'For the New Economy' trimmed in retrenchment

By Jeff Bercovici

     Less than a year ago, Ziff Davis Media changed the name of its one-million-circulation PC Computing magazine to Smart Business for the New Economy.
    At the time it seemed like a daring move, swapping the title’s dated geek-toys image for a more modish biz-tech one.
    In the time since, the so-called New Economy has been reduced to a sad joke as hundreds of dot.coms that supposedly embodied the technology revolution went belly up.
     Not surprisingly, the-magazine-formerly-known-as-PC Computing has decided, somewhat sheepishly, to eschew the unflattering association. 
   Beginning with the May issue, its new name will be just plain Ziff Davis’ Smart Business.
     The name change is part of a wider retrenchment that will also include a major rate base cutback and a good deal of editorial fine-tuning for the magazine, which last week lost its publisher.
     The overall goal is to move Smart Business away from the scrum of business-and-technology magazines and establish its identity as a provider of technology solutions, says Al Perlman, president of Ziff Davis’ business media division.
     "I think that in the changeover from PC Computing to Smart Business we made some mistakes," says Perlman. "One was positioning it around the New Economy idea, when that wasn’t really the focus of the editorial."
     Whereas other titles cover the ups and downs of the internet business for an audience of high-tech executives, Smart Business, says Perlman, is intended as a practical resource for mid-level managers at small- to medium-sized companies.
     "Perhaps in our enthusiasm to change the name we didn’t quite clearly articulate what the publication was," admits Perlman. "We may have jumped on the New Economy bandwagon more than we intended to."
    Starting in May, the magazine will have a new tag line that Perlman says better illustrates the nature of its mission: Technology At Work.
     Smart Business’ conversion from computer magazine to business book began in earnest in 1999 when PC Computing ran a three-part feature series titled "Small Business Secret Weapons."
     Though the series won the magazine a National Magazine Award for personal service, by last summer, editor Paul Somerson was out, and Smart Business (the name change took effect in May) was being criticized as an uninspired rehash of the same tech-business stories that filled the pages of competitors like Business 2.0 and eCompany Now.
     Time Inc. veteran Geoffrey Precourt took over briefly, continuing the magazine’s consumer makeover until he was ousted in October.
     Now it falls to editor Wendy Taylor to make sure Smart Business doesn’t read like a generic clone of its competitors.
     "We’ve really honed it back to make it much more solutions-oriented, less about the industry," says Perlman of the current editorial direction.
    Another miscalculation, says Perlman, was in not reducing the magazine’s circulation following the repositioning to reflect its new, narrowed market. 
    The title dropped 4.5 percent in total paid circulation in the second half of last year, narrowly making its one-million rate base, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Starting in May, the magazine will cut its rate base from one million to 800,000.
    Smart Business also plunged 74.6 percent in single-copy sales for the period, but Perlman says that’s a natural consequence of moving into a category that depends far less on newsstand sales for circulation.
     Advertising pages in the magazine were down 29.9 percent last year, and ad revenue fell 8.9 percent from 1999 to $83.6 million. Last month, pages were off 59.5 percent from Jan. 2000, and revenue was down 42.3 percent to $4.3 million.
     The ad slide is due in part to an industry-wide advertising slowdown that has also clobbered other biz-tech books like Red Herring and The Industry Standard, and has even hit mainstream business titles Forbes, Fortune and Business Week.
     But it’s also part of the lingering hangover from the relaunch, whose timing could scarcely have been worse, coming just late enough for Smart Business to miss the internet advertising boom after abandoning its traditional computers-and-software ad base.
    "We’re still sort of recovering from the changeover," says Perlman. "We never rode the crest of all the new dot.com advertising coming in like all the other New Economy magazines did."
     The key to rebuilding Smart Business’ ad business, he says, lies largely in tapping "e-business infrastructure" advertisers, including B2B companies like Ariba, Commerce One and Cybersystems as well as shoring up business from hardware and software makers like Oracle and Microsoft. 
    The first priority, however, is to find a publisher to replace Lee Jones, who last week left to join Gruner + Jahr as publisher of Inc. 
    In the meantime, senior vice president Peter Longo is acting as publisher of the title.

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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