James Tuckerman, Editor-In-Chief, Anthill Magazine

If you haven’t guessed already, we love to write about cheeky and provocative companies. But we rarely get the opportunity to talk about our own corporate shenanigans, successful or otherwise.

Today is one of those rare, self-indulgent occasions.

In early February, with news that Australia’s oldest circulating business magazine would be closing after 127 years, we released an email with the eyeball-grabbing title, ‘Who wants to help Anthill buy The Bulletin?’

And wowee! Did we get people talking.

The flood of emails, blog comments and phone calls generated by our rally-to-arms not only opened our eyes to the hidden popularity of The Bulletin (gotta love the loyalty of magazine readers). But it only showed us the faith you, our readers, have in Anthill. To check out the blog comments, click here (bless you all).

So, was it really our intention to buy The Bulletin?

Not in our wildest dreams. (Although, our ‘play’ did give rise to some pretty vivid dreams in the months following.)

The purpose of the email was to grab the collective collar of the Australian magazine industry, give it a good, hardy shake and make known the obvious: We are here and we are here to stay (cue Eye of the Tiger on your cassette tape now).

And what were the outcomes of this chest-beating exercise?

Firstly, the story was picked up by the daily papers and then the industry rags. To read our favourite (’tongue-in-cheek’) item of media coverage, click here. The story was circulated through various blogs and electronic channels, including the prestigious Walkley Awards membership newsletter. It also generated record traffic levels on our website (always good for our number crunchers).

But did all the kerfuffle motivate the powers that be at ACP, owners of this now defunct magazine institution, to pick up the blower and give us a call?

At this point, I’ll defer to my circumspect response when approached by Australia’s leading source of political gossip and corporate skulduggery, Crikey.com.

“No comment.”

Am I averting a dangerous breach of some carefully crafted non-disclosure agreement or am I simply adding fuel to the fire of controversy? (Heh heh.) Only time will tell.

In the short-term, we hope our subscribers got a giggle (at least a surprise) when they received our current edition and that we didn’t confuse too many news agency proprietors with our own little attempt to ‘revive The Bulletin’.

The image below is currently available as the reverse cover of our Apr/May edition…

…The Bullantin (Australia’s leading source of Ant-related news).

Click here (or the image) to read the headlines.

Tags: magazines, media, the bulletin

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Innovation, Local Media, Marketing, Our Business. 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.