After almost 45 years, SB&D is ending its run of printing magazines

By Michael Randle, Editor

You have it in your hands. If not, you wouldn’t be reading this.

Many folks still love to read, touch and feel paper. Yet, there are many who wouldn’t read print if it was the only thing readable in an igloo (much like the South’s weather this winter). They would tear it up for a makeshift blanket before they would read it. 

And that’s sad. Not the weather; the fact that most under 40 simply do not sit down and read printed news in a nice, comfortable chair with a fire going. That is gone. Print is not part of their routine. Consequently, there are hardly any more daily newspapers left printing. I still adore tackling The New York Times Sunday edition, all six pounds of it. 

The under-40 crowd gets their news on their phones. We get it. 

Forty-four years of print

I don’t go far enough back to the use of molten lead that would help Linotype machines cast entire lines of text. Each line was a solid metal slug. Every line! Pages were locked in to steel frames called chases and rolled onto presses. Can you imagine? That technology ended in the 1950s.

I started this media company as a 20-something in 1982. I also missed 1950s to 1970s phototypesetting, a real step-up from molten lead. But even then, the X-Acto knife was used prominently in the process.

I grew up in print with paste-up boards and pure darkroom wizardry (“You opened the door to the dark room? Shame on you!”). Before there were computer programs like InDesign or even Quark, printing prep was essentially a craft shop/chemistry lab. Amberlith, Rubylith, X-Acto knives and registration marks (“Don’t bleed on the boards, and I mean it!”) were mere parts of the tools of the trade. 

There, we created — I created as the main layout artist after I launched the Birmingham Business Journal in 1982 — a tabloid-style newspaper. I wrote it, sold the ads, did “layout,” and it was pure artistic magic at 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday with zero digital involvement. 

I also owned it and had to make payroll; tough to do as a 20-something.

Yeah, you worked with cyan, magenta, yellow and black. No other colors. So, you had to mix the ink to make another color other than those. “Hey Gladys, we need 30 percent magenta, 30 percent black, 10 percent cyan and 30 percent yellow” for a brownish-red, brick shade. 

Later, “WordStar” was invented, before email existed. But you could now take a floppy disc with your content straight to the typesetter.

But then, the most amazing thing happened, the dial-up modem was invented. Oh my, you could use your tiny 8-inch screen computer with the tiniest memory to send your content to the typesetter. The folks reading that would deliver to you type strips that could be hot-waxed and placed on boards, again, using an X-Acto knife. It was like an early version of Legos, just more difficult to build. 

Content was not just written, it was built in the days of “publish or perish.” To this day, it is still “publish or perish” and I put that phrase on t-shirts with the BBJ logo on it. Because if you did not publish, you were not paid. 

Then, you had to make all of that into negatives in photo form that would weigh about 100 pounds for a 96-pager. Four negatives (one for each color) for each page. I cannot believe we did that for decades.

Then, after completion that took us about three weeks at best, you shipped the negatives to your $50 million German press house. Our current printer is based in Missouri. We have printed in Alabama, Virginia, Florida and Tennessee over the four decades. 

Mailing and maintaining a current mailing list — in our case for SB&D, site consultants and CEOs from up North — was a full-time job. Addresses were changed each month, people died, retired, moved to another job, etc. 

And you had to catch every single change. The last thing a publisher wanted was to send a $30,000 print job to an address that was vacant. 

This issue and the last this summer will be printed and mailed in Missouri. I always tried to keep our printer in the South. Missouri, at least the south of it, thinks it is “Southern.” (I missed the headline in USA Today that Missouri joined the South.)

So, if you are still into reading print, especially one dedicated to the South’s economic cause, look at what you are holding in your hands. We have one more to go, not to say we will never print again. Never say never, but SB&D has one more issue left before we retire SB-D.com and the magazine into the new SouthernBusiness.com this summer. 

You are going to love this new site, SouthernBusiness.com, when it debuts this summer. The webmaster, Infomedia, handles the sites for Brasfield & Gorrie, Harbert and O’Neal Steel here in Alabama. Those are huge corporations. 

Finally, I lucked up. In 1997, when I designed my first news website, Network Solutions wanted $1.5 million for the domain, SouthernBusiness.com. I checked on the price during COVID and it was still priced at $150,000. I bought it in 2025 for $1,500. 

So, soon, we will have digital-only reads for SB&D for PCs, MAC, iPhones and Androids, where you can discover a whole new platform. Soon, our deadlines will be daily, not monthly and quarterly. 

And, for nostalgia purposes, I count over 1,000 advertisers, some ongoing every year for 34 years, that have advertised with SB&D since 1993. That sounds about right since I have visited and photographed a little over 1,100 of the 1,301 counties and parishes in the South during that time. 

So, we end an era of printing, not because printing our product is not profitable; it is. But, I think 44 years of print with one owner is enough, don’t you? 

We did the best we could. Now, watch what we do next.