Thursday, April 14, 2005

Will Ascend buy Vance?

Folio magazine points out that two of the three B2B publishers owned by Veronis Suhler Stevenson are now for sale. That must leave the folks at Access Intelligence -- the only VSS property in the U.S. that's not on the auction block-- wondering when someone will hang a "For Sale" sign around their neck.
If this stuff interests you, you may want to attend American Business Media's Spring Meeting in Boca Raton, Fla. Cam Bishop, president and CEO of Ascend Media, is on a panel where the topic is "The Merger & Acquisition Front: How aggressive should we be?" Cam has been doing a lot of acquiring of late, and I suppose it's possible he has his eye on something from VSS.
But if you attend the meeting, ask him about my theory that Ascend will soon buy the food publications of Vance Publishing, which have their offices right down the road from Ascend in Johnson County, Kan.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I was once senior writer at Vance. And I was once vice president for online content at Primedia Business, where Cam Bishop once ran all B2B operations.

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