Think back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Stores were closing, the world was shutting down. Offices emptied out, airports and transit systems became ghost towns. Out of this emptiness, the Pandemic Publishing Roundtable was founded. I teamed up with fellow magazine consultant Linda Ruth and we invited futurist and magazine specialist Bo Sacks, the publisher of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, Sherin Pierce, Mr. Magazine himself, Dr. Samir Husni and Gemma Peckham, the founder of Rova and Oh Reader magazines to join us in what started off as weekly Zoom calls to talk all things magazines.Part of rationale for these initial meet ups was simple sanity. Do you remember the isolation we experienced in those early days? This connection turned into a desire for some education. The pandemic gave us an opportunity to learn new things and rethink what a magazine publisher could do to flourish in this changing economy.Now that the world has opened up, we don’t have the opportunity to meet as much. Although the Pandemic has faded, it’s not completely over and now, of course, we have Monkey Pox to worry about. But we still meet as regularly as possible, sometimes just the six of us. Other times, we invite someone who we think can teach us something we’d never thought about before.A few weeks back, we invited industry veterans Malcolm Netburn, Luke Magerko and Matt Lindsay, the CEO of Mather Economics to come and talk with us about the incredibly interesting work they are doing with their deep dives into publisher data. Click below to read the summary of our discussion on the BoSacks.com website.