Apologies for my recent absense, minsiders. I’ve been spending all week preparing to leave. In a few days time, I’ll be relaxing on a beautiful North East beach, barring any more hurricanes. But, all this is not your concern. Here are some of the thoughts I’ve had this week regarding the news.

Mackler is back: When I spoke with Paul Mackler about his purchase of HMP Communications, he said that he was looking to expand the business by acquisitions and organically, but that HMP was going to stay exclusively in the healthcare market. This struck me as odd, because Mackler’s last job was in building a large, fully diversified B2B company: Cygnus. Is this new strategy a slight dig at his old one?

Penton and John French: John French’s myocardial infarction made it into the New York Post this past week. We here at min think that Keith Kelly sometimes crosses the line in his reporting between business and personal, and relevant informatino and speculation. Regardless, our only thoughts on the matter, presently, are to wish John a speedy recovery.

PC World v. PC Magazine: I was contacted by the PR agency that represents PC Magazine this week because Jim McCabe, VP/publisher of the book, wanted to make comment on the new PC World redesign. That call never ended up happening, but I thought it interesting that McCabe would want to comment on his biggest rival. Most publishers hesitate to talk about their rivals. I wonder what he would have said.

Sys Admin: This week in min’s b2b, I talked with Charlie Shively, new helmer of CMP’s software group. He was telling me about the reasons for Sys Admin’s decline and eventual shuttering. It’s still 100% unclear as to why Sys Admin has so many ad pages this year, even if you don’t consider an 80 page insert it had in January. I honestly believe that Kerry Gates, the now-ex publisher, was giving away severely dicounted pages in Sys Amin’s final hours just to gouge the competition. Is this an unethical practice? I don’t know.

Have a great week minsiders. I’ll see you after Labor Day.

Recently, a good B2B media source pointed out something that gave me great satisfaction: that I was right. This particular instance (and I think I can probably count all of them on one hand), though, is bittersweet. In May, I predicted, using very crude calculations, that Ziff Davis might run out of money some time in the middle of the third quarter. Ziff hit the date on the nose, declaring that it would not make a scheduled interest payment on its 2009 senior notes on August 15.

Being right in this case is bittersweet for me because, first of all, I was not rooting for this to happen. I was rooting for a miracle: some way in which the great brands that ZD operates could somehow get out from under the crushing debt that has shadowed their operations for six years. Maybe they still can.

But the real story behind this story–also contributing to the bitter half–is that this company isn’t just a publishing house, brick and mortar and money. It’s not just a hallowed name in B2B. It’s not just an important vestige of Bill Ziff’s time on earth. It’s also made up of people–hundreds of people who now have to wake up wondering what their job status will be that day and the next.

It’s very easy in other industries to think of a large company as just a bunch of factories or operations or services that result in a final product that often can be stacked in warehouses and snatched off store shelves. But in the media industry, the output is a manifestation of a collective personality. Future issues of PC Magazine will be an ink and paper representation of the PC Mag personality, headed by the new EIC, Lance Ulanoff.

It might not be useful business information to remember that the 300 or so remaining Ziff employees are in this, too, but I can’t help but think of it.

It was a beautiful day at The Country Club of New Canaan in New Canaan, CT, on Monday, 8/13. After a barbecue lunch and iced-tea on the patio, spirits were high for what would be a spirited day of golf, tennis, and, in the end, charity. Personally, there was little more I could ask for. I’m proud of the 70 or so people that gave up one day of the work week to support the BPEF internships. That might sound cynical, but I’m being completely serious: it’s hard to give up a work day sometimes, especially for the people at the tournament. Many CEOs/top executives were present, including Ted Bahr (BZ Media), Andy Goodenough (Highline Media/SBM), Bob Carrigan (IDG), Steve Palm (NewBay), and several others. I haven’t talked with ABM about the final numbers, but I’m anticipating an impressive haul.

Despite the success of the day, I left the Country Club in an extremely sour mood. One of the agenda items that has been on ABM’s list for many years is to encourage women and minorities to join business media companies and to participate at ABM. I’m not a proponent of diversity for diversity’s sake, but I did not see one non-white face in the field on Monday, and it left me feeling a tad uncomfortable. It’s these kinds of events, the ones where rivals bond over links and drinks–and not the almost mandatory conferences and committee meetings–that forge real connections, and foster real inclusiveness.

I think the solution is a change in venue, and a broader invitation list. I am not accusing the country club of racism or anything like it. I will tell you, though, that I felt extremely uncomfortable there. I’m not sure why this supposedly classy place was dismissive of me at every turn, but I suspect it had something to do with my youth and the fact that I’m “not from around there.” For me, the definition of class would be making people around you feel comfortable; by that definition, the Country Club of New Canaan has little.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I was also embarrassed by the way some members of our party treated the staff at the Country Club. I realize that they were there to serve us, and, after all, it’s a job for which they get paid. But they are also people, and deserve to be acknowledged as such, and not just service drones. To me, this includes (but is not limited to) saying thank you after you bark orders at someone, and, perhaps making eye contact once in a while. But maybe I just don’t know how to behave at a fancy club.

(ABM is an organization that I’m very glad to be involved with. They do some fantastic work, and, under the leadership of Gordon Hughes, I believe that the heart of the organization is in the right place. That’s why it hurts me to see things like this go on behind relatively closed doors. That’s why I’m acting holier-than-thou in this posting. After all, if journalists aren’t holier-than-thou about things like this, who would be?)

On Monday, I will be playing in the annual ABM/McGraw Hill charity tennis and golf tournament to benefit ABM’s BPEF Internship program.  I’d like to extend my thanks to my company, Access Intelligence for sponsoring my participation in this event.  The entire industry works better when we develop and participate in events that benefit young people (full disclosure: I, myself, am a young person).

The BPEF program has influenced my own small editorial team greatly.  Courtney Barnes, who is the editor of PR News and will be editor, along with me, of min magazine in the fall, started at Access Intelligence as a BPEF intern.  I was talking with her today about her experience.  When she took the job, she figured that she would do it for the summer while looking for a “real job.”  After a few weeks, however, she realized that she loved writing for a living and saw real room to grow at AI.  AI loved her back.  That was two summers ago, and Courtney is now a legitimate star here.

On the flip side, my group had one BPEF editorial intern last summer who did NOT work out.  And a sister group in the company had a BPEF marketing intern that also had trouble and was asked to leave after a few weeks.  But I like those numbers; I love those numbers.  Ask any HR person if they’d be satisfied interviewing one superstar for every two bad apples, and I think you know what their response would be.  

So, if you can’t participate in events like the one being held on Monday, I urge you to support the internship programs at your company.  Nurture the young talent that you have–you will probably encounter a dud here and there, but you just might end up with a superstar.

This week brought to us the announcement of the firing of four top editorial staffers at Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News, the Reed TV books that have dominated the space for years.  Maybe “firing” is a strong word–it rarely happens these days.  Suffice to say, they were let go, cut loose…ankled?

Anyway, the TV trades are in big trouble.  Our own CableWorld (CW is an Access Intelligence book, which is parent to The Minsider) is down over 50% on the year in ad pages.  The traditional advertisers, cable networks, no longer need to advertise in trade publications to reach the carriers.  Most networks already have almost complete saturation, and their sales departments can effectively reach all nationwide carriers by making phone calls.

What CW and other need to do is reposition both from a sales and editorial perspective.  There are (and have been for years) many emerging technologies that are changing the way carriers do business.  Those technology vendors are perfect targets for a new advertising base.

I reported in min’s b2b this week on the ascension of Jason Young to the position of CEO of Ziff Davis, replacing Bob Callahan, who is now chairman of the company.  I think–and I said so in the issue–the pressure of running the company, running the sales process, and borrowing money to stay afloat became too much for one executive to handle, especially over the course of a year or more.  Therefore, Willis Stein (ZD’s PE owners) put Young in charge of running the show, leaving Callahan the ability to focus on selling the company as chairman.

The piece of the puzzle that I couldn’t place by the time min’s b2b went to press was whether ZD was still retaining Lehman Brothers and Evercore Partners to help them negotiate the sale.  I reached out to a spokesperson for the company, and she said that the company “declined to comment on whether the investment houses were still retained.”

If you read other media reports, you saw that “the sale is less of a focus.”  This is not what I originally thought.  If Lehman and Evercore, however, are no longer in the picture, then perhaps the period for actively seeking buyers is over.  And, the company’s position–that is, declining to comment–makes me believe that Lehman and Evercore are, indeed, no longer in the picture.

And, considering all of this, I now wonder, what is Callahan’s status with the company?  Was he kicked upstairs? 

Frankly, it doesn’t look like it would be a good idea for the company to continue on with only the consumer/small business and gaming divisions left.  Enterprise was about 40% of the company’s revenue, but a smaller percentage of the company’s costs–the company overall may have shrunk by 40% or so, but corporate overhead remained the same…well…maybe got a little bit smaller with the promotion (?) of Callahan to chairman.

According to Paidcontent.org, the Ziff Davis Enterprise group, which was recently purchased by Insight Venture Partners (comprehensive, insider coverage…lighter, non-subscription coverage) for $160 million, was merged today with Developer Shed, an online-only tech publishing play, along with recent acquisitions that DS had recently made.  The new entity will be known, to Paidcontent’s dismay, as Ziff Davis Enterprise.  Go to the Paidcontent article here.