If you're in the life sciences, you have like heard of The Scientist. After 25 years of making a go of it, they announced they are closing the doors.
It's a tough market out there, as we can attest. If we had 2008 advertising rates and 2011 traffic, we would be making pretty darn good money. I have no idea how companies with expensive midtown Manhattan offices do it. Well, they have a sales force and we don't, and multiple publications. But you get the idea. It's always a difficult market for science; Henry Donahue, former CEO of Discover, once said to me over coffee, "I think media buyers went into that business because they hate science."
I didn't subscribe to it, but I don't subscribe to any of them, but the free articles I was able to read always struck me as the most credible of the consumer science publications.
Was there ever a market for a magazine devoted just to the life sciences? Well, sure, if someone can make a chain of shops selling $4 cups of coffee work, a magazine for biologists could certainly work - but I don't know how. I couldn't even buy it to find out - the purchase price would be easy enough, who wouldn't want to own a piece of Science 2.0? But the employee costs and the unions in printing are unsustainable.
I said three years ago that in five the market will have shaken out enough that special interests will no longer be interested in holding magazines hostage - like $50 an hour janitors at General Motors, it can't last forever - and it will be realistic to start a print publication again. So far, that seems to be on track.
The Scientist closes by Curtis Brainard, Columbia Journalism Review.
