I’m sure there are more products the company could implement. It doesn’t have any mobile offerings to speak of, and its website represents first-generation internet thinking – a source of information but not of engagement and interaction. With a little bit of study and a few billable hours I could have made some recommendations.

Here’s what I told them instead: The opportunity to increase revenue by adding digital products has largely passed, and simply adding new products will probably hurt the business by:

• spreading the editorial staff even thinner;
• raising digital development costs;
• over-running the sales force’s competence;
• stressing customers, who don’t have more money to spend on new products and will be forced to decide which products to support and which to ignore.

In essence, trying to invigorate the company by adding more digital products is just going to lead to more fatigue for everyone – and at best provide only incremental revenue gains.

The real opportunity – and the only real option – is to use digital tools to increase the organization’s footprint and prominence.

Here’s the argument:

In B2B media, ad revenue and unit yields have been stagnant for a decade, and there is no reason to think that’s going to change for the better. As hard costs continue to rise, print circulations have been on a forced retreat. Publications that have maintained controlled circulation levels are doing so by cutting in other areas or – more likely – by winning market share and profits from other, lesser competitors. Neither is sustainable.

Given that it’s not economical to add print readers, the real value of a digital strategy is to present the brand to new people – either by expanding outside the magazine’s traditional market (taking a step upstream, toward the advertisers’ suppliers, for example) or its traditional geography (i.e. international).

That doesn’t mean simply launching a digital or iPad edition. These are passive – cool media in Marshall McLuhan’s lexicon.

But extended audiences demand hot media. They need to be actively engaged; they need learn for themselves how a media brand is valuable to them. Engagement at that level means creating a different kind of relationship based on interaction with community, expansiveness of content, and flexibility in the way content is applied. These are the strengths of digital tools – when those tools are skillfully and strategically applied.

In the real world, it probably means a pretty significant website overhaul and, more significantly, redeployment of staff and restructuring of sales compensation.

Editors have to stop thinking in terms transferring knowledge from experts to the readers – instead becoming moment-to-moment conduits for peer-to-peer communication. Less like network news anchors and more like a highly specialized cruise directors.

Sales strategy has to evolve too. It’s less about products and more about platform – how the media brand provides a fluid and organic conduit between the advertiser and the market.

These are not small changes to make, and this is not a short-term project. But it represents the difference between relevance, growth and prosperity on one hand; and retreat into a niche position or extinction on the other.

The study, according to a report by BtoB magazine, concludes that as more and more people move online to get their information, advertisers aren’t willing to pay as much to reach them. Why? Presumably because these prospects become easier for the advertisers to reach – a conclusion that’s hinted at by the study’s other finding: that advertisers are willing to pay some kind of premium based on context and relevance of the audience.

This is nothing new to readers of this blog. But it’s a big stick in the eye for B2B media types who still think their future will be secured simply by providing great content.

The new owner is Duncan McIntosh Co. Inc., based in Irvine, CA – a white knight that rides in, not on a horse but on a powerboat. Duncan McIntosh is a consumer marine media company whose properties include Sea Magazine, The Log newspaper and, most notably, Boating World.

There’s no deeper meaning to this. It’s just nice to write about  a company that sees the value in a storied brand, tradition and a franchise that serves the media industry. No surprise that the company isn’t one of the diversified media giants, for which earnings multiples are the only meaningful metric.

E&P was such an institution – it’s been around since 1901, but existed under a different title since 1884 – that it’s hard to imagine a media world in which it doesn’t exist. That’s why it’s closing is so surprising.

On the other hand, The Nielson Co. had been trying to sell its media publications group, including E&P, Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, Backstage, Billboard, Film Journal International and The Hollywood Reporter. Most of the group was just sold; E&P was not included in the deal.

I don’t know anything about E&P’s finances, but you don’t need an MBA to understand what that means.

Trade books that cover the media industry are chronically short on advertisers. They all live a subsistence existence. E&P’s folio has been razor thin since I first saw it in the early ’80s.

If E&P ever made good money (high margins), it never made big money. And in times of recession, small-money magazines do worst in the effort to maintain their margins.

I’m sure E&P is in the red, and that any forecast in which it could become proftable again doesn’t deliver enough earnings to justify the turnaround project.

And with the dire condition of many newspapers, E&P’s expiration is a symbolic event that was probably inevitable.

In that context, that E&P should die broke and alone isn’t a surprise at all.

I’m sorry to see it go, and feel for everyone on the staff. It was a great institution right up until the end.