DMGT reports that B2B revenues are down 20% year on year for the last quarter whilst Penton Media in the US has filed for bankruptcy protection. Its still snowing in every sense of the word.

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• Publisher Penton Media to file for Chap. 11 (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• DMGT reports revenue down 15 per cent (newstatesman.com)

Penton Media in More Trouble

Over in the US more trouble for the folks at Penton Media. Paul Conley reprints a letter to staff from their CEO which is very long indeed. It takes six lengthy paragraphs to pluck up the courage to tell staff that the business in moving to a four day week for the Summer. When I want to "How to tell people bad news" school (I really did go on a course about this once!) we were told that you should put the news right at the top of the communication. No amount of flannel can hide the horror of bad news whether its diagnosis of a terminal illness, redundancy or anything else.

One quote from this missive sang out to me,

"but remember that one of our Achilles heels is that we are mostly supported by advertising which has collapsed.
Speaking of advertising, it has not only collapsed in print, but as a company, we haven’t shown the growth we should on the web." The problem is that almost every media company can make the same statement, business media, radio, regional papers, most national newspapers, most conusmer magazines.

If I were runnning Penton, I might not worry about saving a few quid on the salary bill, but perhaps use a day a week over the summer to get everybody working on a better plan for the future.