Another B2B sale to Wall Street types

I'm a little disappointed to find that VSS has sold the Hanley Wood publications to JPMorgan Partners. I'd held out hope -- perhaps naively -- that the B2B properties would be sold to a B2B publisher.
Certainly there is some positive news in the deal. JPMorgan paid good money for Hanley Wood -- some $650 million. That tends to boost the asking price of Primedia Business and other B2B companies that are now on sale (see my fellow B2B media blogger David Shaw for a look at the numbers behind the deal.)
But when I look past the money, I see trouble.
I've worked for Wall Street publishers before. Henry Kravis controls Primedia through KKR. Michael Bloomberg, mayor of my fair city, is the owner of Bloomberg News. The two men hold the two top slots on my list of the Five Most Repugnant People I Have Ever Known.
I've written before about the clash between the distasteful management style that brings success on Wall Street and the supportive environment that fosters the subject-area expertise that B2B publications need to prosper.
Here's hoping that JPMorgan sees something of value in the values of our industry.

Chicago, South Korea and the blogsphere

I had a wonderful time this weekend in Chicago. The weather was perfect. The city, as always, was nearly so. I was there to speak at a convention about something other than B2B media. But as luck would have it, I wound up talking at length about blogging.
Much to my surprise, only two people in a crowd of 30 or so had ever heard about blogging or citizen journalism. Much to my pleasure, almost everyone seemed thrilled by the possibility of participating in the discussion about subjects they care about, rather than being passive consumers of lecture-style journalism.
While I was in the Windy City, Dan Gillmor was on the other side of the planet in South Korea, speaking about citizen journalism in the land of ohmynews.
I wish I had brought a copy of his speech to give to my group in Chicago.

No blogging for awhile, I'm traveling to Chicago

When I'm not thinking about B2B media, I'm thinking about yoga. And if I'm not thinking about yoga, I'm thinking about sayoc. And when I'm not doing any of those things, I'm thinking about applied behavior analysis.
This weekend I'll be giving a presentation at the Association for Behavior Analysis convention. Wish me luck.
I don't expect to do much, if any, blogging while I'm gone.
Talk to you on Tuesday.

Changing journalism education

I applaud any move to improve journalism. As I've said more times than I can remember, this is an exciting and challenging time in our business. There are new ways to distribute content. New styles of writing have emerged for the post-objectivity world.
Change is here. Journalism must adapt.
But I tend to doubt that much good will come from the announcement that a group of journalism schools is going to spend $6 million "to elevate the standing of journalism in academia and find ways to prepare journalists better."
By my way of thinking, the core problem in journalism is an arrogant attachment to the elitist ways of the past. So bringing together a bunch of elitist schools -- Harvard, Columbia, etc. -- is probably not the best way to foster change.
I'm far more interested in what's happening at my alma mater at the University of Missouri than I am in what the media elite in New York and Cambridge think. Why isn't the University of Kansas, which has the advantage of being based in Lawrence, part of this project? How about the University of South Carolina? Or smaller schools such as Northwest Missouri State (where I serve on an advisory board.) Heck, if you have to include a school from New York, why not go with NYU, which has at least one leading thinker on staff?

Those guys who bought the Advanstar properties

There's some coverage in the Boston business press of the private equity group known as the Audax Group, which bought a good portion of the B2B properties of Advanstar. Audax has formed a new company called Questex (what is with these silly, we're-so-modern names?) to run 23 trade publications, 20 exhibitions, 25 conferences and 50 websites covering technology, industrial and specialty products, beauty, travel and entertainment.
Audax is one of those massive investment groups with tons of cash and a penchant for the leveraged buyouts. Similar groups such as KKR, which owns Primedia, and VSS, which owns a bunch of things, are already major players in B2B publishing.
Audax owns a slew of companies, including Readymix Concrete and the Boston Herald newspaper.
After complaining earlier today about a B2B publisher that did such a lousy job of covering itself, I have to point out the Boston Herald failed to mention it is owned by Audax.

New direction and misdirection at GIE Media

There's a lot of change at GIE Media, publisher of such B2B titles as "Golf Course News" and "Secure Destruction Business." Earlier this month, Chris Foster was named president and chief operating officer of the Cleveland-based publisher. Now comes word that Mike DiFranco has joined the company as Group Publisher, Manufacturing. All this is good news. Foster worked at GIE previously and developed the company's Internet systems, where GIE is often well ahead of competitors. (For example, just yesterday I was talking about how few discussion boards there are at B2B publishers. But there is one at "Pest Control Technology" and a number of other GIE sites.) DiFranco is a 30-year veteran of our industry who most recently served as a vice president of Penton Media. But I'm not using this post to praise GIE. I'm using this post to condemn it. I don't know how many times I have to tell people in B2B that we are in the information and communications business. That means we communicate information. We don't hide it. Check out this annoying article about Foster that appeared on the "Lawn and Landscape" site. The writer, and I don't know if it's someone in public relations or in editorial, managed to tell us all about Foster without telling us what, if any, is Foster's relationship to company chairman and chief executive officer Richard Foster. The same piece also appears here and here. Is it possible that the writer didn't think that was a question worth answering? Or did he or she think that no one would wonder if GIE is a family-run company? And it's not as if this don't-tell-anyone-anything-of-interest style is a one-time problem. Check out the article about DiFranco in PCT Online, which contains this cryptic line: "DiFranco brings with him the popular Today’s Medical Developments magazine as GIE Media expands its leading portfolio of B2B publications to include manufacturing publications." Huh? Does that mean that GIE bought the magazine? Or did DiFranco buy it from Penton and then resell it? Is this a joint venture of some kind? You can read the article all day and never find an answer. How can anyone in our industry think this is acceptable? Does anyone at GIE think that their readers don't notice these gaping holes in their stories? Do people at GIE think this helps their credibility as journalists and publishers? Doesn't anyone at GIE realize that their readers aren't idiots and they are insulted by such foolishness? And lastly, is this sort of half-assed reporting the norm at GIE?