SOME READERS SQUAWK BUT MOST LIKE REDESIGN OF SCIENCE MAGAZINES

by Norman Bauman

Science magazines write about cold logic, but like science itself, rouse passions of grand opera: love, loyalty, betrayal, the search for knowledge, treasures inherited over generations, and Faustian bargains.

John Rennie, editor in chief of Scientific American, roused many of those passions in April of 2001 with the redesign of the 155-year-old magazine. He apologized for the pain some readers felt but defended his decisions, speaking at a meeting of Science Writers of New York (SWINY) held October 16 at Rockefeller University. Rennie was joined on a panel about science magazine redesigns with editors from Popular Science, Discover, and IEEE Spectrum.

To some loyal readers, Rennie is the Tyrannosaurus rex that ate Scientific American. Among those critical of the change is Sean Carlson, whose "Amateur Scientist" column was dropped. "It makes no sense to dismantle the flagships of science literacy," said Carlson in an interview with the New York Times about the magazine redesign.

It was "a wrenching change," acknowledged Rennie. However, the "Amateur Scientist" did badly in focus groups. "We tried a number of different approaches," he said. But less than 60 percent read it, and only 18.8 percent rated it "very interesting." By contrast, most features in the magazine have a 70 percent readership.

Brutal culling, high readership

You have to be "grown-up" enough to say, we do that every month, it works well, but not enough people read it, said Stephen Petranek, editor in chief of Discover. "I have dropped columns with 60 percent readership." (A 75 percent rating is his cutoff point.) The result following the redesign of Discover: readers average three hours each issue, renewal rates are "unbelievable," and advertisers are happy.

Discover's rate base is one million. "That's a big problem," said Petranek. "A million is a mass audience." Only 800,000 people love science enough to buy a science magazine, he figures. "So you have to build a coalition audience"-300,000 "hard core science nuts," 300,000 teachers, 100,000 parents buying it for their teenagers, and a couple hundred thousand trying it out.

Readers have conflicting tastes, said Petranek. If it's too simple, they complain. If it's too hard, they skip it. To attract women, you lose men.

When Petranek started at Discover, a reader typically read one story ("their story") on their particular interest-astronomy, space, cosmology. He set out to "train" readers to understand that, "if they took a chance and read an article in an area of science that they were not particularly interested in, they would be rewarded." Now, 25 percent read the magazine cover to cover.

Aging readers

Scientific American is caught in a demographic trap. Compare a fat 1980 issue to a skinny issue today. Circulation has been steady, at 700,000 worldwide. But feature pages are down, from 200 in 1980 to 100 today. Ad pages are worse, from 100 pages in 1980 to only 15 or 20 today.

Aging readers don't sell advertising. Scientific American must draw younger readers, by being more accessible, more relevant, without abandoning traditional strengths or older readers, Rennie said. He thinks he's done it, with articles that are shorter, clearer, more lively, and more technology-oriented, while the trademark basic science feature stories are more readable. He seems to have succeeded. Fewer than 100 angry readers cancelled their subscriptions.
Readers have conflicting tastes. If it's too simple, they complain. If it's too hard, they skip it.

Popular Science

"We had a perception problem among our customers," said William G. Phillips, executive editor of Popular Science. "Customers" means readers and advertisers. People still think Popular Science is a do-it-yourself magazine. Young people would "stumble into" the magazine, and say, "I didn't know you covered personal digital assistants." So the redesign emphasized product evaluations.

In focus groups, readers said, "Popular Science is really the authority on this stuff. I love the way you test all this stuff."

"Well actually, we don't really test everything," admitted Phillips, "but they thought we did." So they created a product test section.

They emphasized pop culture (i.e., "Does this movie get the science right?").

Before and After Redesign

IEEE Spectrum

IEEE Spectrum is a hybrid magazine and research journal, and must explain science to technical people outside their field, said Susan Hassler, editor in chief. Spectrum was winning awards, but 365,000 IEEE members were "getting Spectrum in a poly bag, and not opening it up." The articles were long, technical, and hard to read.

IEEE'S members are not just electrical engineers, but computer scientists, biomedical engineers, all kinds, said Hassler. "They're very bright and very interested and very critical," but outside their area of expertise "they're not experts."

"In the old Spectrum there was one article, which was a long feature," said Hassler. There were shorter opinion pieces, "but there wasn't a lot of variety in length and pacing." Now there are four sections, with lots of places to fit content that wouldn't fit into the old formula.

Positive letters are outnumbering negative by three or four to one, said Hassler.

Discover

On his second day on the job, the departing publisher mentioned to Petranek that advertisers had been promised the next issue-closing in 30 days-would have a redesign. "We had to do our redesign overnight," he said. "I was scared to death."

Discover was unreadable, said Petranek. It read like a textbook. In undertaking the redesign, he used the tricks of "narrative, super-readability, news, a cosmic paragraph fairly high up on why you should waste your time reading this."

But he stayed away from two common design tricks-illustrations and people. Illustrations in the past had looked like science fiction.

"Most of our readers couldn't care less about people," said Petranek. "They're very interested in science and stories about science."

Petranek received 2,000 angry letters. "You've ruined my magazine," "It's no longer about science," "You've dumbed it down." The reaction was not unexpected. A magazine is your friend, he explained, and it comes into your house. You don't want your friend to change.

Scientific American

"Even people who are very well-educated and very committed to the idea of science are much less willing than they use to be to sit down and read some kind of long article," said Rennie.
Rennie kept the science authors, but is using more journalists.

For example, in October 1980, Nobel Laureate Cesar Milstein authored a 12-page article about the basic science of monoclonal antibodies. Milstein's introduction: "When a foreign substance enters the body of a vertebrate animal or is injected into it, one aspect of the immune response is the secretion by plasma cells of antibodies: immunoglobin molecules with combining sites that recognize the shape of particular determinants on the surface of the foreign substance or antigen, and bind to them."

In October 2001, editor Carol Ezzell wrote a six-page article on the current technology of monoclonal antibodies. Ezzell's lead: "Molecular guided missiles called monoclonal antibodies were poised to shoot down cancer and a host of other diseases-until they crashed and burned. Now a new generation is soaring to market."

Despite fears and predictions that the new Scientific American would be dumbed down and turned from a science focus into a tip sheet on new technology for investor, recent issues are reassuring. A macular degeneration article (October 2001) is short but explains the mechanism and current therapy. My field, biomedicine, is represented by a good number of well-selected articles.

Scientific American's biggest failing is its use of the Internet. It's the only major science magazine I can't read in full text online. The links are often too simple or too specialized, as in the macular degeneration article.

And the demise of the "Amateur Scientist" is a tragic loss. A magazine that sends you off to extract DNA from an onion in your kitchen conveys something essential about science.

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Norman Bauman is freelance based in New York City.