• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, September 11, 2006

"It would be great if more magazines went out of business in the coming months," wrote Scott Donaton in Ad Age. "And more Web sites were shut down, TV shows yanked off the air, newspapers folded and radio programs unplugged." The media landscape needs to be cleared of some clutter and there are still too many bad products out there--"ones that clearly aren't working but are being sustained for reasons of vanity," he wrote.

Emerging from a closed-door meeting at which copies of Donaton's editorial were distributed, the management of Crain Communications promptly shut down both Ad Age magazine and its companion Web site, Ad Age.com.

"You know, I think Scott is one of the smartest guys in the business," Rance Crain might have told "Over the Line "(but didn't). "I read his thoughts last week and it all started sounding kind of familiar. We had a family picnic and agreed that it really WAS vanity that kept us publishing Ad Age, so why not follow our own advice and shut the whole thing down. Good-bye to those angry phone calls from publishers who think we wrongly covered their companies or left them out of some roundup. So long to defending Madison + Vine as the Next Big Thing. Farewell to those insider Randy Rothenberg columns that I never really understood. And now Bob Garfield can piss off anybody he wants, and they won't end up calling me at 3 a.m."

"Needless to say, we are all shocked," the ultra-slim, perpetually five-o'clock-shadowed Donaton should have said. "I mean, I hate to lose my job, but on the other hand, it is nice to know someone reads my stuff, ya know?"

"Geez, that was kinda sudden," Ad Age alumnus Stuart Elliott said in an interview "Over the Line" dreamed up. "Think of all the journalists who have spent years grinding out copy there: Joe Mandese at MediaPost, Patrick Reilly, who gave up a respectable career as a Wall Street Journal reporter to become a, ugh, PR guy, Jon Fine with that book-jacket pose on his BusinessWeek column, Gary Levin now at USA Today, arch-rival Adweek's Alison Fahey--and of course, there was me."

"Who's your daddy, Rance, huh? Who's your daddy now," said Mike Marchesano, executive vice president and chief transformation officer of VNU, which publishes Adweek, Mediaweek, Brandweek and a couple of other weeks that nobody can remember.

"Crain Communications is primarily a publishing company providing vital news and information to industry leaders and consumers with 30 titles--well, I guess 29 now," said the parent company in a statement. "Each newspaper, magazine and electronic news site has become required reading and an authoritative source in its own sector of business, trade and consumer market... except advertising, I suppose."

Dismayed staffers began to circulate their resumes to other adverting and marketing publications, with more than one of them mumbling (to the extent you can mumble in an e-mail) "He couldn't write about TiVo or AOL or Google like everyone else, nooooooooooooo, he has to write about how shutting down magazines is a 'smart' thing to do. Mr. Run-With-The-Big-Dogs Know-It-All..."