Coverage of the 2005 American Magazine Conference in Fajardo, Puerto Rico

ARTICLE SNIPPET - MPA's IMAG Appears To Be the "Digital Incubator" for the Magazine Publishing Industry's Long-Awaited Acknowledgement of Building Multi-Platform Media Extensions

The 2005 American Magazine Conference: "The Future of Magazines" was held October 16-19 at the Wyndham El Conquistador in Puerto Rico, with nearly 475 publishers, editors and other senior business executives in attendance. The weather was warm and sunny, as were the vibes that spread about the future of magazines and embracing the digital age. Media luminaries like Hachette Filipacchi Media's Jack Kliger, The Readers' Digest Association's Thomas Ryder, Time Warner's Don Logan and Martha Stewart herself all acknowledged and supported embracing new technologies, while the independent publishers seem to have already figured it out.

• During the pre-conference MPA-IMAG session, these smaller special-interest publishers, whose companies typically range from $5 to $150 million in revenue, shared plans about new launches, majority of them being email newsletters, websites or digital magazines
• Smaller, independent publishers realize the Internet is truly unique among platforms that they are deploying against, as is evidenced by the success of Boston Common Press' Chris Kimball and what he's done with the Cook's Illustrated brand, America's Test Kitchen TV Show and AmericasTestKitchen.com
• No other medium has the power to be a nexus for an entire media business—not television, magazines or books has the potential of being a marketing engine as well as a media presence the way the Internet can be
• We wonder how long it will be before the big companies actually understand the meaning of this—is it possible, if you read between the lines of Stewart, Logan, Ryder and Kliger that they are beginning to understand that their website is the nexus of their business, not their magazine?
• If these larger publishers do understand it intellectually, we have not seen it manifest itself in their media strategy—and boy, are we waiting

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