Conde Nast to Close Four "Lady" Magazines

Well, there go four more media properties: Gourmet, Cookie, Elegant Bride and Modern Bride. Condé Nast announced that it is shuttering the four magazines because of these dark economic times. Magazine closures hardly come as a surprise anymore -- but, Gourmet! Really? It premiered in 1941 -- amid the Great Depression and just ahead of World War II, as NPR points out -- and soon achieved iconic status for its spectacular recipes and accompanying photos so vivid you could swear they were scratch-and-sniff. (I dare you to look at any of these pictures without drooling. It's like the National Geographic of food!) Cookie, a relatively new title, comes as much less of a shock -- and that is even more so for Modern Bride and Elegant Bride. Looks like amateur chefs will have to turn to Bon Appetit or any of the innumerable cooking blogs out there and Cookie readers always have online parenting publications like Babble or any number of awesome "mommy blogs." Readers of the final two mags will have what still seems an overabundance of bridal glossies and books, in addition to the loads of niche Web sites for each and every type of wedding imaginable. That's the glass-half-full perspective (which is admittedly much easier for someone who isn't terribly interested in cooking, weddings or babies). The half-empty view is not only that it's unfortunate all of these are "women's" mags, but, barring a major institutional reorganization, it also means three prominent female editors in chief are out of a job (the two bridal titles share the same editor). Any way you cut it, it's yet another sad day for the publishing world, and for women's place in it.

Blog’s Lessons for Email

Marc Munier, commercial director at Pure 360, says there are things we do with blogs that can be applied to email: Regularity. Surprising as it may be, people get used to the regularity of your emails and tend to react badly if you mess with the schedule, very much the same if a blogger posts erratically. Informative. This is related to the frequency, recipients don’t mind getting very regular email communications as long as you have something new and interesting to them within the content. Monthly emails can be very dull if you are only talking about the latest version of your software, whereas daily emails can be fantastic because there is always something new. Comments. . This is the key factor, blogs are two-way communication channels, one-way blogs are just website content with lower copy writing standards. And of course you don’t need to actually comment for it to be a two-way communication, just the fact that you can comment if you want to is enough to engender that feeling of engagement. And it’s exactly the same with email; replies are your listening portal. Replies should be encouraged, you are never going to get loads, after all, there are rarely more than a handful on blogs, but you have to make it easy and follow up when people do. So the worst thing you can do is have a “do not reply” email address, and the second worst thing you can do is send a static automated response when people do reply. Make it shorter. People’s attention span is shortening by the minute. Honestly nobody will read down to the bottom unless you have something amazing to say – and if you do, put a snippet on the email and the rest of the story on your site. After all email is the channel not the content, email gets people to do things and go places, it isn’t the end destination. Put the unsubscribe link at the top of the page. This will show to your recipients that you are a legitimate marketer and that you don’t want to email people who don’t want to receive your emails. Even ignoring the massive improvements in your delivery rates that you can achieve, unsubscribe links belong at the top of the email. On the flip side it is really easy to follow, so make it easy for people to subscribe. Newsletter sign-up forms should be prominent on your site. Email is a great channel but on its own it can’t achieve all your marketing goals. But email used in conjunction with other marketing mediums is brilliant – it’s like adding Vodka to a cocktail, it doesn’t shout about itself but it makes all the flavors work better. Email can be used to bring together different elements and stretch the channels that people interact with you on. It would be difficult to run an email data capture program through Twitter, Facebook or a blog; driving email subscribers to these social networks is by comparison a walk in the park. The ubiquity of email is its main strength. Twitter has over 4 million users, Facebook a hefty 150 million but there are 1.5 billion internet users – 90% of which have an email address, making it the top on-line activity just ahead of search engines.