Inc. is a terrific magazine, clearly the leading title for small and growing business entrepreneurs. 
   Fast Company has a broader audience. It's written for people who are passionate about their work and want to do it better. They work in small or large organizations. They work at the top and middle of companies. Our readers are mavericks, innovators and business builders who are driven to succeed by working and leading differently. 
   That said, we share about 50 percent of our advertisers with Inc. and nearly 75 percent of our potential advertisers. And our web sites are sold as a network. So there clearly is some synergy but also some competition.


Despite declining ad pages and turmoil at G+J, you and other staffers at Fast Company staunchly defend the magazine's connection with its readers and the quality of its editorial. The missing link seems to be a buyer for the publication. Who is the ideal buyer for Fast Company?

   An investor who believes in our mission, sees our true potential, and supports us in a true turnaround effort.
  You can't engineer a turnaround under a company that simply cuts costs, reduces your newsstand copies, gives up on newsstand promotion and marketing, doesn't actively solicit new subscribers, and collapses your sales force to merge it with another magazine. 
   I've had four publishers and three bosses in 22 months. Truth is, a new owner with a much lower basis price can more clearly see a path toward success. After having spent $350 million for Fast Company, G+J couldn't ever really recoup the investment or feel very good about it


Realistically, how many potential buyers are there out there who could take Fast Company and make it fit into their portfolio of titles?

  Condé Nast is a perfect fit. Wired can be thought of as a hip, cool and edgy lifestyle book for technology in the same way that Fast Company fits a similar profile in the business category. Both would make a smart combo sell for advertisers who want to reach highly affluent and highly educated younger readers.
    Both Inc. and Fast Company would fit exceptionally well into the McGraw-Hill stable because they would give support and protection to Business Week in the same way that Fortune Small Business and 2.0 offer benefits to Fortune.
    And McGraw-Hill could then go to market with an integrated sell, in each case having the A-plus title to compete against Time's B or C title in each category. And the McGraw-Hill titles would deliver greater quality, greater brand name recognition, higher rate bases and audience reach, and superior web sites as well. I can't think of a better strategic play. 
    But this is a great buy--at the bottom of the market--for either a big magazine publisher or an independent entrepreneur.


To your knowledge, how much interest have potential buyers expressed in Fast Company and Inc.?

   We're in a due diligence process right now with roughly a half dozen finalists who will submit a second round of bids on Monday. The winner should be chosen then.


Are you taking steps to raise money or save the magazines?

    No need because there's a good amount of interest in the sale. More of that interest is focused on Inc., which has been around for more than 25 years and is the leading title in its field. But there are people out there who love what we do and understand it.


If the ideal buyer appeared and purchased Fast Company, just how much money do you think it would take to bring the magazine back to the stability it enjoyed during the mid-1990s?

    I don't believe the magazine needs major investments over a long period of time. We can quickly make some changes to move it into a very comfortable position in short order.


By all accounts, Fast Company proved itself to be a successful magazine before the dot.com craze. But when the boom and bust happened, one could argue that the magazine got sucked into the vacuum and lumped together with other new economy titles. How do you respond to people who still consider Fast Company a new economy publication?

   Unlike Business 2.0 or so many other magazines that folded, Fast Company was never a dot.com or tech book. And I make no apologies for the magazine being a so-called "new economy" publication because we are working and living in a new economy where globalization, the internet, an empowered customer and inspired leadership makes all the difference to competition.
   We wrote about those changes from the very beginning. We still do. And they matter greatly to anyone who wants to succeed in this unpredictable, fiercely competitive world.


In a recent New York Times piece, media writer David Carr suggested that Fast Company is a has-been publication connected to a bygone era. Tell us why he's wrong.

   His comments suggest to me that he hasn't read this magazine in a very long time. If David bothered to look at the magazine more recently, here's what he would have read: a cover story that challenged the notion that we really can have work/life balance, a contrarian piece which won us a recent award from the Conference Board for having the best coverage of work/life balance issues. 
    He would have read a terrific profile of Malcolm Gladwell just as his new book was hitting the bookstores and immediately popped onto the bestseller lists. Malcolm is the hottest public speaker in front of business audiences today. 
   He would have read our recent interview with P&G's A.G. Lafley, the Jack Welch of this business era, on a topic--design--that no other business magazine has captured. 
   We're doing sophisticated, provocative, edgy and irreverent journalism of the highest order in our pages. That's why the magazine is a finalist for the third time in the past four years for a Loeb, the most prestigious honor in business journalism. That's why we won the New York Press Club award for the best business story in a magazine last year. That's why Folio named us the best business/consumer magazine last year.


How would you reposition Fast Company to make it more viable? Does it even need to be repositioned?

   We've done just that in the past two years and very effectively.
   Our newsstand was up, until G+J cut our draw. Our renewal rates are up. Our engagement with the reader is at or near all-time highs. Our core readers love us and put our brand up there, in terms of their emotional connection with the magazine, with The New Yorker, National Geographic and Vanity Fair.
    The latest ABC-subscriber study shows that our readers are spending 25 percent more time with the magazine than they did four years ago, and 90 percent of our readers believe we cover business as no other magazine does.


If you had to name one thing, what does Fast Company most need to become viable again?

   An investor with the passion, the enthusiasm, and the intelligence to equal that of my staff. I love and greatly respect my team, and I'd put them up against any other editorial staff in the business.


   In analyzing what brought about G+J's demise, many would point to the Rosie trial or Dan Brewster's very public departure from the company. Is there any one person, event or factor that you blame for the company's woes?

    Not really. There are a lot of fingerprints on this company's difficulties.