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.