If unchecked euphoria was the predominant mood at business magazines in 1999 and 2000, this year it would have to be shell shock.
    With ad page levels down anywhere from 10 to 70 percent from last year, the only excitement comes from layoffs and merger rumors, the only joy from watching competitors who are doing even worse.
    But there’s one group of biz titles that are expecting to thrive in the down market. 
    Ad recession or no, small business magazines continue to ramp up with snazzy redesigns aimed at grabbing younger, busier readers.
    Yesterday, Inc. magazine presented media buyers with the first glimpse of a comprehensive redesign, the title’s first under new owners Gruner + Jahr USA. 
    And next week, Entrepreneur hits newsstands sporting a brand-new look in its June issue.
    The moves follow the relaunch of BusinessWeek’s Small Biz monthly supplement and the redesign of Fortune Small Business earlier this year. Reports out today suggest Business Week parent McGraw-Hill is in talks to acquire the independently held Entrepreneur to beef up is stable against Fortune and G+J.
    For small business magazines to be going into high gear just as recession threatens may seem odd, but Entrepreneur publisher Jim Kahn says it’s perfectly natural.
    "Entrepreneurship grows when there’s downsizing among big businesses," he says. "Those who were around during the last recession said it was a good time for entrepreneurial magazines. Maybe if history repeats itself, it will be the same thing this time."
     Kahn speculates that widespread layoffs feed entrepreneurship by freeing up large numbers of highly skilled, trained executives and managers who then go and start their own companies.
     "As people leave businesses and get laid off, a lot of them realize they don’t really want to go back to the big corporations," he says.
    George Gendron, editor in chief of Inc., agrees that what’s bad for the big fish can be great for the minnows.
     "As these executives move from what I think of as the ‘Fortune’ world into the ‘Inc.’ world, they’re upgrading the level of professionalism for everybody," he told listeners yesterday.
    Gendron says other trends, including the growth of outsourcing and the continuing influx of women and minorities into the ranks of small business, are feeding a boom in entrepreneurship.
    Even the acceleration in the rate of mergers and acquisitions is beneficial to small businesses, as the larger merged-entities, citing reasons of "scale," abandon niche markets to smaller competitors, says Gendron.
    For Inc.’s new design, which will appear beginning with its September issue, a major goal was to make it a faster read, says Gendron.
    In response to criticisms from focus groups, the proportion of feature articles has been cut from two-thirds of the editorial to around one-third.
    Making up the balance will be an increased number of shorter takes in the various new sections and departments that comprise Inc.’s new organization.
    The new front-of-the-book section, Incubator, will showcase the "relentless inventiveness of entrepreneurs laboring in labs and garages, at kitchen tables and computers," says Gendron.
     Subsections will include High Concept, a spotlight on new technologies and products, 60-Second Business Plan, about the high-pressure art of pitching ideas to venture capitalists, and the self-explanatory Best Home Town Businesses.
     A renamed management section, The Whole New Business Catalog, will examine "the practices of growth company leaders," says Gendron.
     Following that will be a business lifestyle section, Inc. Life, with articles on personal finance, health, travel and home office design.
     "It’s exploring life as it’s lived beyond the walls of the company," says Gendron.
     As part of the redesign, Inc. will also increase its trim size and paper weight.
     Articles in post-redesign Entrepreneur will also be somewhat shorter, says Kahn.
     More noticeably, the magazine has been reorganized, with the surprising and humorous contents in the Smarts sections now lumped together at the front of the book.
     Other departments, Tech, Money, Management and Marketing, have changed from a four-column page format to a two-column format, creating space for a second story to run along the side of each page as a sidebar. (Articles in the feature well will stick to the current three-column layout.)
     "When we need to, we have the capability of putting two articles on a page. Intuitively, we think people are going to feel like they’re getting more," says Kahn.
     The new format also allows the sections to be self-contained, eliminating the need to continue articles at the back of the book, an innovation Kahn says will make for a faster read.
    Color-coded page headings for each department will also make for quicker navigation. Other innovations, such as bolder charts and graphics, are aimed at making Entrepreneur more pleasing to the eye, says Kahn.
    "We had great content, but we didn’t always look good," he says of the magazine in the past. "We were a little like a woman who was very intelligent but you didn’t always find her attractive. The new design satisfies the content need, but it also satisfies the visual need."

May 16, 2001 © 2001 Media Life

-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.

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