It’s the same story everywhere you look: Tech-oriented business magazines coming to after last year’s dot.com delirium, only to realize they have to make painful cutbacks if they want to stay alive.
    Everywhere, that is, except at Technology Review. The Boston-based title increases its frequency to monthly with this month’s issue and is adding staff to its online division.
     With The Industry Standard, Red Herring and others laying off left and right in response to plummeting ad page totals, the timing seems odd, to say the least. 
    What gives?
    The answer is simple, says Technology Review publisher and CEO R. Bruce Journey. While other magazines have gone the voguish New Economy route, breathlessly covering the twists and turns of the internet industry, Technology Review has stuck with a less-fashionable emphasis on gadgets and the science behind them, not the human drama of the business world or the stock market.
    "Where we have differentiated ourselves as a media company is that we have focused like a laser on technology," says Journey. "We aren’t profiling people or looking at IPOs."
    The magazine is published as a not-for-profit venture of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
    This arrangement frees Technology Review from the bottom-line mindedness that rules other magazines, says Journey.
    "We have been able to do the right thing, which is not always the profitable thing," he says.
     That meant sticking to an ironclad 50/50 ad page/editorial page ratio through the months of the dot.com boom, while other publishers were busy stuffing their books with all the ad pages they could bind.
     That’s not to say Technology Review didn’t ride the rising tide while it lasted. Total ad pages were up 33.9 percent, to 351.22, in 2000 versus the previous year, while ad revenue was up 74.1 percent, to $8.3 million, in the same period, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.
   But Journey says most of the growth has come from blue chip financials like IBM and Credit Suisse First Boston, rather than from fly-by-night dot.coms prone to extinction.
      Still, he says he doesn’t necessarily think that business-tech books like Fast Company, Business 2.0 and Red Herring had the wrong idea in milking the boom for all it was worth, even now that it appears to have ended.
    "Frankly, I don’t think that the New Economy titles are withering, by any means," he says. "They enjoyed a great bonanza with unprecedented ad volume. I mean, you never saw 400-page magazines like that before unless it was Bride’s magazine in June."
    Journey has hopes that the advertising slowdown that has taken place over the last couple months will prove to be nothing more than a long-overdue return to a sustainable rate of growth.
     "I don’t think on the media side this is a depression," he says. "I think of it as a realignment. I think this will make everyone go back to the fundamentals of business."
     Perhaps the best evidence of Technology Review’s counter cyclical behavior is its recent decision to increase the staff for web site technologyreview.com from 24 to 62. 
   Bloated internet divisions are often the first place strapped publishers look to make cuts; Red Herring and the Industry Standard have both cut jobs from their online units in the last six weeks.
    Despite an influential study showing that expensive web sites are usually a poor investment for magazine companies, Journey says technologyreview.com is a crucial tool for reaching young readers.
   "I don’t think that there is anyone under 30 whose primary source of information is print," he says. "If you don’t support your online component you’re signing a death warrant for yourself."
   Technology Review will increase its rate base from 250,000 to 275,000 in July of this year.

Printer-Friendly Version |  Send to a Friend
Cover Page | Contact Us

© 2001 Media Life