Bosacks - Presion Media Group

What is this FREE newsletter all about?

And how much does it cost?"

It is purely a very "personal" and slanted collection of news gathered daily over the Internet, which to me seems relevant and useful about the publishing industry.

I do this as a labor of love and to keep myself as up to date as is possible with the ever changing and advancing "Information Distribution Industry" formerly known as "Publishing".

The price for this service is nothing. It is Free. It is just as easy for me to copy three or four of my industry friends as it is to carbon copy the current list of 5,125 publishing professionals.

I do not write many of the articles, but have been known to add caustic comments when and where it seemed appropriate. After all, as the Japanese proverb goes, "If you believe everything you read, you better not read."

The articles come from publications around the globe that release their information on the Internet.

I have my address book categorized and broken down into six separate areas of focus. I can add your name to any and all of these sections.

Please let me know which list(s) are of interest to you.

1) Prepress/CTP/Digital

2) General Production Information

3) Paper/Mill Information

4) Print Sales related Information

5) Publication Business Information

6) E-Media - The New Business and Economy f Information Distribution.

Bosacks Speaks Out:

What is content?

Content, Content, Content What is it good for? Nothing!

All this talk of content and mergers and increased content and increased

mergers. Phooey!

It's not about the content. Piles and piles of content is just that -- piles and piles of junk. Useless to most, perhaps somewhat useful to some few dogged focused pursuers of information. Content is not king, but quality content might be queen. And focused quality content might be considered a king. And Presorted Personalized Focused Quality Content might be the "Emperor of All Information" Content is the workshop where I store all my tools. Information is the exact and only "hexagonal wrench" I need to finish the damn job. Now where was that wrench? When did I use it last? I don't remember. It could be anywhere.

Here is a question -- what makes this newsletter useful to you? I think it is the fact that I have spent 30 years doing a job very similar to yours. Not exactly the same, but close enough. My experience empowers me to act as your "agent." I sort through the information of our industry and forward to you the best that I can find that might be useful for you to know, based on my parallel experience to yours. Am I 100% correct? No, not even close. But I am useful enough to have a very large readership. So where am I going with all this? It is not the volume of content that is important; it is the focused practical usefulness of information that makes the content valuable.

All this talk of content and the power of mergers, and the power of combined content... Phooey! Mergers are good for business due to tangible efficiencies. Smaller head count, less office space and greater buying power. The rest is bull! Synergies? BULL! All this jabber of a "volume of content" is terribly misleading.

AOL ... and Time and Warner... Think of them as three separate companies for a minute who have more content than the Great Library of Alexandria. So What?

Do you know that in the old great Library of Alexandria they had no idea

what they had? All they had were rolled up scrolls. Piles and piles, shelf

after shelf, room after room. I'm mean huge! For that time, it was the combined knowledge of all the ages. Awesome Huh?. NOT!

Most scrolls were not labeled at all, Just rolled up and tied parchment, placed in piles. They had little or no titles once unrolled. And absolutely none had an index or a table of contents on any publication. The concept of indexing or a TOC wasn't invented yet. So what did they have? They had tons and tons of content, without the ability to get to what they needed, when they needed it. There were no labels. Where would you begin? How would you find what you want? How would you even know what you want? Sound familiar?

I am a huge Internet user, and the truth is I love it. But there is still so

much to do. The billions of pages of information out there are for the most part useless, until we reinvent indexing and a new system of personalized delivery. What we need is a "true" personal agent. A computer program so sophisticated and detailed that it does the searching and sorting based upon our unique and personalized individual needs.

We need that computerized personalized agent that I have spoken of several times in this newsletter. An "agent" or "concierge" of cyberspace. An "agent" that fits where our wristwatches fit now. A total voice recognition system, answerable only to us. A program that will know all that is knowable about us. An "electronic friend" that will send birthday cards and meaningful presents to friends and family. It will pay all the bills and make all appointments with coworkers and doctors. An agent so integrated into the cyber paths that my agent will call your agent to confirm or deny our availability to meet without our intervention. An agent that knows so much about us that it knows not only what we want to read, but also what we didn't know we wanted to read. That is to me the key to growth. This agent has to be so "smart" it will deliver to us not only what we have "asked for," but also information that we need to know about, but didn't know that we didn't know.

This "thing" or something very like it will happen. In fact I think it will

happen in our lifetime.

BoSacks Speaks Out: Publishing, Canaries, and Poker

Everybody who reads this newsletter knows that I am happily, a magazine guy through and through. So, it's not a mystery that I am continually barraged with questions like; "Bo, why do you keep such a strong focus on the newspaper industry?" It's a good question, and it contains an important answer.

Well, the answer is, as I have stated many times over the years in this newsletter, that I believe that the newspaper industry acts for the magazine industry like the vulnerable little canaries that coal miners carried and used in the coal mines in times past. When there was little clean air, the canaries "fainted" first, warning the miners of pending trouble. A similar process could be said for newspapers being slightly more sensitive and vulnerable in times of economic stress and "fainting" first, months before the same conditions hit the magazine industry.

This approach was a terrific and very accurate barometer, which I have used for some thirty- odd years. It helped me in many ways, not the least in adjusting and perfecting my paper buying and inventory control methods, as market conditions and prudence would indicate. Don't let anyone tell you differently; really good paper purchasing is a science, requiring the skills of both a good businessman and market analyst as well as those of Bret Maverick. Picture, if you will, playing a game of poker. Although you might not know exactly what is in the other guy's hand, by paying attention to the "canaries," you have a pretty damn good idea. If you have played poker before, knowing what is in the other guy's hand is at the very least a huge edge. Is this fair? Yes. All I have done is my research; the rest is a proper and accurate business forecast.

Now that I have completely drifted off the subject I started to discuss, here is the point. I do not know if the "publishing/canary theory" still holds any water, or air, as the case may be. I believe that many of the old business models may have changed. Newspapers and magazines have changed. And the advertising community surely has changed in, if nothing else, the many different and new venues to spend advertising dollars on or in. Not to mention their search for accountability. (As an example, www.monster.com, which is a huge and successful "job" site, has taken, a huge hit of revenue from newspapers' classified advertising. Dollar for dollar classified advertising was very expensive and profitable real estate, accounting for very large revenues in the newspaper industry.) If the business model has changed, then does the apparent rise in newspaper advertising still portend a future and parallel rise in magazines? I think so, but I am not quite as sure as I used to be.

So can we say that the apparent rise in newspaper advertising will forecast an equal rise in magazines? I don't know, But I can tell you this; in the past a rising economy was always first visible in newspaper linage for those who were looking for it.