Abe Peck has enjoyed a productive career as both educator and media professional. His specialty is magazines – now Magazines 2.0.

Abe relocated to Santa Barbara, CA, in 2008 but remains involved with the Medill School of Journalism / Northwestern University as its first Director of Business-to-Business (B2B) Communication and as Professor Emeritus in Service. As a Senior Director of the Media Management Center, he brings innovation and cross-platform collaborations to MMC, the executive seminar program affiliated with Medill and the Kellogg School of Management. He conducted and analyzed landmark research on “reader experiences” of magazines (Magazine Publishers of America) and other media, and has co-edited Medill on Media Engagement for Fall 2010 release by Hampton Press.

Abe taught full-time at Medill for 27 years He was the first professor there to be awarded an endowed chair (Sills Professorship) and the first to be awarded a second endowed chair (Helen Gurley Brown Professorship). In 2006, he became Chair of Journalism & Cross-media Storytelling after 25 years of chairing Medill’s program in magazine writing, editing and publishing, from which five titles were launched commercially. His publishing class collaborated with Reader’s Digest on its digital future / connecting with younger readers, and his colleagues have worked on similar projects with Ebony and Popular Science. Abe has worked with Medill students as they participate in residencies at media outlets in Asia.

In 2008, Abe received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Business Publication Editors for his long involvement with business-to-business publications. He now serves on the ASBPE ethics committee and co-generated a 2010 study on the lack of corporate training in digital skills that B2B editors in the U.S. receive.  Abe has judged the Jesse Neal Awards for American Business Media over many years, and was the head judge for the 2010 competition.

Abe was the 2003-04 Educator of the Year of the Assn. for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s magazine division. He was acting and associate dean at Medill, and, with other administrators, raised nearly $25 million dollars to fund the complexities of contemporary journalism education. He chaired the committee that laid the basis for Medill’s current strategic plan. He was the first director of the National Arts Journalism Program (Pew Foundation), which was based at Northwestern, Columbia, USC and Georgia, and taught Arts Reporting at Medill.

Professionally, Abe specializes in magazine launches, strategic editorial performance reviews, vision and mission statements, cross-media positioning, magazine architecture, feature writing and ethics. He has just become an advisory director for Media Advisory Partners, a new investment banking firm that will acquire media properties. For twelve years, he was strategic editorial co-reviewer for Advanstar Communications, and he has consulted to / led B2B workshops for Vincentz (Hannover, Germany, Vance, Reed, Putman, Nielsen, Global Sources, Crain, Babcox , BPA Worldwide media auditors and Advanstar. Internationally, Abe has consulted in China, Hong Kong, India and the U.K, and has consulted or reported in Ecuador, Finland, the Philippines, Senegal and South Africa, as well as with visiting Chinese journalists and officials in the U.S., including for the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS). He has helped launch adventure travel, city, outdoor, pharmaceutical and security titles, and has worked with more than 100 print magazines, Web sites, portals and newspapers, from modernmedicine.com to Highlights for Children, from Hindustan Times Media of Indiato the Shenzhen Press and Rayli groups of China.

Corporate clients have included Abbott, Eaton, Goldman Sachs, International Paper, Microsoft, the National Investors Relations Institute and Tellabs. Abe currently is the only person to judge both the National Magazine and Jesse Neal awards, and he has organized / judged contests for Advanstar, Allured, Lebhar-Friedman, Meredith Corporation, the Society of American Travel Writers and the Society of Publications in Asia. Abe has worked with Academe and CASE on educational issues. He has led seminars on magazine start-ups for Folio: and the Western Publishing Association, and is a longtime program partner with American Business Media.

Abe is on the editorial boards of Miller-McCune, a policy magazine based in Santa Barbara, and Santa Barbara NewSource, a launching effort to encourage enterprise reporting in Santa Barbara. He was a longtime associate / contributing editor of Rolling Stone, a consulting editor for Outside and a contributing editor to Satisfaction, a Tribune Company title for baby boomers first launched in Medill’s publishing program. He has written for magazines from Esquire to Folio: to The Rotarian, Travel Weekly and MSNBC.com. As a reporter / editor / columnist for Chicago’s Daily News and Sun-Times, he won two Illinois Associated Press awards, and he occasionally freelances for the Santa Barbara Independent. He was a critic at large on WBBM-AM, Chicago. In 2006, he was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame. In 2010, he co-founded the Magazine League of Santa Barbara, a gathering of local magazine-makers.

Once editor of the Chicago Seed, Abe wrote Uncovering the ‘60s: The Life and Times of the Underground Press, which The New York Times recently called the genre’s “definitive” history. He wrote the foreword for Voices from the Underground and the radical press entry for the History of Mass Media in the U.S. He edited Dancing Madness (Rolling Stone) and consulted on Rolling Stone’s History of the ‘60s. He contributed to The Eighties: A Look Back, The Experts Speak, The World Book Encyclopedia (“magazines,”) and Trade, Industrial & Professional Periodicals of the United States. He had reviewed books for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and The Progressive.

Abe received a BA from New York University, did graduate work at the City University of New York and earned a certificate from the Advanced Executive Program of the Media Management Center. Oft-quoted, he is listed in Who's Who in the World, America, American Jewry, Education, Finance and Business, Media and Communications and Midwest. A former member of the Asian-American Journalists Assn. per his interest in that part of the world, he served on the Chicago Chapter’s advisory board. He served in the U.S. Army Reserves.