with Less
February 16, 2009Since great swaths of the World Wide Web were developed by freelance geeks, it should come as no surprise that a robust community of writers and techies have devoted page upon page to maximizing their productivity and applying the lessons learned to their—and your—entire lives. The productivity genre offers publishing managers numerous “hacks” that can [...]
How to Control the Jitters in 2009
January 30, 2009This following is excerpted with the author’s permission from a post that appeared recently on the MailerMailer blog. The economic forecast for 2009 looks dismal. Given the jitters of the market, reviewing your forecasts more frequently throughout 2009 will serve you well. Use this timetable as a guideline for the next six months. 1. January: [...]
Nanobots Aren’t That Hard to Manage
December 18, 2008Lots of readers of The Wall Street Journal e-mailed Monday’s interesting and timely piece about the “new class of worker,” the Nearly Autonomous, Not in the Office, doing Business in their Own Time Staff—nanobots, for short. It’s an especially hot topic among publications managers. Increasingly, staff members want to telecommute to save gas and time, [...]
Wait! Don’t Touch That Website
December 8, 2008My colleagues and I are fans of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit outgrowth of the St. Petersburg (FL) Times that is devoted to improving the craft of journalism. So it’s in the spirit of collegiality that I’m responding to Joe Grimm, who writes “Ask the Recruiter” for Poynter Online. A reader asked: “I am a [...]