The foregoing is far from a definitive list of ownership changes. It simply records some major transactions and demonstrates how active the marketplace is. Many companies have had multiple owners. Medical Economics, for example, went from the founding Chapman family to Litton Industries to Thomson to Advanstar within 35 years. The McGraw- Hill Companies have repeatedly launched, bought, and sold medical journals as corporate enthusiasm seemed to wax and wane. Amidst consolidations of ownership, journals themselves continued on their evolutionary path. Jon Bigelow, former president of Cliggott Communications and now president and CEO of KnowledgePoint360 Group, observed that journal circulations have "tended to become more and more targeted to limit production and postal costs and avoid 'waste circulation' for advertisers." He adds that reading patterns are different because "physicians are in a sound-bite, multi-tasking world." As a result, Bigelow says, "even the cover-to-cover reader is, in fact, skimming over pages looking for key phrases, headlines, tables, visuals. So there is a much greater need to make the pages of a journal appealing. This has been reflected in content in many ways. The tabloids have become brighter, with shortened articles. The A-size journals have shortened articles, too. More visuals are used—photographs, tables, x-rays, MRIs." Steve Stoneburn, president and CEO of Quadrant HealthCom, speaks of the trend to leverage journals into new revenue areas. "We try to make a medical education program sale not solely a print product, but something that extends into digital and live events. All that has become part of the mix." Journals are also accommodating the advertisers' need to target messages in increasingly specific ways,
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