Debra Goldman's Consumer Republic

If you want to know about the issues raised by cloning, you might turn to Scientific American or Discover. But if you are more interested in how cloning gets spun by Washington lobbyists, there is but one magazine to turn to: Seed. Dedicated to the intersection of science and pop culture, Seed seeks to bring the name-dropping and cele brity fixation of People and the style sense of Wallpaper to that bastion of geekdom, science journalism. "Science couture," 21-year-old editor and publisher Adam Bly likes to call it. Launched against all odds in March, during the worst magazine-advertising recession in memory, Seed has seen its apparent suicide mission become a small publishing coup. After three issues, the magazine's rate base is 100,000 and is due to rise to 150,000 by the second half of 2003. Frequency will also increase to bimonthly next year. By 2004, Seed is projecting 250,000 readers and 10 issues a year. And earlier this month, the magazine took a big leap in credibility by hiring Alan Stiles, a veteran of Esquire, GQ and Vanity Fair, as associate publisher. A move from Montreal to New York is also in the works so the Seedlings can be closer to what they like to call "the global science scene." Since Bly first announced his intention to make science cool, Seed has been a publicity magnet. Its timing was perfect: The press' supply of cocky twentysomething dot-com entrepreneurs had run dry, leaving the field clear for a cocky twenty something publishing entrepreneur. And at a time when corporate publishing plays it safe with line extensions (Teen Vogue) and subtle slicings and dicings of established genres (LivingRoom, Chic Simple), Seed stands out. Here is a title—from Canada, of all places—that sprang, like Wired in its early years, from a real cultural insight. Which is more than we can say for Rosie. By introducing surefire reader bait—pop culture and celebrity—into the coverage of science, Seed is both different and familiar enough to titillate advertisers while making them feel comfortable. "Media buyers get it right away," claims Bly of the Seed concept. And why not? Their marketing colleagues love to throw around phrases like "brand DNA" and dazzle clients with references to chaos theory and quantum physics, the very kind of science-culture cross-pollination that Bly talks about. Besides, no one in the marketing world can resist the siren song of a "cultural shift," which is what Bly claims to be capturing in the pages of Seed. Despite his tender age—or rather, because of it—Bly is fluent in advertising's lingua franca, rattling off demographics and psychographics and making inevitable references to the "b" word. One gets the feeling he has spent a little too much time reading—and believing—his own press clips. Though he has yet to settle into his New York office, he can already see the Seed Group empire stretching before him. "This is about launching a new brand," Bly insists. "It's about the new face of science media." The magazine is the flagship, he says, but "the brand is the big story here." A cultural shift there may be, though to be fair, Seed isn't the first to figure that out. The magazine pounds the same science-meets-society beat that Malcolm Gladwell has made his specialty in The New Yorker, except nothing in Seed's current issue approaches that jour nalistic level. One article, for example, explores whether one-time psychotic Anne Heche was typecast as the possibly mad heroine of the Broadway play Proof—but has little to say about Heche, who apparently did not speak to the magazine, or about science, except to note that it's hard to write a compelling drama about mathematics. Another feature, about celebrities and DNA paternity tests, spends so much ink rehashing old tabloid headlines that the really interesting story—the debate over genetic-privacy rights—gets buried. (Besides, isn't the more telling intersection of genetic testing and pop culture found on the afternoon talk shows, where paternity tests have become a staple?) The piece concludes, "[T]here seems little hope [the law] will ever spare us the grotesque spectacle of pampered rockstars surfacing gluttonously from a writhing hot-tub full of groupies." Surely if science, culture and celebrity are intersecting as much as Bly insists, his writers need not go to such syntactically tortured lengths to link them. If it hopes to become a brand, Seed will eventually have to live up to its editor's extravagant promises to "reposition science" and "deliver the impossible story." For the time being, however, 100,000 very attractive readers and a lot of hype speak louder than words.

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Debra Goldman's Consumer Republic

Debra Goldman

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Debra Goldman