Linda Ruth's Page

I was recently reminded of a long-ago occasion on which one of my daughters went for a walk on an icy slope and begin to slip. Though she tried to dig in her feet scrabbled with her hands, the downward momentum took her right to the edge of a quarry, where she grabbed a tuft of grass to hang on until our local fire department came to fetch her home.

In an industry that has already weathered many blows, some pretty recent, it can’t be good news that Mercury News is ordering product…

Stephanie Fryling, the Vice President of Newsstand at Barnes and Noble, wants to shake things up.

Fryling joined Barnes and Noble in May of 2012. She made the move from Source Interlink, one of the two magazine distributors to this 700+ store chain and she immediately began to go deeply into the chain’s sales data looking for new opportunities.

It’s a delicate time for the chain, beleaguered as it is by the same trends affecting…

What does scoring points have to do with scoring a page one listing on a search engine results page?



Only a half a dozen or so years ago, the savviest publishers were just beginning to use video on their sites. They did so uncertainly, experimentally, and in many cases unsure of why, exactly, they were doing it. And there were many reasons to do so; but a huge one, perhaps the biggest, was for SEO purposes. A page that included a video clip, it was found, was 50…

Content publishers having spent the last decades navigating the transition from print to online, today are struggling with another transition: from content "consumption" to interactivity.



Every day I read about someone "consuming" a story, a video, a blog post, a snippet. I get it. We can't talk about "reading" anymore when there are so many different types of media to "consume." It's a step in the direction of multi-media; a step in the direction of a fuller…

I wish I could make it to New York for the April 9th PBAA meeting entitled: POS Data in an Expanding SBT Environment: New Uses, Best Practices and Implications for the Single Copy Supply Chain.

It might sound boring as heck but my inbox is already buzzing with messages about it, most of them a response to my last blog post, the one about—well, about Scan Based…