FIR Interview: Social Media Monthly Publisher and Editor Bob Fine

In this FIR Interview, FIR co-hosts Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz chat with Bob Fine, publisher and editor of The Social Media Monthly, a new print publication that is also a current Kickstarter project.

The Social Media Monthly was conceived at the 2011 South by Southwest Interactive conference and launched a mere 53 days later, on May 20th, 2011 at BlogWorld in New York. Three weeks later Fine secured national distribution for the magazine with Barnes and Noble. The magazine was honored as one of the top magazine launches of 2011 by MIN, an organization that reports on the publishing industry.

In the interview, Fine recounts the… Read More »

Businesses destined to add e-books to their content marketing efforts

Publishing books isn’t exactly new to businesses. In 2009, Forrester Research executives Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li made a splash with Groundswell, published by Wiley. It may be one of the more visible examples of a business—Forrester—publishing a book (the company got the royalties instead of the authors, the status quo for employees who write business books while employed), but because of the economics of book publishing, that’s about to undergo a massive shift.

Who publishes books is already in the throes of change. Amazon’s Kindle library is crammed full of titles produced by individuals who avoided working with a publisher at… Read More »

Think Quarterly is a case study in how to become a media company

Google’s Think Quarterly magazine is the latest example of a company recognizing that, regardless of whatever else it is, it’s a media company.

Google, of course, is a media company on a number of levels. Its primary business helps people find stuff. Its YouTube operation is all about letting people share video. The company produces scads of media, from apps (like Google Earth) to the videos it produces to help promote and explain its various offerings. There are Google blogs, which are media, as are the doodles that frequently replace the logo on the Google.com page.

But until Think Quarterly, Google hasn’t been known as a print… Read More »

Forrester’s blogging policy misses the IP point

Warning: Long post follows.

Readers of this blog and listeners to my podcast, “For Immediate Release,” know thast I focus primarily on the impact of online media on organizational communications. As a blogger and a podcaster with an audience, companies routinely reach out to me with their news and information in the hopes that I’ll find their content interesting enough to share. It’s only about 9:30 a.m. here in the Bay Area and I’ve already received about a dozen such pitches today via email.

Forrester Research is one of the organizations that engages in such outreach—and, candidly, it’s one of the few organizations whose content… Read More »

Some perspective on magazine closings

Much has been made of the statistics cited in a press release issued December 14 by MediaFinder. According to the release, 275 new magazines were launched while 428 folded. These numbers were presented as further evidence of print’s inevitable demise.

There’s no question that the Net is having a profound impact on the publishing business. Many of the major titles that shuttered print production shifted to online-only models.

But context is a valuable thing. It’s worth noting that far more magazines perished in years long before the digitization of media began. It’s also worth nothing that those were all recession years: 1992, 1993,… Read More »

The ethics of publishing stolen material

IABC President Julie Freeman TechCrunch’s decision to publish internal documents stolen from Twitter, “Was it appropriate to publish stolen documents?  Even if the information obtained was accurate?  Was it ethical?  Does the public have the right to know how Twitter (or any company) plans to make its money and when?  Does how information is obtained affect whether it should be published?”

I’ve decided to post my answer here.

I was struck by one of Robert Scoble‘s remarks on FriendFeed, part of a lengthy discussion on the controversy. In response to the argument that nothing in the Twitter… Read More »

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