On Dec. 14, ASBPE's Washington, D.C., and New York City chapters jointly sponsored a web seminar on using Excel as a reporting tool to analyze corporate finances -- the first webinar ever presented by ASBPE

The presenter was Steve Ross, editor-in-chief of Broadband Properties and a teacher of business writing at the Harvard Extension School. Ross walked participants through exercises in calculating key business indicators such as profit margin, earnings per share, price-earnings ratio, and return on investment. He also pointed out a few possible errors in analysis that might easily trip up a novice financial reporter. You can read a recap of the session here.

If you missed the webinar, don't worry -- there's still an opportunity to participate. Two more financial-reporting webinars will be offered n March 2 and in early May. You can always find out the latest about ASBPE webinars here.

Update, 2/12/07: You can order a DVD of the seminar by contacting ASBPE at info@asbpe.org or (630) 510-4588.

This post has been changed to show the latest dates for our next webinars. The webinars will deal with financial reporting, but will not cover the same material as the December webinar described above. In addition, this post has been changed to reflect the fact that the seminars offered have a web component. (They were previously referred to as "teleseminars.")

Labels: ASBPE Educational Programs, Reporting, Webinars

I plan to do a short writeup about our Dec. 7 State of the Industry Banquet and Panel Discussion on the web and B2B publishing later this week. A few highlights:

• Tech Target's Maryfran Johnson said that at a recent Web 2.0 conference she attended, it was comforting for the audience to find out that even the big guys like Time Warner and Yahoo haven't figured out everything about the web.
  
  
• CFO's Tim Reason noted that publishers tend to look at the home page of the web site and think that that's their product. In reality, it's likely that a majority of visitors -- at CFO, 86% -- arrive at the site directly on the article or page they're interested in via an e-mail newsletter or other link and never even see the home page.
  
  
• CIO's Gary Beach questioned who was driving delivery of online content. "If we put anything video out there, any advertisers will buy it," he said. But whether his audience really wants to watch video online is another matter.
  
  
• Reed Business Information's Steve Moylan noted that there was a lot less overlap between print and online than they had originally assumed.

More later.

Correction, 12/12/06: Maryfran Johnson is no longer with Tech Target. She now has her own business, Maryfran Johnson & Associates, which provides services related to events.

Labels: ASBPE Educational Programs, New Product/Content Development, State of the Industry, Technology, The Business of Publishing, Web