Wednesday, June 22, 2005

R&I and CMO win ASBPE magazine awards

Reed Business's Restaurants & Institutions and IDG's CMO have been named the magazines of the year by the American Society of Business Publication Editors. Congratulations to all involved.
R&I, which publishes 20 times a year and covers "the entire foodservice industry, including chains, independent restaurants, hotels and institutions," collected the ASBPE honors for magazines with circulation of more than 80,000. It was judged for its performance in five editorial categories, including excellence in reporting and writing, design and reader interaction.
Certainly R&I is deserving of the honor. It tends to publish information-dense stories that feature crisp writing. More importantly, the stories tend to be well sourced and brief. For example, if you're willing to put up with a very intrusive registration process, take a look at this piece from April. The writer quotes four sources by name and title and tells the story in fewer than 700 words. If you spend anytime at all looking at B2B magazines than you know how rare it is to find a story that quotes more than one source. Or, even worse, are B2B publications that routinely use unnamed sources without justification.
I'm a little less impressed with R&I's interaction with readers. There is a feedback function, but it only generates an email form rather than giving readers access to a comment function or discussion board. On the other hand, simply publishing reporters' names and email addresses online puts R&I ahead of many competitors.
CMO, which topped the other nominees in the less-than-80,000-circulation category, is one of my favorite B2B publications. In particular, I like CMO's design both in print and online.
The publication is also unafraid of new media. It has webcasts, RSS feeds and staff-written blogs .
Most importantly -- and I can't emphasize this enough -- CMO understands the new culture of journalism in a way that is still very rare in the B2B world. Take a look at the right-hand side of this page. Those are links to CMO's new media rivals and competitors. Few trade publishers have enough faith in their own products to provide such links. Even fewer trade publishers are willing to abandon the myth that they are the only voice in their industry. CMO, however, recognizes that it is part of a conversation. That's particularly valuable for a magazine that covers the marketing industry, where powerful online voices such as Corante's BrandShift have arisen.

No comments:

Post a Comment