Is Trade Publishing a Canary in a Coal Mine?

I had lunch on Monday with the Steve Cohn (EIC of min), and the editor, publisher, and president of a very big, very well-known, and very old gentleman’s magazine at a restaurant in the McGraw-Hill building. Of course, we talked about their magazine, the Giants game, and consumer-side gossip. But one topic of conversation that kept on coming up was the state of trade publishing in 2008. We talked first about BusinessWeek and the plight of the weekly in general. Then we talked about M&A in the B2B space, and then, finally, the topic of whether trade advertising would be strong in 2008.

Alan Greenspan famously said while chairman of the Federal Reserve that he need only look at the price of scrap metal to determine where the economy was headed. The scrap metal business is a commodity based on several commodities: essentially, the profit that scrap outfits make is dependent on the price of various metals around the world as well as the price of oil, electricity, and various other commodities. Therefore, price of scrap can be a good indicator for the economy as a whole–scrap goes up, economy doing well, scrap goes down, who knows. (I got this from The New Yorker…see John Seabrook’s article “American Scrap” (abstract) in the 1/14 issue for more. You should also read Ken Auletta’s “The Search Party” (complete article) in the same issue–it’s about Google’s lobbying efforts in Washington.)

Like scrap, trade publishing can be a good indicator of how the economy as a whole is doing. When I look at our exclusive min’s b2b Boxscores and see that the building and construction category is down as a whole about 10%, well, that indicates something to me. Just for fun, I’ll give you a quick run down of how all of our categories are doing (change is in ad pages year-to-date through November 2007, Source: IMS/The Auditor, except Business/Horizontal, which is provided by min):

Advertising & Marketing: +1.66% (A strong year in advertising has bolstered some of the big books in this category)

Automotive: -2.32% (More on this category in this week’s min’s b2b)

Banking & Finance: -.60% (Something tells me that some books in this category will be hit hard in 2008)

For the roundup of the rest of our categories, click below….

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