Fourteen years and many twists and turns ago I was hired to be the editor of this magazine. At the time, International Gaming & Wagering Business stood basically unchallenged, a business-to-business publication serving a still relatively underserved market, covering all forms of legal gaming all around the world. Supporting this robust edifice was the World Gaming Congress, a trade show of already considerable size that was growing at a double-digit pace annually.

To the credit of our owners at the time, Gem Communications, that happy set of circumstances was very effectively used in no small part to continually invest in this magazine, and a lot of thought (and money) was put into making IGWB a one-stop information shop for the industry worldwide. IGWB was literally everywhere, and valuable editorial real estate was allocated to all industry segments.

Back then the casino industry was just beginning to overtake lotteries in terms of advertising dollars in IGWB. This led to some tension between the segments, and “We don’t want to advertise in a casino magazine” became a common refrain from our lottery customers. We continued to invest in lottery coverage, but to no tangible business benefit. Ultimately, we were compelled to keep our focus on those areas of the business where there was overlap with the casino industry, which meant video lottery terminals and other emerging technologies. A critical leg of the stool of this publication as it had originally been conceived was removed. We became a casino-focused publication more than a total gaming publication.

After the loss of the World Gaming Congress in 2001, another leg which started to get rickety was our business outside North America. Like all companies in a position of market dominance we couldn’t resist the urge to do something to upset people. In the case of World Gaming it was a “points” system whereby every dollar of advertising in this publication counted toward one’s booth position at the show. The least enthusiastic participants in that program were our Europe-based customers, who given the choice would never have allocated a significant portion of their advertising budgets for ads in a U.S.-based publication if not for the trade show hook. When that went away, so ultimately did their business.   

Other things were happening. The growth of the industry inspired all sorts of enterprising people to launch gaming publications, most of which used lower-cost business models to take aim at the higher advertising page rates of this comparatively high-overhead, independently audited publication. Advertisers were very often satisfied to overlook the weaker editorial and unaudited circulation claims of such titles, even if they sometimes bore all the credibility of an account statement from Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, to run the same ads they were running in IGWB at half-price or lower. This reality endures.

Our response to all of this was to launch more vertical publications on a quarterly basis with lower page rates, and while that largely worked, IGWB got a little slimmer (first a little, then a lot). Our owners at the time did the reasonable thing and insisted on stricter accounting for the publications, which now needed to be profitable on their own two feet. Advertisers began a justified and now familiar complaint that there are too many magazines in the gaming B2B space. The happy set of circumstances of the mid-’90s was gone and eventually so was the trade show that was the foundation of much of it.

One of the only positive outcomes of the trade show battle was our acquisition in 2001 of Casino Journal and the Southern Gaming Summit. While the magazine was purchased for a fundamentally inane reason (we were trying to limit the print advertising options of the then start-up Global Gaming Expo and thereby save World Gaming) it was an established, respected title in its own right, and Southern Gaming Summit, which is produced in partnership with the Mississippi Casino Operators Association, remains a fixture on the commercial gaming trade-show landscape.

For eight years, IGWB and Casino Journal have coexisted, but the current economic and industry B2B publishing environment has forced us to make a hard choice. Simply put, like everyone else we compete with we need to put our editorial and sales resources behind one monthly magazine. For the reasons outlined above — the pre-eminence of casino-style gaming, the pressures on our international business and on ad rates — it made sense for us to choose Casino Journal.

This doesn’t mean we’re retreating from the world. On the contrary, we will migrate all of IGWB’s non-North American circulation to Casino Journal, and the magazine will be distributed digitally to more than 2,000 readers internationally. We are also taking the print circulation of Casino Journal up from 9,500 to more than 12,000 in the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. The extra readers come from more than 2,500 readers in these areas who have personally requested IGWB as part of our audited circulation development process and who were not already receiving Casino Journal.

End result: More than 14,000 individual readers will receive Casino Journal, an increase of more than 40 percent over its current circulation, and the editorial focus moves from domestic to global. We’ll still deliver coverage of the lottery and racing industries, especially when those sectors overlap with casino gaming, and advertisers will get access to the same audience delivered by IGWB at substantially lower rates than we could justify with an all-print distribution globally. With time, going to a digital format outside North America will also enable us to offer customized regional editions for Europe, Asia and South America.

We’ll be going into this reshaped world with what remains the deepest editorial team in our business. James Rutherford, one of the best editors and writers anywhere, whose global sense of the market was honed by several years as international editor of IGWB based in London, becomes editor of Casino Journal. Marian Green, whose editorial coverage and understanding of the gaming machine business is unsurpassed, remains editor of our bimonthly, Slot Manager, and will serve as managing editor of Casino Journal. Patricia McQueen, well-known for her expertise in the lottery and pari-mutuel sectors, a recipient of an alumni award from the University of Arizona for distinguished service to the racing industry, will cover lotteries and racinos.

On the trade show front we’ve also rationalized our product mix to get more in tune with the market. Last month we announced at BingoWorld in Las Vegas that the show will be moving in 2010 to Biloxi, Miss., to be co-located with Southern Gaming Summit. The concept of BingoWorld at Southern was immediately embraced by attendees and exhibitors alike as it gives them access to a broader market at a lower cost.

Both of these developments remind us that one of the good things about hard times is they can compel you to do the things you probably should have been thinking about doing anyway.

See you next month in Casino Journal.