Breathing New Life Into the Nation’s Oldest Magazine

Founded in 1845 by inventor Rufus Porter as a weekly broadsheet, Scientific American is the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States. But after a redesign to its print edition and a Web 2.0 overhaul to its Web site (www.SciAm.com), you would never know it.At the helm of bringing this industry stalwart into the 21st century is Bruce Brandfon, Scientific American’s vice president and publisher. Brandfon joined the publication in 2001, faced with significant declines in ad pages and revenue. But by 2007, the magazine’s ad revenue had increased 25 percent over the previous year. Brandfon spoke with Publishing Executive about this dramatic turnaround, and how he is expanding the appeal of the Scientific American brand to a broader audience. Scientific American’s print ad revenue was up 25 percent last year from 2006, and you added some big-name, first-time advertisers such as Subaru and Citgo. How have you been able to generate this increased ad revenue, especially at a time when many print publications are struggling?Bruce Brandfon: Many of [the country’s] major issues … today are in science and technology, such as a cleaner environment, alternative energy, privacy and security, curing urgent diseases. … The people who proceeded me in this role … simply didn’t embrace or understand this. … The day I got here was the lowest point in the bell curve of Scientific American [as far as ad revenue]. Here’s the extraordinary thing: During the last Internet boom, Scientific American lost pages. How can that happen? The people who are writing the code are the readers of the magazine! So the answer was, [those who proceeded me] didn’t know what they had. [And] they were overwhelmed by all the attention some of this new media was getting. … Is there room for traditional media in this new media landscape? The answer is: Of course there is. But it doesn’t mean that you should be staunchly defending anachronistic business practices. … As the audience migrates and changes in the way that it wishes to access the information, you have to find a way, in our case, to maintain the level of quality and rigor, the accuracy, credibly and importance of the information, and … you’ve got to give it to them in the way they’re wishing to consume it. … A wonderful thing that we have going for us [is that Scientific American] is a publication that people have demonstrated that they like spending lots of time with. …[Another] reason [ad revenue has increased is because] smart, highly educated people who particularly have a focus on science and innovation are very successful, [and] they tend to be leadership people. Reaching them with an advertising and marketing message has become a more important goal for a lot of advertisers. … And [our] audience, we have found, is not only your high-school chemistry teacher with his hair messed up and his ink-stained shirt, but it’s financial analysts, venture capitalist, investment bankers, CEOs, CTOs, advocates in Washington, affluent people. There’s a direct correlation in this country between education and affluence. ... When I got here, what I struggled with was just how badly the magazine had done as an advertising enterprise given the richness and quality of its audience. As a 160-plus-year-old publication, is addressing preconceived or outdated notions about the magazine and its audience part of the challenge when you’re approaching potential advertisers?Brandfon: That’s a great question and an absolutely accurate statement. … People who are familiar with the magazine from years ago remember it as this very austere, scholarly tome—a lot of words on the page, a lot of little, black-and-white graphs on the page, not a lot of excitement visually. … So the challenge for us is overcoming the inertia of this brand that, to some people, seems old-fashioned, [and] also to get younger people excited about the subject of science. They care more about teenage music phenomenons than they do about Nobel Prize winners. They get excited about technology, but what they forget is what makes technology work is science. ... You recently redesigned both the print publication and the Web site. What improvements did you make in print, and what goals did you have for that redesign?Brandfon: … We redesigned the magazine in July [2007] to make it more vivid. ... The layout is different, the graphics are much more intense, there’s a lot more going on in the margins. There’s something we have now called “Key Topics” at the beginning of every story that gives you the opportunity, as you’re flipping through the magazine, if these key topics seem interesting to you, you’ll go back to it. … We did a big audience study earlier this year and determined that the science-interested public was much bigger than the audience for our brand currently was. … We felt we could expand the scope of the appeal for the brand known as Scientific American in the magazine by making it more vivid and having people recognize that the information in Scientific American has strong financial and public policy implications. … What was the focus of the Web site redesign? Brandfon: … We redesigned the entire Web site. … On the Web, we can open up the portal to the brand more widely. We did a couple things: We made it more state-of-the-art, because we know a lot of the audience on the Internet wants to see up-to-the-minute navigation and technology on your Web site. [Also,] certain subjects like health and environment and technology, to name three, are very appealing, particularly to that broader, science-interested audience [who wants to know:] How does it apply to me personally? How does it change my life and my family’s life? [For example,] energy, environment and “green” is one area now that we’re all much more cognizant of, so you’re going to see a lot more of that on our Web site. … We’ve added a daily podcast, which last week was [the] No. 12 [most downloaded podcast] on iTunes. We have a tremendous amount of blogging [on the Web site]. Editors are posting content, and we’ve hired a [community editor] to bring the science-interested public together. … We’ve reorganized content around channels. So [a visitor] might not go to [the] physics [channel], but they’ll go to technology or health. … From our [Web site] metrics, we’re generating more traffic and have more than doubled time spent on the site since the redesign.

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Breathing New Life Into the Nation’s Oldest Magazine

Janet Spavlik

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