The names of magazines like Red Herring and The Industry Standard have become virtual synonyms for dot.com-era hubris. 
   Why would anyone want to emulate them?
   One might well ask that question of Technology Review editor Bob Buderi, since that’s just what his magazine is doing. 
   With its October issue, the 104-year-old, 315,000-circulation monthly introduces a redesign meant to appeal to readers whose interest in new technologies is primarily business- or investment-driven.
   As strategies go, it must be considered either very bold or very foolish, given the cautionary example of the Standard and Red Herring, as well as eCompany Now, Upside, Smart Business and others. 
   All grew fat on dot.com ads while the boom lasted; all vanished once the recession came, leaving them with bloated cost structures and readerships that were too small to interest mainstream advertisers.
   As for the survivors, Business 2.0 and Fast Company, they aren’t exactly thriving despite the efforts of their new owners to reposition them as mainstream business publications. Both magazines are up slightly in ad pages this year but way below their pre-recession level.
   But Buderi maintains that the premise of the New Economy titles--that business and technology should be covered as one subject--deserves another hearing.
  "They crashed and burned not because the idea was bad but because, first, the economy crashed and burned," he says. 
    "Second, they had pretended in their heads that this stuff would go on forever and the framework that they laid for their businesses could not be sustained. That doesn’t mean tech and business don’t go hand in hand."
   He is surprisingly unreluctant to have Technology Review spoken about in the same breath as Red Herring, which shared an investment-oriented outlook.
    "I don’t think we go into quite the same space but we definitely move closer to it, and that doesn’t scare me at all," he says. "We’re trying to look more at the users of the technology, not just the creators. In many cases, these are the businesses that buy the new technology or put it to work.
   "A lot of our readers also have some investment angle in mind. They don’t want us to talk about investments but they want to hear about what’s coming down the pike."
   Content in the October issue includes a story about a movement to replace the internet with a new network, an article about advances in drug development and an interview with GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt.
   Buderi acknowledges that getting readers excited about the promise of new technologies is considerably harder in 2003 than it was in 1999.
    "It’s a different world. It’s a slower-growth world," says Buderi. "Back then, everything about technology was an easy sell. Now we have to work harder than ever to make the relevance of technology stand out."
     Through August, ad pages in Technology Review were up 26.7 percent to 177.5, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. 
    Circulation was up 1.4 percent in the first half of the year, averaging 318,848, but newsstand sales were off 29.4 percent from last year, averaging 11,180.