Bay Area a Hotbed for Social Entrepreneurs

Also in the latest issue of the Marina Times, I speak with Ruth Shapiro, editor of the new book The Real Problem Solvers: Social Entrepreneurs in America.

Ruth Shapiro. Photo by Sonya Abrams

SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE
Bay Area a Hotbed for Social EntrepreneursBy John Zipperer
December 2012 

In 2012, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama visited Silicon Valley looking not for votes – everyone knows this is the bluest of blue areas – but for money. If they had spent more time on the ground here, in addition to cash they might have picked up some ideas for solving the country’s problems. The Bay Area excels at producing ideas and cash.  

A growing number of people looking to improve the world in various ways are incorporating wisdom and resources from businesses. It’s a rapidly maturing field, and Ruth Shapiro is doing everything she can to ...

Read the entire article... 

Print Is the New AM Radio

Folio: reports that a regional magazine publisher in North Carolina is starting a new print newspaper. He has spotted the problems that have occurred with the decline (that's a nicer word that collapse) of daily newspapers, and he is concerned that citizens are not getting good information on the workings of their communities and the world. So he is creating a new weekly newspaper that will serve his audiences.

It is counterintuitive only if you aren't paying attention to media and business. Big daily newspapers have basically imploded under the weight of high costs that were no longer supported by massive print classified advertising. Readership has also shrunk, but the newspaper's problems today are primarily advertising revenue-based, not readership based. So daily newspapers have tried to reinvent themselves over and over again, with a lot of wasted money and a lot of amnesia about why people want to read newspapers in the first place (and therefore why advertisers would want to pay to reach those readers in print).

AM radio was once written off as a has-been, overtaken by the superior FM stations. But then talk radio (and particularly the conservative kind) saw an opportunity, and AM radio became hot again.

I see a similar coming opportunity as big publishers lose the ability to publish magazines that drop from something like 900,000 circ to 450,000 or 250,000. Those lower numbers can't support the corporate infrastructure and massive debt loads carried by the big publishers, especially the public ones. But that leaves lots of burgeoning opportunities for smaller publishers (existing and new ones) to step in and successfully publish magazines in many niches at 100,000 to 500,000 circ. I remember pitching a science/science-fiction magazine to a small publisher fifteen years ago when Bob Guccione canceled Omni magazine, which had fallen from more than 1 million circ in the early 1980s to around 600,000 by the mid-1990s. Guccione couldn't make a 600,000-circulation Omni work; many others could have been profitably thrilled with such a number, or even half of it.

That small publisher didn't bite, and I think he lost a good opportunity.

Small Business Media Comes and Goes

The heart of the American mittelstand is losing and gaining in the current media turmoil.

Bloomberg, which recently assumed ownership of the BusinessWeek brand from McGraw Hill, is closing BusinessWeek SmallBiz, which catered to ... well, the name is self-explanatory. Meanwhile, Portfolio, which was an unsuccessful big-business feature monthly from Condé Nast, stayed alive as an online-only venture. It is now being run by American City Business Journals (owned by the same parent company as Condé Nast) and is being refocused as a source of information for small- and medium-sized businesses.

A year ago, I was investigating the possibility of creating a magazine (and related media) aimed at the small and medium business. My goal was to focus on serving the businessperson who wasn't interested in going public, who wanted to build his or her business, perhaps sell it at some point or pass it along to the next generation. Within the strictures of that setup, I wanted it to be something that was as in-depth and high-quality as Fortune or Forbes.

Looking for potential market competitors, I went over the newsstand, and I found regional titles (no, had to be national) and entrepreneurial how-to-get-rich titles (no, had to be professional and about developing and growing a business) and investment titles (no, had to focus on private businesses, not public ones -- those are already covered well elsewhere). But I didn't find anything that fit what I was thinking about, so I figured I might be on to something. I started pulling together a business plan, but then a little thing called The Complete and Utter Collapse of the World Economy came along, so that idea was shelved.

We'll see what the new Portfolio does, and whether the market opening I spied still exists.