M e d i c a l P u b l i s h i n g • Consolidation of ownership. As has been true in many fields, larger companies have acquired smaller ones. The past 20 years have been particularly active from the standpoint of mergers and acquisitions. Recent developments belong in the context of history. The medical publishing industry in the United States began in 1812 with the launch of The New England Journal of Medicine. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association arrived later in the 19th century, with a first issue in 1883. The early part of the 20th century saw the births of Annals of Internal Medicine, Archives of Internal Medicine, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Modern Medicine, and Medical Economics. But the industry didn't get really hot until after World War II, with the rise of branded prescription drugs and modern marketing. It became super-heated in the aftermath of the US Senate's Kefauver hearings in the early 1960s. At that time, the Food and Drug Administration mandated that a "brief summary" of prescribing information be included in ads targeting physicians. Some publishers feared that pharmaceutical manufacturers would finance that mandate by reducing the size of their ad units. They needn't have worried. Advertisers simply increased the size of ad units to comply with the new requirement, and publications exploded in terms of advertising pages, ad revenue, and editorial pages. Business thrived to such an extent that Medical Economics, to cite an extreme example, limited the number of advertising pages in a single fortnightly issue to 180, lest visibility of ads be impaired. From a publishing management perspective, the 1960s were the golden age of medical journals. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In addition to the author, a number of people contributed to this chapter, including: Elise Daly Parker, researcher, and the following who gave interviews and materials: Jon Bigelow, Jay Carter, James Chase, Elisa Cooper-Broski, Scott Cotherman, Rob Dhoble, Diane Fitzgibbons, Charlie Hunt, Lisa Kirk, Lee Maniscalco, Paul Nani, Robert Osborn, Ron Pantello, Debbie Renner, Patricia Spinner, Steve Stoneburn, Jaime Trapp, and Art Wilschek. 137
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