This may not be a good thing for Publishers Weekly, also owned by Reed Business and not part of this transaction.
In an earlier round of restructure, PW had been consolidated for certain purposes with LJ and SLJ, as an example a consolidated website situation where one user had access to all sites, and with some management positions consolidated for the three publications. Considering the decline in print advertising for PW over recent years, this ability to put overhead costs over multiple magazines was no doubt very helpful to the PW bottom line. Now, PW has to have its own publisher all to itself, it can't cross-sell internet ads with the other magazines, it'll be more on its own. LJ and SLJ may have held up a tad better with their tighter focus on library markets. PW has always suffered from being a little bit of everything to a lot of different constituencies in the publishing business and not always vital to any of them, that even before the on-line migration and the economic challenges of the past couple of years. More challenges ahead...
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