This week saw the announcement of David Blansfield’s, SVP at Penton’s design engineering group (Machine Design), appointment as president of magazines at F+W Publishing, the large consumer/niche publisher of I.D., Print, HOW, and many others.  Blansfield replaces Colin Ungaro, another B2B veteran, most recently of Reed’s new products division.  Also, earlier this year, Eric Shanfelt got up off the bench and joined Clay Hall’s Aspire Media, another enthusiast company.

Both Blansfield and Shanfelt come into their new jobs brimming with confidence.  And why not?

When I first started at min’s b2b just over 18 months ago, I spent my first few days on the job in Phoenix at the American Business Media Spring Meeting.  There, there was some concern about B2B media companies doing all they could to monetize their content.  There was further concern that B2B media companies were way behind other media companies in doing.  This worry has paid off, as now B2B media companies are way ahead of their consumer and niche counterparts in monetizing Web opportunities, as well as face-to-face and custom publishing opportunities.

So, in practice, you might assume that a B2B media executive with years of experience squeezing every penny out of every crumb of content would do quite well on the consumer/niche side.  I’d make that assumption.  It didn’t work out with Ungaro, it seems.  Hopefully, Shanfelt and Blansfield will have more luck.  Time will tell and we’ll be watching.

More on this in this week’s issue of min’s b2b.

This week, in min’s b2b, I spoke with Tad Smith, CEO of Reed Business Information.  He confirmed to me what I had been hearing from other companies: paper is getting more expensive.  Why?  Because many mills are closing or have closed.  But why are the mills closing?  Smith thinks it’s because the industry is trying to raise its profits and its margins.

If you’re a publisher, is your paper getting more expensive?   And if you’re an editor or art producer, are you being told that you have to downgrade your paper quality or that you can’t afford paper that you expected to be able afford on a new project?

I was having lunch today with a friend in the industry.  We had both been watching some of the B2B deals that have gone through in the past year or so.  While the mega-deal of the year involved the expansion of an already huge Penton Media into the second largest diversified B2B media company in the country, the other two that we discussed saw the formation of two very different kind of companies.

Bill Reilly’s Summit Business Media, although it has plans to get very large, is focused on the service industries–finance, accounting, insurance, etc–exclusively at this point.  And Paul Mackler’s HMP Communications is focused on health.  In fact, last week, Bill Colbert told me for min’s b2b that he, along with VSS, his PE backer, was going to focus on building a single-industry company.  And Ascend Media has recently gone from diversification with Stagnito (health and food) to focus.

Will the new generation of B2B startups aspire to the Reed/Penton/Cygnus model?  Or will they be more focused?