When American Lawyer Media recently changed its official name to ALM, you knew that it was trying to position its brand as a more general publishing player. The breadth of that positioning becomes more clear with its recently announced acquisition of Real Estate Media, Inc., a leading provider of commercial real estate news and information. The rationale provided for the acquisition is an interest in amplifying its sales force in common geographic and business sector marketplaces, enabling complementary sales to companies involved in both the legal and financial side of real estate transactions in both national and local markets - a nice complement to ALM's existing stable of national and regional law titles. As standalone sales forces become harder to justify for single-sector publications this kind of complementary sector leverage will become increasingly common. It's a savvy positioning of print-oriented ad sales capabilities, but hopefully a positioning that leverages ALM's increasingly sophisticated online presence as well to help businesses in real estate and other sectors solve a wider variety of business problems. Trade publications need to focus more on a wider variety of needs within their client bases not just through title acquisition and title proliferation but through delivering solutions that move beyond title-oriented islands of information to integrated content solutions that mix traditional editorial skills with online technologies more effectively to provide rich data and more content from their audiences. This means a new kind of sales force as well, a challenge that many titles will be hard pressed to meet in the transition to predominantly online revenues. Kudos to ALM to a timely purchase and best wishes for a strong marriage of both sales forces and online capabilities.