Which of These Headlines Is Defamatory?

Takes one to know one.

After American Media Inc. complained that the original headline was "defamatory," Folio: magazine today tweaked the headline on an article about AMI's Star magazine publishing SlimFast ads that masqueraded as articles.

Folio: also published AMI's statement about the article, in which the publisher of National Enquirer and other scholarly journals huffed, "We are very concerned about the defamatory headline and implication in your article, [sic] that falsely states AMI 'pulled' SlimFast ads after a challenge from the Better Business Bureau."

You see, when Star headlined an article about the long friendship of John Travolta and Tom Cruise with "30 Year Gay Secret" even though the article had nothing more than vague references to "gay rumors," that's not defamatory. It's poetic license. (Citing the "bait-and-switch" cover, Gossip Cop gave the article a zero on its accuracy scale.)

Or when the Enquirer ran one hideously Photoshopped cover image after another during the Presidential campaign to "prove" that Hillary Clinton was about to die from brain cancer, that's free speech.

(As Politico's Jack Shafer wrote, "You don’t have to be a Hillary lover to be repulsed by the Enquirer’s coverage of her; the sicknesses the Enquirer has attached to Clinton would fill a medical encyclopedia—muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, endometriosis and brain damage from her concussion. She suffers from obesity (289 pounds), brain cancer and mental disorders, and has had two strokes, the Enquirer claims.")

But when Folio:, a magazine that covers the U.S. magazine industry, writes "Pulls" instead of "Discontinues," that's a DEFAMATION SHOCKER!, as the Enquirer's headline writers would say. Time to call the lawyers and shoot the messenger.

What Folio: didn't alter was its description and depiction of how AMI's round-heeled business ethics were on display in the SlimFast campaign -- including the factoid that "a number of dubious articles, purportedly written by editorial staffers but almost certainly part of a paid SlimFast campaign, proliferate throughout AMI's portfolio of websites."

But Folio: did add some comic relief to the updated version by publishing AMI's shoot-yourself-in-the-foot statement verbatim, including the comment that the company doesn't think it did anything wrong.

Postmaster General Wins Dubious Publishing Honor

In just two and a half years, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has gone from hero to villain in the eyes of a leading publishing-industry magazine.

Disruptor General

Folio: named the U.S. Postal Service’s CEO this week to its Folio: 100 list of the 100 most influential people in the magazine industry, in the “disruptor” category.

“Donahoe raised postal rates by 6 percent in December, making magazine delivery more expensive at a time publishers are carefully managing their print costs,” Folio: noted. Periodicals mail volume declined more than 6% in the first six months after the “exigent” rate increase was implemented.

Folio:’s slap at the PMG was a far cry from April 2012, when the magazine hailed Donahoe because “he has pledged to support the magazine industry.” He was awarded a place on that year's Folio: 40 list of the magazine industry’s “most innovative and distinguished professionals.”

Folio: quoted him back then as saying “You don’t hear me walking around saying we need an exigent price change — that will push you, bill presenters and standard mailers out of the mail.”

To be fair to Donahoe, almost everyone in 2012 thought Congress would have to do something to relieve the Postal Service’s financial burdens, after squeezing billions of dollars from the agency in the form of pension overpayments and prepaid retiree health benefits.

But in fact Congress has been unable to do anything more meaningful than name additional post offices, leaving Donahoe few options in his efforts to keep the agency solvent.

Related articles:

• Wanted: New Postmaster General; Must Be Able To Kiss 535 Backsides Simultaneously 
• Folio: Magazine Honors Donahoe As Innovator
• The Postmaster General's Scandalous(?) Salary 
• Potter Quitting the Worst CEO Job in America

 

Is There Life After Print? Yeah, Maybe at a Community College

My fellow printing geeks keep telling me that print isn’t dead, but it sure is looking pretty sick at times.

Here are some of the recent news items that make a “print guy” in the magazine industry feel like a marked man:

Hype-rventilation

Many so-called leaders of the publishing industry have gone ga-ga over the Apple Newsstand, with some recent excitement about the top 100 sellers racking up sales of a whopping $70,000 every day. The top 100 U.S. and Canadian magazine titles on the real newsstand (the ink-on-paper one that's been left for dead) generate $70,000 in sales about once every 19 minutes.

And never mind that most of the Apple Newsstand money is coming from subscriptions, which in the print world are bringing in even more money than single-copy sales.

Folio: Magazine Honors Donahoe As Innovator

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe was named today to Folio: magazine's "2012 Folio: 40" list of the magazine industry's "most innovative and distinguished professionals."

The Donahoe article, published online today and to appear in an upcoming issue of the magazine, cited Donahoe's "continued commitment to magazine media, while also remaining steadfast on the realities surrounding the challenges the USPS is combating."

Donahoe has reassured publishers that the U.S. Postal Service won't try to solve its financial problems by jacking up their postage rates, the article said. He's trying instead to cut costs, it added, by reducing the number of employees and postal facilities and by eliminating Saturday delivery.

Turmoil in Magazine Land: Did Folio Diss BoSacks?

Folio: posted an interesting blog about online news aggregators today that was made more interesting by this aside near the end:

"I can think of at least one well-known media news aggregator who not only pulls publishers’ headlines and leads for his e-newsletters but posts full news stories, verbatim—and sells ads against them," wrote Jason Fell. "Sure, he links back to the original story, but who is going to click back to the publisher’s Web site when they can read the whole piece directly from the newsletter?"

Bob Sacks, alias BoSacks, agrees with me that he is almost certainly the target of Fell's ire. More than 11,000 people in media-related industries, especially the magazine industry, receive his e-mailed newsletter -- which is mostly media-related articles he forwards, often with commentary and sometimes with one of his famous BoRants.

"Yes. I do fit the M.O. described in the article," Sacks emailed me. "I have been at this a long time. I have tried to save every letter from publishers and writers begging me to pick up their stories -- and also the many thank-you letters for doing so."

I would much rather have one of my articles mentioned by "blurb-and-a-link" than having aggregators publish the entire article. A blurb at Postalnews.com brings at least a thousand visitors, while having an entire article on a prominent Web site will lead to only a handful of links. (Links from emails are hard to track.)

But I have no quarrel with BoSacks because he provides proper attribution and links. He also tries not to pull often from any one source -- though he did send out three Folio: articles last week, including two by Fell. Besides, reformatting by Constant Contact software often makes BoSacks emails so hard to read that many people probably end up linking to the source Web site instead.
 
For an obscure, anonymous, part-time blogger like me, the exposure from BoSacks is worth more than the lost traffic from people seeing an article in one of his emails rather than on my site. (Besides, I'm not very good at "monetizing" the traffic here, which only averages about 1,000 people a day. You could help by clicking on one of the ads, you know.)

But as someone who has sent a few cease-and-desist emails to Web sites that used my content without permission or compensation, I'm sympathetic to Fell's annoyance when he concludes: "In an age when publishers are struggling mightily to make nickels from their online endeavors, shouldn’t this aggregator offer some sort of revenue sharing program?" Folio: may be so widely read by magazine people that having an article become a BoSacks email does little to bring new readers to the magazine or its Web site.

For the record, Folio: always plays fair with my blog, providing proper attribution and links when it cites my articles, which is not often enough. At times it seems to have gone out of its way not to mention one of my "scoops" when it picks up the same story, but Folio: always puts original research and thought into its article rather than just rewriting me.

Also, for the record, BoSacks does not know the true identity of D. Eadward Tree.

"I can't tell you have many people ask me who you are," he wrote me. "I always speak the truth, which helps my newsletter be what it is. So I tell them I have no idea. They don't believe me. I say, 'No, really, I have no idea.' They say, 'OK, so you won't tell me.'"

Bob, don't expect me to tell you, either -- unless you take Fell up on that revenue-sharing thing.

Getting Noticed, Getting Ignored

Tired of reading my articles on this cheap-looking blog?

Now you have a chance to read some of my stuff at real Web sites -- "real" as in they have corporate sponsors and are created by companies with full-time employees and actual business models.

WhatTheyThink?, the respected Web site covering the printing industry, has posted "Newspaper Production Enters Colorful, Outsourced Era" on its PrintCeo site. (The original is here.) They even figured out how to put the San Francisco Chronicle's video with the article. And don't those ads from the likes of Kodak and Presstek look much prettier than some of my cheesy-looking Google Adsense ads?

RISI, the leading information provider to the paper industry, has posted "Smackdown: Printed Editions vs. Digital Editions" (the original is here). They even created a neat little logo for Dead Tree Edition, though that tree looks suspiciously alive to me.

WhatTheyThink?'s Going Green site has also recognized the smackdown article with very favorable commentary, followed by insightful reader comments.

It never fails to amaze me which articles get multiple links and five-figure audiences -- and which get ignored.

Last week's article about the possibility of emergency increases in postage rates next year has been cited by numerous Web sites I've never even heard of -- and ignored, as far as I can tell, by every major publication and Web site serving industries that rely on mail.

Unless you count Folio:, the bible of the magazine industry. It posted an article yesterday referencing "speculation" about an exigent rate increase of 2% to 3% or maybe an increase of the First Class stamp to 50 cents. I think those are obvious references to my article (Do you agree?), but the Folio: piece never mentions Dead Tree Edition.

Now about those Google ads. I find it interesting to watch Google try to deliver ads that are "context sensitive" and to see how those ads perform -- or don't perform. And getting a few bucks from Google every once in awhile helps me respond when my roommate/partner asks, "Exactly why are you putting all this time into your blog?"

I think I actually came close to earning minimum wage on one quickly written piece -- "Monkeying Around With Postal Pallets". It was a surprise hit among disgruntled postal workers (Are there any gruntled postal workers?) who had fun comparing the orangutans to certain members of Postal Service management. It got more than 20 times as many "hits" as my piece about Twitter quitters, which I thought was much funnier.

You just never know.

Time May Not Be on Donnelley's Side

As rumors swirled the past couple of days that Quebecor World's creditors committee had rejected R. R. Donnelley's acquisitive advances, it became clear that Donnelley's plan may have a fatal flaw.

Folio:'s web site published a piece late Friday (June 5) pointing out several problems with Donnelley's proposal, mainly that working out formal terms, getting approval from antitrust authorities, and consummating the deal would take many months. Meanwhile, QW's special debtor-in-possession financing would run out on July 21, and the creditors would be waiting for their money.

Sources inside and outside QW have passed along the rumor that QW's creditors committee, which is in the driver's seat, had turned down RRD. But the committee's only publicly stated position is a May 15 letter to creditors recommending a vote for the QW reorganization plan that states, "If it appears that this [Donnelley's] proposal will provide recoveries to the Debtors' unsecured creditors that are greater and/or better than those provided under the proposed Plan, the Creditors' Committee will take all necessary steps to pursue such proposal and the Creditors' Committee's recommendation may change."

The letter does not state whether the committee took what RRD recommended in its May 12 proposal as the next step -- "immediately identify a working group at the Quebecor Debtors that can work with us . . . to conduct the due diligence process and finalize the terms of the definitive asset purchase agreement." RRD's letter indicated that it could not present a formal proposal until such a process occurred.

What is not clear is whether Donnelley would still be interested in an acquisition after QW emerges from bankruptcy protection. Stay tuned.

BoSacks 1, Folio: 0

Did you see on Wednesday (Nov. 5) that Folio:’s Web site had the “news” that paper prices have apparently peaked? (It’s not worthy of a link.)

Dead Tree Edition broke that story five days earlier, and BoSacks distributed it Sunday afternoon -- which led to a flurry of customer phone calls to paper salespeople on Monday morning. Thanks for the plug, Bob. I promise to stop making jokes about what you might have been smoking during your High Times days.

How is it that BoSacks, one guy with a Web site and bad hair, continually provides faster and better coverage of certain magazine-industry issues than the leading trade publication for the industry? Because he recognizes that the old “not-written-here” mentality doesn’t cut it in the age of Web 2.0.