LinkedIn, Smithsonian, and Fortune among those making publishing industry news
For the second time in 2015, a leading online learning platform is making huge publishing industry news – but this story goes well beyond the $186 million Lynda.com investment back in January.
Let’s take a look at that development as well as two others reported on in Folio: late last week.
LinkedIn Acquiring Lynda.com
Ed tech giant Lynda.com – which has made an art out of building a library of multimedia content, cultivating audience, and developing subscription strategies – is now a part of LinkedIn.com.
The social networking service has made a push in recent years to become a publishing force, and the $1.5 billion acquisition – half cash, half stock, according to Folio: – will bolster the offerings available to its membership.
“At LinkedIn, we’ve followed lynda.com for a long time, rooted in the conviction that access to high-quality, skills-based learning-and-development content should be available to every LinkedIn member and a fundamental part of our platform. Through its singular focus on programming and content quality, we concluded that lynda.com had developed the best approach for LinkedIn in the industry. In fact, we were so aligned on this strategy that when I called Ryan Roslansky, the head of LinkedIn’s content products, to discuss the thought of acquiring the company, he remarked in disbelief that he had been planning to pitch me the same idea the following day,” wrote LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner on the company’s site.
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“The combination of LinkedIn and lynda.com is the kind of fit that benefits everyone. LinkedIn has the members, the jobs, a unique understanding of the skills required to do those jobs, and a publishing platform that can be accessed by roughly 350 million people to share professionally relevant knowledge. lynda.com’s service has the premium library of skills-based courses. Together, we can bring opportunities and access to knowledge that everyone deserves. And together, we can more easily build the Economic Graph by mapping together the people, jobs, skills, and knowledge that are core components of it.”
Smithsonian Travel Magazine Launches
Smithsonian Enterprises is diversifying its product line by entering a highly competitive niche: travel magazines. Smithsonian Journeys will be a quarterly publication that will be print-only … with a $13.99 cover price. Former National Geographic exec Victoria Pope will lead the magazine as editor in chief.
The company currently relies heavily on events programming and tours.
Fortune Welcomes Erstwhile Gigaom Staff
One month after online tech magazine Gigaom’s unceremonious folding, a third of its staff have found a new home with Fortune. The hires and beats include Barb Darrow on cloud computing, Katie Fehrenbacher on energy tech, Stacey Higginbotham on Internet of things, Matthew Ingram on social & digital media, Jeff Roberts on tech law and policy, and Jonathan Vanian on enterprise tech.
Time Inc.’s financial title reaches 17 million readers a month, Folio: reports.
Do you have any publishing industry news to share? Let us know in the comments!
To read more of the latest publishing industry news, visit FolioMag.com.
