It’s de rigueur for a magazine to be acquired by a new publisher for its circulation list and sometimes to take out a competitor. But in an unusual twist, Definicion Media Group is in talks to acquire Echelon magazine, a two-year-old print and online business magazine aimed at gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender readers, for potential synergies with the media group’s corporate search business, CandidateFive, also a GLBT specialist.
CandidateFive is eyeing the human capital it stands to gain in the form of potential job candidates and corporate clients to service, culled from Echelon’s readers and advertisers, while Echelon is angling for deeper pockets to help fund a redesign and rebranding of the magazine. Patrick Diamond, president and founder of the one-year-old search firm, expects the deal to be completed by early November, while Echelon publisher and founder Michael Lamb is anticipating the redesigned bimonthly will bow sooner, in mid-October, with the November/December issue.
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“Echelon didn’t have the launch it needed initially,” Lamb said of the title, which claims 4,600 subscribers, 3,600 of them online. The magazine’s new look, Lamb said, will be “a lot cleaner, less cluttered, easier to read and more visual — a cross between Business Week and Vanity Fair. We’re dealing with traditional business issues, but we want to be stylish at the same time.”
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A loose partnership between Echelon and CandidateFive began in April, with the magazine bringing sponsors to the search firm’s career forums, held in locales such as Los Angeles (where both are based) and San Diego. CandidateFive’s clients include Nike, Comcast, PepsiCo, AT&T, Nationwide and the Los Angeles Police Department and Diamond expects the search firm’s roster of job candidates to number about 5,000 by yearend, boosted by the Echelon acquisition and purchase of additional databases. Terms of the pending deal were not disclosed.