• by John Gaffney , October 16, 2002

The baseball version of Riffs:

Here Comes Dick Parsons To The Mound: It’s easy to say things like this when you’re not writing the checks or apologizing to Wall Street analysts, but I think SI For Women got a quick hook. AOL/TimeWarner shut the book down reportedly for not filling the growth mode among active female athletes that the company thought it would fill. I think this will in time become a flourishing category for magazines. Will it reach anywhere near a solid half-million circ? No. Can it maintain a solid 350,000. Yes. But you have to wonder what kind of company can hang with a 350,000 circ magazine these days. Maybe the financial logistics have reached a point that will cause the industry to reconsider the profit and loss levels that make a magazine worth while. SI For Women will be back, I believe. It won’t have the SI brand attached, but somebody will make this concept work at a workable level.

PopUps: If AOL won’t take pop-up ads on its site anymore, does that include the ads that you see when you leave a TimeWarner site like Fortune or Business 2.0? Those are the ads Bob Pittman claimed drove a lot of subs.

Foul Ball: Major League Baseball has a lot of work to do with advertisers. First we have a strike threat. Then attendance hit’s the skids. If the Anaheim Angels don’t pitch to the San Francisco Giant’s Barry Bonds during this World Series that ‘s kind of like saying Jennifer Aniston is on Friends, but you don’t put her in any scenes.