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away a top BW talent
Byrne's mandate: Make title a big-league player
By Jeff Bercovici
As honors go, being the most successful New Economy magazine is a bit like being the most eligible bachelor in the nursing home: It’s mainly a matter of surviving long enough.
Fast Company has never considered itself a New Economy title, but it has often been (mis)characterized that way, perhaps because it came of age in the dot.com era and competed for technology dollars with magazines like The Industry Standard, Red Herring and Business 2.0.
On Friday, Fast Company named a new editor in chief to succeed co-founders Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, who in February announced plans to step down.
John Byrne has been with Business Week since 1985, most recently as a senior writer. His challenge at Fast Company will be to prove to the world that the 10-year-old title, having outlasted nearly all of its New Economy-era classmates, is capable of competing at the same level as Forbes, Fortune and Business Week.
He’ll have to do it in a publishing climate that has been brutal to young business magazines, claiming the lives of Red Herring, Upside and Smart Business in the last 12 months alone.
In picking a new editor, it was important to go outside Fast Company’s editorial ranks to find someone who could bring an entirely new vision to the magazine, says Dan Rubin, executive vice president in charge of Fast Company and Gruner + Jahr’s other business title, Inc.
“To take a fresh look at what is the DNA of this magazine -- that is something the founders would have a difficult time doing,” says Rubin. “They can step outside, but certainly not as well as the new editor will be able to.”
The idea is not just to freshen up the magazine’s content but to adapt it to fit a business reality that’s quite different from the one that existed at the time of Fast Company’s birth.
“His challenge will be to take the substance of the magazine -- what we call the ‘special sauce’ -- to keep a good portion of that but make the changes that are now necessary in a very quickly changing business environment,” says Rubin.
It’s no accident that a magazine that has often said it intends to be the Business Week of the 21st century went shopping for an editor at, well, the Business Week of the 20th century.
Byrne is a massively accomplished business journalist, having written 57 cover stories for Business Week and created some of its best-known features, including its ranking of the best business schools. He has written eight books, most recently collaborating with former General Electric chairman Jack Welch for his memoir, “Jack: Straight from the Gut.”
“[Byrne] is one of the most creative journalists anywhere,” wrote Business Week editor in chief Steve Shepard in a letter announcing Byrne’s departure to staff. “John is intrigued by the opportunity at Fast Company -- a chance to apply his knowledge of management and his imaginative brand of journalism to a magazine born in the boom of the 1990s that needs to reinvent itself for a different era … Our loss is their gain.”
Gruner + Jahr has also confirmed longstanding rumors that it will relocate Fast Company's editorial offices from Boston to New York this year.
At 725,000, Fast Company is still a ways from catching up to Business Week (970,000), Forbes (900,000) and Fortune (830,000), but it is well ahead of Business 2.0 (550,000), the only other survivor of the past decade’s wave of business titles.
Subscriptions were up 4.7 percent to 711,616 in the second half of the year, while newsstand sales, which make up less than 5 percent of Fast Company’s total circulation, were off 20.4 percent, averaging 22,833, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
After an 18.4 percent drop in ad pages last year, 2003 began with a strong rebound, with pages up 37.7 percent to 103 through February, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.
Concern over the war and the health of the economy has caused that rebound to falter for the time being, says Rubin.
“What we have found is inconsistency,” says Rubin, noting that Fast Company and Inc. have both managed to increase their share of the advertising market during the slowdown.
“One month will be much stronger and then the next month it backs off. We’re not getting any momentum. There’s this sense of ‘wait and see.’
“Still, it’s better than bad month after bad month.”
April 7, 2003© 2003
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