Welcome To Foliomag.Com, The Print Edition

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2000

In the Web business, the conventional wisdom changes awful fast:

* AOL is the Internet with training wheels and will be acquired in six months. No, AOL is the most successful company on the Net.

* The Web competes with magazines. No, they complement each other.

* Web-only procurement exchange sites will knock legacy b-to-b players out of the market. No, the early exchange sites try to be all things to all people, transaction volume is still minimal, and print b-to-bs, with their deeper content and customer relationships, will learn from the mistakes of the early leaders and prevail in the end.

Even as the conventional wisdom reels and swirls, there are some tenets that will always be true: Be aware of where the market is going. Be threatened by competitors' initiatives. Focus on what your customer wants. Don't assume that just because you do something well that it's what your customer really wants or needs.

Those are the things this new quarterly Folio: supplement-- a brick-and-mortar spinoff of our Web site--is about. It's about the magazine-company leaders who absorb the value in the conventional wisdom and disgard the rest. It's about telling the story of those leaders as they move online. The pages of this supplement will be exclusively about the most interesting business transformation in a generation. (Or ever.) It's dedicated to the idea that magazine management is now more about magazine-media management, a discipline where print complements the digital business, where one is as important as the other, and the sum is greater than the whole. This transformation is at the top of every executive's agenda--inside the magazine industry and in every other industry. That's the premise that underlies this product. Look for three more issues of Foliomag.com this year.

ROBERTA THOMAS

GROUP PUBLISHER

TONY SILBER

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR