We have more than 1,300 entries that require a critical eye from a quality editor for judging. The commitment to judging can be from two hours on a small category to around a dozen or more hours. We’ll give you the criteria and make it as easy as possible and you’ll have several weeks to get it done. The payoff? You’ve helped colleagues, just like yourself, be judged fairly by a B2B journalism professional. Think you’re up the task? Then, email me your contact information at tonieauer@gmail.com and I’ll follow up with you.

– Tonie Auer, ASBPE National Competition Committee Czar

For the last 10 years, ASBPE has sponsored this scholarship to foster interest in ASBPE by younger B2B professionals who are advancing in their careers. These scholarships are open to all business editors, including print and Web. The scholarships will pay the registration fees and one night of hotel for the winners. Transportation to and from the event, any non-conference meals, and other incurred costs are the responsibility of the winners or their publishing companies. Winners of the award will also receive a free one-year membership to ASBPE.

For more information on how to enter the contest, please visit the secure Google Document we have created. Entries are due on March 14, 2012, so enter your application today. For any questions relating to the competition, please e-mail Amy Fischbach at amyfischbach@gmail.com.

The Chicago chapter is looking for social media success stories for its upcoming Digital Boot Camp on April 20. We will be hosting a panel of writers and editors that have succeeded in engaging users through social media. If you believe you’re a good fit, let us know by March 1 by emailing chicago@asbpe.org.

ASBPE's redesign goal was to improve its members' user experience. Along with InMotion developers, the site was rebuilt using a WordPress platform.

Have you been to http://www.asbpe.org lately? If you have, you may have noticed a few changes have taken place. The association recently unveiled a redesigned website which promises an improved user experience and much more robust functionality.

To get the most of the site, we’ll be posting a series of blog posts on the new functions of the website.

In this blog post, we’ll cover the new process for logging in to the site, updating your account and your account details.

Logging In

The log-in process for the new ASBPE website is similar to the old process. Locate the Log-In or My Account underlined text in upper right hand corner of the site.

Once you have selected one of these options, you will be taken to a log-in screen.

As with the previous site, your user name is the email address you used to create your account. Your password remains the same as it did with the old site. If you cannot remember your password, you can selected “Lost your password?” and reset it. If you do not remember your user name, you can email web-master@asbpe.org for help in identifying the email address that was used.

In our next blog post, we’ll discuss how to update your account information.

Please note that there will be no more extensions beyond this date, so get your entries in today!  You can enter and pay for your submissions online.  Simply visit https://www.b-online.com/secure/asbpe/competition to enter the online system.

Good luck with the competition and thank you for supporting ASBPE!

This survey is 10 questions and will only take a few minutes to complete.

Click here to access the survey

Thank you very much for your input!

The association is making a shift to embrace all of those who contribute to the B2B content landscape. At a Fall board meeting, the National Board of Directors made the decision to adopt ASBPE as our official association name. No longer thought of as solely editors or working on publications, the name change ushers in a breadth of new opportunities for our members.

Because we’ll be known as ASBPE going forward, we believe it’s important to have a tagline that best represents who our membership represents and what we do. Below you will find several options you can vote on. The winning tagline will be adopted as the official tagline of ASBPE. Be sure to vote early. The polls close on February 1, 2012.

Ceci Rodgers, a business and economics lecturer at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, walked editors through the nuts and bolts of financial reporting and sorting through the often confusing (sometimes on purpose) world of 10-Qs, 10-Ks and 8-Ks.

“If you can read a nutrition label or a stock quote, you can read this,” Rodgers said.

She recommends editors skip past the “PR garbage” and go straight to the tables on the forms, highlight the lines of information they need, and only then go to the PR/analyst section for explanations from the company.

BREAKDOWN. Rodgers broke down the three most common financial reports journalists and editors deal with:

10-K – annual report

•  Offers some MD&A (management discussion and analysis)
• Focus on the footnotes, especially anything listed as “other liabilities” or “special entities”
• This is the only audited report; the 10-Q isn’t

10-Q – quarterly statement

•  Income statement – measures profitability
• Balance sheet – financial health
• Statement of cash flows – focus on the cash from operations line

8-K – disclosure of information material to the company

14-A – deals with executive compensation

STORY IDEAS. Think there’s nothing in that mass of numbers, percentages and analyst double-speak? Here are some story ideas you can easily pull from a company’s 10-K or 10-Q:

• How much income tax does the company pay?
• How much cash does it have on hand?
• Does it face any pending litigation?
• What’s the status of its pension funds?
• What are its “other” liabilities or assets?
• Is the company “channel stuffing” – moving a lot of product to retailers or distributors and listing it as sold on their books?

WHERE TO LOOK. The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law mandates companies follow GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) that allow journalists and analysts to make apples-to-apples comparisons of companies in the same industries/segments. That doesn’t always make it easy, but Rodgers recommended b2b editors focus on three areas when quarterly and annual reports are released to the media:

• Income statement – how profitable is the company?
• Balance sheet – What is the financial health of the company?
• Statement of cash flow – How much liquidity does the company have?

I – income statement

• A company’s top line is its total sales plus revenues.
• Operating income focuses on profit without interest or taxes and tells you how the company is doing in its everyday business.
• EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, debt and amortization) “takes the noise out,” Rodgers said, so analysts like it as a metric to judge the company’s performance.
• The cost of goods sold (or COGS) shows the impact of commodity costs on business.
• Sales and G&A expenses – compare this to the same three-month period from last year. If this rises too fast, cost cutting and layoffs might be imminent.
• Gross margin = revenue minus COGS divided by revenue

II – balance sheet

• Assets are cash and short-term (three-month) securities. Look for a trend here; are they building cash or not?
• Goodwill should be less than 20% of total assets?
• Liabilities are long-term debt (one year or more).
• Market capitalization = stock price x shares

III – Cash flow

•     Good ratios of operating cash to net income are 1:1 or 3:1

Author Chuck Bowen is a 2011 ASBPE Young Leader Scholarship award winner, and editor and associate publisher of Lawn & Landscape magazine. You can email him at cbowen@gie.net.

Submitted by Howard Rauch

One of the most important values a publication or Web site can deliver to its readers is articles based on high-quality editorial research.  High quality does not necessarily mean that you retain the most expensive research service to conduct a national study for you … although quality certainly is implied as being present if you do use an outside agency.  High quality does mean:

1.    You addressed a topic of considerable importance;
2.    You asked significant questions;
3.    You obtained a decent response;
4.    Your conclusions were highly instructive to readers;
5.    Whenever possible, the information reported clearly was ground-breaking.

Even the smallest magazine staff should plan on publishing a continuous flow of original statistics. So … how do you organize a research effort?  How do you exploit it? What are some do’s and don’ts along the way?  Here are 14 responses that fill in some of the blanks.

1. If you’re planning a major project, seek input on the questionnaire from your readers.  You may be pleasantly surprised to find how responsive people are when you’re not contacting them for the conventional reason of conducting an interview.

2. Follow the established principles of making a questionnaire easy to answer.  Have plenty of check-offs and multiple choice, but also include several open-end questions.  Also include historical questions; otherwise you lack a frame of reference, especially in terms of sales data.

3. Random sampling is for the birds.  Perhaps saying so is heresy to devout researchers.  But if you leave things strictly to Nth name response, you run the risk of winding up with lots of non-authoritative responses.

4. Watch questionnaire length. When a questionnaire is especially complex, offer an incentive to respond.

5. Establish a written timetable and stick to it.  Allow for second and third mailings. Provide adequate time for your art staff to develop graphics that are easily followed by your readers.

6. Plan on conducting some interviews personally so you can confirm whether the tabulations you are seeing actually make sense.  Try to do this early in the game, before the questionnaire is mass-mailed, so you can get the bugs out via some final revisions.

7. Beware of interpreting results based on straight averages.  This caveat applies particularly to salary studies.  “Median” is the magic word implying proper use.  An additional thought about salary studies is to present results by region as opposed to reporting a single national average.

8. You don’t need a high quantitative return if you draw a high quality response.  Just remember to say that results reflect only the experience of the sample and are not projectable to your industry’s universe.

9. When you write the article based on survey results, interpret rather than recite.  It is absolutely unpalatable for a reader to wade through a series of sentences of the “60% said this, 30% said that, 15% said the other” variety.

10. Proofread your charts and insist on seeing a final color key.  For example, the technique of using varying shades of a single color to reflect different response segments can backfire if all those shades appear identical.

11. Don’t be guilty of publishing research that has no foundation.  If the overall response is bad, or certain “cell” groups did not furnish adequate data, clearly you are in hot water.

12. Don’t rely totally on the mail. Plan to supplement the response with telephone and/or face-to-face interviews.

13. For best results, always cross-reference your data. There are many significant gems left languishing because hasty decisions were made that cross-tabulation would be too time-consuming.

14. Variety is the spice of editorial research.  Depending upon your field and your budget, you can mix trade and consumer projects.  One way to get mileage from reader studies is to gather enough information that can be reported in monthly doses without diluting the timeliness factor.

I would be remiss if I ignored the elusiveness of statistical math.  To illustrate the possibilities, here are two questions excerpted from a test I’ve used during editorial research workshops:

• In 2010, there were 11.6% more hospital P.T. units than in 2009.  In 2011, there were 14.7% more hospital P.T. units than in 2010. Based on this data, is it true or false that the increase reported for 10-11 was 3.1% higher than the increase reported for 09-10?
• The following facts were reported in a survey of lawncare firms:  (1) Of 1,000 firms surveyed, 18% responded; (2) 48% of respondents also provide pest control services; (3) 27% of those offering pest control services consider the business to be unsuccessful; (4) lack of success was attributed to high cost of service by 8% of respondents; dissatisfied customers – 4%; diminishing customer base – 4%. What common statistical problem does the data reflect?

Everybody ought to ace this two-question exam. However, be assured that variations of the above snafus do get published from time to time.

Adam Tinworth

For more than eight years, UK-based trade-press editor Adam Tinworth has chronicled on his blog the rise of new and social media and how they have shaped both his personal life and his career. Though change can be unsettling, Tinworth told John Bethune in a recent interview that the best strategy is not to resist it, but embrace it. Journalists, he said, must not only acknowledge, but learn to enjoy, “publishing into a more crowded, noisy, dynamic, and swashbuckling public sphere than ever before.”

As part of the interview, Tinworth offered some specific advice to business-to-business journalists, and suggested that they are well-positioned to take advantage of new media:

As you’ve noted, journalists today need to work with and produce not just text, but audio, video, and images. What can they do to develop and improve these kinds of skills?

Two things. The first: continue experimenting, including in their spare time. My video skills grew leaps and bounds by pulling together videos for my friends and family. I’m fond of the musician comparison (but I have a nasty feeling that I nicked it from Emily Bell): musicians don’t only play music when they’re on stage performing. And journalism, as a profession, shouldn’t only happen to deadline, for your main publication. Play, experiment. Enjoy the acts of reporting, creation and publication. If you don’t—or can’t—you’re in the wrong profession.

The other, of course, is to resist what Paul Bradshaw calls the Flying Zombie Laser Shark problem—editors or publishers pushing journalists to do everything. They should be aware of the potential of everything—but also be aware where their strengths lie. I’m mainly a words and images guy, with a little video, but no audio to speak of. That’s just my skill set. Every journalist needs to be aware of where their own balance is.

Compared with other types of journalists, do you think that trade journalists have any particular advantages in adapting to new media?

Yes—they do. The internet is a medium that is hard on generalists and kinder to niche specialists. B2B journalists aren’t trying to build communities—they’re serving communities that already exist. That gives us a head start over (say) national newspapers, whose audience is slowly being eroded by the million nibbling bites of more niche publications. We have a closer relationship, usually, with our audiences, because the people we’re reporting for are often the same ones that we’re reporting on. It’s therefore not so much of a stretch to take those offline networking skills and relationships, and bring them into the online space. It also gives us a faster and more personal feedback loop as to what is working and what isn’t.

However, we need to be prepared to get even more niche online than we were in print. Forget farmers, think livestock breeders. Forget the aviation industry, dive down to in-flight entertainment or defense.