Line56 Media
10940 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 600
Los Angeles, CA 90024
310/443-4226
http://www.portalsmag.com
Like most publications in the high-tech sector, Line56 magazine felt the crunch over the past year, changing its name to E-business Journal and going from monthly to quarterly,
while maintaining its Line56.com Web site. The pub is now officially on the backburner - but parent company Line56 Media seized on a new magazine venture that offers ripe PR
pitching opportunities.
Jim Ericson, editorial director, tells PR NEWS that the company's focus right now is on Portals magazine, launched this fall with a controlled circ of 35,000 business decision-
makers: CEOs, CIOs, CTOs and line of business managers.
The magazine focuses on the needs of these execs as they implement and manage corporate portals for b-to-b, b-to-c and employee communications.
"Companies have spent a lot of money on the infrastructure [for portals]," Ericson says. "Everyone is looking for ways to leverage that infrastructure."
Content/Contacts
Coverage will focus on how to successfully implement and make use of portals. The first issue included a look at Hewlett-Packard's portal strategy, which leveraged the
technology for employee communication and brand integration in the months following its merger with Compaq. The issue also examined a portal that includes 180 million documents
from 22,000 federal agencies, allowing citizens and government users to access the documents more easily than they would through the agencies themselves.
Sarah Witt is editor-in-chief of the new magazine; contact her at [email protected]. Ericson can be reached at [email protected].
Pitch Tips
Email only, please. The editors definitely don't have time for phone calls. Ericson fields many inquiries for Portals, as well as for other Line56 editorial projects, and he
prefers an email he can reference again.
While the editors are interested in the technology - they profiled one of the first portal platform technology providers in the first issue - they're really after the business
solutions behind portals. Pitch them case studies of unique implementations and uses. "We all get caught up in future-speak," Ericson says. "We want to know what companies are
doing today. We're really interested in what companies are voting on with their wallets."
Comments
Portals is being published on a quarterly basis, but will likely move to bi-monthly in 2003.
According to Ericson, the pub is serving a niche that is rich with opportunity. Organizations in virtually every sector are considering portals right now, he says. "Everyone is
interested in this. We've seen strong interest in the public sector, in institutions and universities, even the United Nations," Ericson says.
The Line56.com Web site will continue to serve general e-business information needs, but for now, the company believes the best move is to focus print editorial resources on
this hot niche.
In The Pipeline
In the next issue, the editors will look at content management. They'll be interviewing a large aerospace company and a large energy company about their portal content
strategies. There are also plenty of sub-topics, Ericson says: Instant Messaging, Web services and the implications of portals.
For example, when used by healthcare organizations to expedite contact between busy doctors and frazzled patients, what problems could portals cause? And if used by a
pharmaceutical company to lessen bureaucracy in the process of developing a new drug, could portals have potential legal implications when "notes back and forth between drug
designers are available 10 years from now?" Ericson asks.