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Industry Standard
Easier navigation and new, post-dot.com tagline
By Jeff Bercovici
To those in the magazine business, The Industry Standard has often seemed emblematic of the so-called New Economy.
During last year’s internet-fueled boom times, the magazine grew at a dizzy pace, shattering ad page records and pumping out weekly issues the thickness of bridal magazines.
Then the bubble burst, and the three-year-old title began laying off staff and trimming costs.
But the Standard, unlike so many of the New Economy startups whose fortunes it chronicled, is still around, and these days it's busy positioning itself for when the ad economy springs back.
This week, it unveils a major redesign in an effort to reintroduce itself to readers who know it chiefly as the foremost cheerleader of the dot.com gold rush.
As part of the makeover, the magazine no longer bills itself as "The Newsmagazine of the Internet Economy." Its new tagline: "Intelligence for the Information Economy."
"We liked the old tagline, but what happened is ‘the internet economy’ became irrevocably tied to dot.coms in people’s minds and became a liability," says Industry Standard editor Jane Goldman.
The new tagline, says Goldman, is intended in part to correct what she sees as a one-dimensional view some people have taken of the Standard.
"We boomed through the time dot.coms were booming, and certainly we profited from that association. But when the dot.coms bombed, we became known as a dot.com magazine, which we never were."
But Goldman says the main objective of the redesign was not a clearer identity but to help readers better navigate through the magazine. The need to improve navigation became apparent during the heady days of last year, when it was not uncommon for the Standard to publish 300-plus page issues.
"It was insane," Goldman says. "That volume of pages showed us glaringly where the sort of flaws and weak spots in the design of the magazine were."
To make it easier for readers to find their way around, the magazine now has put slugs at the top of pages indicating which section they’re in.
Additionally, most of the short, week-in-review type news articles have been moved from the back of the book to the front, where they’re presented in a new, more readable format.
The back of the book now has new lifestyle and investing columns, and the "Intellectual Capital" department has been renamed "Ideas."
The Standard’s overall circulation, which includes both paid and controlled circulation, is up from 150,000 last year to 200,000 this year, according to a spokesperson for the company.
Still, Goldman says she expects to see a certain amount of churn and even erosion in the subscriber rolls now that internet euphoria has passed.
"We did attract a lot of people last year, but they weren’t necessarily the types of people we wanted to attract. We’ll definitely lose a lot of the ‘spectator’ subscribers who picked us up because of interest in this dot.com phenomenon."
At the same time, competition for readers could ease somewhat as the number of titles in the category shrinks. Already, one Industry Standard competitor vanished this week when Time Inc. bought Business 2.0 and announced it would fold the title into eCompany Now, retaining only the name and subscriber list.
Goldman says she believes more such disappearances may be on the way, especially if, as expected, the current downturn in the advertising market lasts well into the second half of the year. "I would be surprised if things had stabilized already."
Ad pages in the Industry Standard itself were down 72.7 percent in the first five months of the year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Ad revenue fell 56.6 percent to $27.7 million.
Goldman says the ad slump has been something of a relief for those edit-side staffers who have survived the three rounds of layoffs since December, in that they are no longer under pressure to turn out massive amounts of editorial every week to balance out ad pages.
"We did fine, but we were hanging on by our fingernails to keep up the quality of edit."
Does she think the days of 150 ad pages per issue will ever return?
"God, I hope not!"
June 13, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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