James Erik Abels of Forbes interviews John Koten, the CEO of Mansueto Ventures, the parent of Fast Company and Inc. magazines, about why the magazines have continued to show strong circulation and ad sales growth in a down market.
Here is an excerpt:
If anything, you could view this as a shift of resources from the print magazines to the online department because they’re [reporters and editors] now going to be working 20% to 30% online. They do a lot of reporting, but [right now] they’re thinking about just what they’re going do for the magazine and they’re not thinking about how they might leverage that online.
I’ve told every employee here that at the end of the year I want a memo explaining if [they] were an online employee how [they’re] going to contribute to print and if [they’re] a print employee, I want to know how [they’re] going to contribute to online.
If I’m a journalist, I need to be able to do online, print, video, audio–whatever the heck is out there. I wanted to start a super-reporter program here, where we took two reporters from digital, two reporters from Fast Company and two reporters from Inc. and have them cross-train like hell to create a super-reporter who could wear all nine hats. Then I thought: Why shouldn’t everybody be doing that?
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