March 4, 2005 – Epitaph for a Magazine

March 4, 2005 – Epitaph for a Magazine

Opened Hotmail early this week from my computer at work—love Hotmail you can access you mail from any computer anywhere. Once I entered my password and logged on, I find the one or two pieces of junk mail—stock tips from CBS Marketwatch, Bambi Francisco is on about some dotcom thing, I’ve just qualified for a once in a lifetime low 30 year mortgage rate, and so on. I trash everything and then I click “pop” and magically, Hotmail accesses two other e-mails I have and one of the two—the one for this website literatureview.com has a message.

It’s from a chemical trade organization. They are doing a special symposium commemorating the 40th Anniversary of Gordon Moore’s pronouncement of “Moore’s Law”. It’s kind of a slippery law that gets interpreted differently as time passes. I won’t go into the technical mumbo jumbo regarding the law. Suffice it to say that it has made the computer you are using to view this blog so inexpensive that nearly every place in the world has a good percentage of their inhabitance able to afford them.

Moore published this law in Electronics magazine in 1965, published at that time, by McGraw-Hill, the 6th Avenue publishing house that still publishes Business Week. In case you’re wondering, the magazine coined the term “electronics” when it debuted in April 1930 under the editorship of O.H. Caldwell. In his editorial charter, he said, “For this vital, pulsing electronic art (I loved the fact that he called it an art), a clearinghouse is needed—an engineering journal that will gather together these widespread activities, chronicle scientific and industrial advances abroad and here, and provide practical usable information which can be put to work.” Gordon Moore’s article in the 1965 issue of the magazine certainly fit the criteria for publication in the magazine.

In the e-mail query I received, the writer wanted to find a copy of the April 19, 1965 issue of Electronics to have the article on hand at the event—an artifact that made the law tangible so to speak. When he went looking for the magazine it was nowhere to be found. He first went to McGraw Hill, but the company unloaded the property in 1988. And no, they did not have a library that had back issues of the publication. He then went looking for the magazine on the web in hopes of finding someone who could help him in his quest. Guess what, my name popped up as the last person associated with the title. In his e-mail he asked if he could give me a call. I said sure and gave him my cell phone number to call the following morning as I commuted to work. He was on Eastern Standard Time.

He called at 7:30 my time and wanted to know about the magazine, what had become of it, who owned it now, where he could go to get back issues, etc. It was similar to someone asking the whereabouts of a deceased person. You have to inform the person making the inquiry that the person is deceased. And the natural response to the news is further questions: how could that happen to such a magazine that published “Moore’s Law.” I knew the story of Electronics starting in the late 1970s when I worked in public relations, where I pitched clients—Intel and Apple—to the publication. A year and a half later I moved into technical journalism and worked for five years on a publication that competed with the Electronics. In 1986, I moved to Electronics and remained there until the end.

I was charged with the task of putting this once great publication to rest. It was not an undertaking I relished. My tenure as editor of the magazine began in 1990 and ended five years later. By the time I arrived, the great journal had been damaged so badly that it was in a horrible state. In 1988, McGraw-Hill sold the magazine to a Dutch publishing company. A few years earlier, the Dutch had acquired the New Jersey company, which I had worked for and directly competed with Electronics. the Dutch purchased Electronics to eliminate a major competitor and also to create a business publication that would complement their technical magazine.

The logic wasn’t flawed as Electronics had always covered the business as well as the technology of the industry. At one time it had bureaus in London, Paris, Munich, and Tokyo and these were staffed mostly by journalists. The 6th Avenue editorial headquarters were where the engineers, turned journalist, resided. They would convert arcane technical prose into understandable English. The staff could easily convert over to covering business exclusively. Most of the field editors and those in the home office had executive contacts in all the major electronics companies in the industry.

Thus the reasoning behind the sale was sound, however, the execution of the strategy went horribly wrong. First, Electronics was published every other week, the same frequency as the Dutch technical journal. The first change the Dutch made was to reduce the frequency to once a month—effectively cutting the revenues of the publication by over fifty percent. Electronics’ large staff was likewise cut in half, with many abandoning the publication before it moved from Manhattan to New Jersey. McGraw-Hill had also made a similar misstep with the magazine’s frequency earlier in the decade resulting in the same financial disaster. To recover after a revolt from the advertisers, McGraw-Hill began publishing the magazine weekly and then returning to its every other week schedule a year later. The Dutch obviously had forgotten history and moved forward.

However, The next misstep was far more disastrous. From its inception in 1930, Electronics was largely sold to subscribers. The Dutch and the New Jersey publisher it acquired were both companies that produced controlled circulation journals. Subscribers got the magazine delivered free but had to provide demographic information about their job functions, purchasing influence, etc. This audience demographic was sold to advertisers wanting to reach this profile. The trouble with 60 percent of the Electronics paid subscriber base was there was no such data that could be sold to advertisers. The Dutch determined that there was no way to get this information. The obvious solution was to eliminate the paid subscription base and grow the 40 percent of the circulation with demographic data the magazine’s sales force could sell to advertisers.

I don’t recall the circulation of Electronics back then (I should but I’ve forgotten), but let’s say it was 70,000. The decision was made to send 42,000 paid subscribers a form letter saying Electronics will no longer be accepting paid subscriptions and the remainder of your current subscription will be reimbursed with Discovery magazine. The letter was sent under the name of Electronics’ publisher back then. Not surprisingly there was such a great backlash from the subscriber base that the Dutch retracted the letter. Among the outraged phone calls and letters the publisher received was one from the Wall Street Journal that asked “what kind of idiot would do such a thing…” or words that effect. Though the Dutch recanted, the damage had been done and the subscription base began its slow decline. Many of my contacts that were subscribers told me that was the last straw; they were giving up on the magazine. It was one of my saddest days at the magazine.

The story doesn’t end there. About the time all this was happening, the Dutch in Haarlem were growing weary of its underperforming operation in New Jersey and decided to sell off the operation. The U.S. subsidiary was put on the blocks and a Cleveland-based publisher came forward to buy the property. It had wanted only one of the publications—the technical publication, but decided to purchase two others in the stable, one of which was Electronics. It seems the chairman of the Cleveland company—a 70-year old ex-editor—had a soft spot for the magazine, having known it from its earlier glory. By the time Cleveland took possession, most of the editorial staff had left except for me, the copy desk, the Munich bureau editor—a great guy and a wonderful writer, and a handful of technical editors in the New Jersey office. I was made editor because the publisher—the guy who received the scathing letter from the WSJ—lived in California and wanted an editor he could interact with daily.

We made a valiant effort to breath new life into the ailing journal, but the publisher got frustrated trying to get Cleveland to invest in the circulation and he left to join a start-up in Mountain View. Near the end of 1993, the writing was on the wall. Advertisers could not be convinced that Cleveland would invest enough in the publication to make it worth their while to support. Cleveland management made the decision to convert the monthly publication into a every-other-week 16-page newsletter sent to the paid subscriber base. The subscription revenue was sufficient to cover a reduced editorial staff of largely freelance writers based in Europe and Asia, a small copy desk in Cleveland and me. This strategy failed because the normal attrition of paid subscribers had to be replenished and Cleveland had no experience acquiring paid subscriptions. The result was similar to a bleeding patient with no effective way to stop the blood loss and no way to replenish the loss with fresh supply.

During my tenure, I wrote two obituaries, one for my staff editor based in Munich, and an earlier one for a technical editor based in New Jersey. The last obit I wrote was for Electronics.

By the time I had finished my tale—I had provide more information than my caller had expected but I needed to tell the story throughly—I felt a need to help him find his issue of Electronics containing the Gordon Moore article. I told him I would send an e-mail to all those who had worked on the publication and asked if they had back issues or knew of someone who might have. I sent the e-mail out a couple of days ago to eight guys and received two replies. Four were returned undeliverable—I could attribute this to Hotmail, which has been flaky lately especially sending mail to aol addresses—but that would account for only one of the bounces. The truth is 1965 was a long time ago, for everyone except those who still remember what they were doing that year, like me.