Editco.net

It's a cold world out there for business to business publishers; the market's growing online but the premium-priced print recruitment ads are harder to come by.

One such victim is Centaur Media, publisher of Marketing Week, Design Week, The Lawyer and Money Marketing.

This is a pretty impressive line-up by anyone's standards but Centaur is apparently up for sale, or thinking of going private (it floated a few years ago).

The other week it culled a few publishing directors including the liked Annie Swift on Marketing Week. It's open to debate what publishing directors do, in effect they're supposed to be mini-managing directors of one or more titles, but this looks like a cost-cutting measure more than anything else.

The company is still run by chairman Graham Sherren, who made his name at Morgan-Grampian business publishers and then quietly bankrolled what was then Marketing Week Communications in the 1980s.

When he eventually left M-G he moved into what became Centaur, joining up formally with his mate Marketing Week founder the late Antony Nares, and brought in old Fleet Street hand Jocelyn Stevens, who promptly lost the company millions by buying Sloane Ranger title The Magazine, edited by my old pal Nick Monson.

Jocelyn exited with a few millions after about a year (lose a few, win a few) but Centaur prospered in the 90s and eventually went public but at far too high a price.

Like many companies with a lot of shareholders, Centaur succumbed to the temptation to pitch its public offer too high, at £1 a share.

Despite a pretty reasonable commercial performance (the last figures have it making £15.9m on £90m sales) the shares only reached 155p at top and are now languishing at 80p or thereabouts.

Sherren is a hugely capable business publisher but, in a world transfixed by 'new media', perceived to be short on the 'vision thing', as are his managers.

In the meantime main industry rival Haymarket, re-energised since Michael Heseltine emerged from government to resume the family business, has surged ahead by investing heavily in online and moving into India and the Far East.

As a PLC Centaur has nowhere to go. Talk is that Sherren might try to take the company private. It's a bargain for someone at the current price, although the next couple of years in the B2B publishing market are going to be exceedingly tough.