As you may have heard, yesterday Reed Elsevier announced they were selling off RBI, the b2b publishing end of their operation, including Variety, Broadcasting and Cable, and, yes, Publishers Weekly, the home of this very blog. The reason given was that the cycle-driven profit structure of magazines supported by advertising didn’t fit in with the Dutch parent company’s business plans. Lots of scuttlebutt going around, but whoever wants the whole caboodle will need a spare $2-2.4 billion, which could take a while–or no time at all. Certainly Variety alone could have a number of suitors.

We really have no idea what any of this means but we’ll keep on blogging until they tell us to stop. One bit of fall-out that is known: the Reed Exhibitions group that puts together the BEA, New York Comic-Con and New York Anime Fest will not be sold off, so that’s one less conflict of interest on our plate.

This entry was posted on 02/22/08 at 8:00 am and is filed under Meta, Business News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.