Talking Biz News Founder Ready to Pass the Torch
Talking Biz News founder Chris Roush announced on Wednesday that he’s ready to move on from the site, which tracks job changes and other day-to-day news in the field of business journalism.
“After 14 years of running Talking Biz News, I’m looking for someone to hand it over to. If you’re passionate about business journalism and have some time to do it, send me a private message,” tweeted Roush, who is also a longtime journalism professor at the UNC School of Media and Journalism—where he created the school’s business journalism program—and serves as founding director of the Carolina Business News Initiative.
Roush noted that traffic to TalkingBizNews.com has grown in each of the last five years, and that he intends to continue running the site and its social feeds until turning things over to a successor.
Radhika Jones, a little over a year into her tenure as Vanity Fair‘s fifth editor-in-chief, announced Wednesday evening that the magazine has launched a full digital archive—not only including all back issues since the magazine’s 1983 revival, but also several from its original 1913–1936 run.
In the works since around the time Jones took over for longtime editor-in-chief Graydon Carter late in 2017, the archive contains over 700 searchable back issues and a number of collections curated by Jones’ editorial team.
“Once upon a time, archives required special dispensation and white gloves; they were hidden away in corners of libraries and the adjective most associated with them was ‘dusty.’ Not so in the digital age,” wrote Jones in a note accompanying the launch. “When the editor-in-chief baton passed to me, I requested the loan of bound volumes of each chapter of V.F.’s existence, the better to absorb its history. Magazines evolve the way living things do, in concert with and response to the changing world around us—but they retain their core DNA, and the archive records its imprint.”
Said archive will be available to readers for free (after supplying their email addresses) until June 30, after which access will be granted only to paying subscribers—another value-add for a magazine attempting to drum up additional consumer-driven revenue after introducing a metered paywall a year ago.
For now, check out the archives for free-of-charge here.
What’s the latest on the Quad/LSC merger?
Not a whole lot. The proposed $1.4 billion deal which would merge two of the country’s largest long-run publication printers into one company is still awaiting federal regulatory approval, with most observers anticipating a decision from the Justice Department in the coming weeks.
Despite the magnitude of such a merger in a publication-printing industry that’s already seen considerable consolidation over the past decade, magazine publishers have broadly remained silent on the deal, at least publicly.
“A publishing company executive tells me that a paper company contacted him in March as part of an effort to get publishers to object to the deal,” writes the pseudonymous writer behind the blog Dead Tree Edition, which has been on this story for months. “It found that publishers were reluctant to speak up for fear of angering two key suppliers.”
Two organizations that have spoken up are Pen America, a free speech advocacy group, and The Authors Guild, who—backed by the Open Markets Institute—co-signed a March 6 letter to the DOJ’s Antitrust Division expressing opposition to the merger.
A spokesman for the Open Markets Institute says there’s been no further correspondence with the DOJ as of yet. We’ll continue to track this story.
Just two days after selling Golf Digest to Discovery Inc. for around $30 million (per numerous reports), Condé Nast unloaded another magazine off the block: 85-year-old Brides magazine.
The buyer, Dotdash (formerly About.com) and parent company IAC, will scrap the 300,000-circ, bimonthly print edition but retain much of the title’s current editorial staff, including executive director Lisa Gooder, according to The New York Times, which reports that neither side is revealing the terms of the deal.
“It wasn’t like there was crazy bidding at the end,” Dotdash CEO (and Folio: Hall of Famer) Neil Vogel tells the Times. “It’s clear to us that there wasn’t a ton of investment behind this in the last few years.”
Brides and Golf Digest were two of three magazines put up for sale by Condé Nast last August. The third, W, remains on the block.
From the job board…
Cleveland-area B2B publisher GIE Media seeks a managing editor to help oversee print and digital editorial for two of its cannabis industry magazines: Cannabis Business Times and Cannabis Dispensary. The ideal candidate possesses a journalism degree and brings three-to-five years of editorial and production experience to the role.
See this and other current openings at careers.foliomag.com.
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