The Folio: 40

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, March 15, 2001 by Jillian Ambroz, Dale Buss, Terry Fisher, Cindy Gillis, Sarah Gonser, Caroline Jenkins, Michael Kaplan, Mark J. Miller, Bob Moseley, Susan Thea Posnock, Lee Steele, Geoff Van Dyke

National Writers Union president Jonathan Tasini has been fighting against injustices since he was barely a teen, first protesting against the Vietnam War. On March 28, one of his longest battles, the landmark electronic rights case of Tasini, et al. vs. The New York Times, et al., will come to a conclusion-- at least as far as the courts are concerned.

"From the beginning I told people that a court case is just one tactic in the larger strategy of building a powerful union that can protect people," he says. "I expect we will win in the Supreme Court, but even if we win a unanimous decision, we still need a union to fend off the all rights contracts that the industry is trying to impose."

The seven-year-old case was first filed in 1993 with Tasini as the lead plaintiff, along with other NWU members. It charged copyright violation regarding the electronic reuse of work produced and sold on a freelance basis.

The lawsuit named a group of publishers including The New York Times, Newsday and Time Inc. Although Tasini lost the first round, a U.S. Court of Appeals decided in favor of Tasini in September 1999. That decision has been appealed to the Supreme Court by publishers. In addition to the lawsuit, Tasini says the NWU has pushed for a solution to the problem through the Publication Rights Clearinghouse--established after the lawsuit was filed in the mid- 1990s. The PRC is a licensing-based system that acts as a writer's agent inlicensing secondary rights to previously published articles. "Coupled with the lawsuit, the PRC will guarantee that every time a writer's work is commercially exploited, a writer will get a royalty for that," he says.

Jonathan Kirsch, a Los Angeles-based attorney who specializes in publishing law, says the Tasini case is a wake-up call to publishers that they have to be thoughtful and careful about clearing rights in the work that they acquire on a freelance basis. The information revolution caught a lot of publishers unaware," Kirsch says, "and they were relying on contracts that turned out to be obsolete."

CARA DEOULPERL

She transformed the concept of special advertising sections into innovative, multiplatform marketing tools.

CAROLINE JENKINS

When J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency for the Ford Motor Company, was charged with boosting the automaker's community outreach and appeal to women in early 1998, the firm turned to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and Conde Nast's Cara Deoul Perl.

"Cara created a breast cancer-Race for the Cure insert featuring Olivia Newton-John on the first page and Ford on the last," says Kerry Doyle, senior partner and management supervisor at JWT. "She really took the time to understand the Ford brand, the objective, the goals. She helped put a face on the Ford logo."

Today, Perl continues her work selling and executing innovative, cross-promotional special advertising sections that run in numerous Conde Nast titles simultaneously--and with much success. Six years ago, when she started work in the newly created position of vice president of creative marketing, she produced 80 pages of special advertising; last year, she churned out 288.5. All the while, she has been perfecting her technique of developing multiplatform partnerships between Condo Nast and a number of different clients.