Dan Hickey is the CEO of Kalmbach. Kalmbach is a privately held company.
Hickey's vision for the company is this: “We are moving away from free content on the web to more of a membership model,” he explains. “Our customers are moving more to digital, so we need better tools to manage that relationship. It’s not really about renewal of the magazines, but can we get them to an event? Can we get them to buy ecommerce products from one of our stores?”
Read the following to understand why SAM went away:
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/341645/why-membership-is-the-new-publishing-at-kalmbach.html