Harrumph!

For those of us who worked business and trade magazines, BusinessWeek’s disgrace will take come adjustment. In today’s Financial Times is a little piece on the bottom of a page about McGraw-Hill shopping the once dominant book for $1.

That doesn’t have the emotional pull to many, not as powerful as daily newspapers collapsing. Yet to me, it’s as striking in its way as a car maker going down.

For a couple of terms, in the business press, we tend to refer to:

• book, which outsiders could call magazine
• property, which non-publishing sorts would call a book
• trade magazines, generally monthlies or weeklies devoted to specific industries like construction or restaurants
• business magazines, which can cover trades but tends to be more financially and managerially oriented, like Inc. or BusinessWeek
  
• editor, on a magazine can mean that, but generally senior editor or such means a writer who gets more title than money

I worked them all. I did a big handbook for McGraw-Hill (for corporate directors), was on the staff at Inc. and Management Review, wrote for computer and electronics pubs, as well as construction and materials handling ones. I began to know BW folk when I worked at the New York HQ of Conover-Mast, which Boston-based Cahners bought to triple its size.

BW is where writers hoped to go to get lazy and overpaid. Several from Conover-Mast ended up there when Cahners tried to move our books to Boston and Chicago. Some writers went to the dark side, public relations, but most scuttled back ashamed later to return to trade or business press writing.

The Conover-Mast books tended to have a rivalry with equivalent McGraw ones, and sometimes titles from other houses. At Construction Equipment, where I worked, we tried to catch (and successfully passed) Construction and Highway and Heavy Construction in both ad pages and revenue, as well as writing awards.

I worked for a great writer, John Rehfield, who inspired us to greatness in our little trade maggy ways. He was a civil engineer, but he was both enormously funny and a facile writer. He was an astounding anomaly in a field where most editors know their business but have a terrific problem putting that knowledge into intelligible words. In fact, when John offered me the job, I asked why. I had come out of newspapers and the only construction expertise I had was as a carpenter’s helper for two summers in college. That brought a big laugh as he put a hand on my portfolio and waved his arm toward the editors beyond his office. “You’re a writer. I can teach you anything you need to know about construction. I can’t teach an engineer how to write.”

When Cahners moved CE to Chicago,  I stayed in New York with the energy and publishing. Many Conover-Mast writers found other companies as well. A few ended up at BW. While I never had much interest in a job there, they sure did like the money and prestige of sailing on McGraw’s flagship.

And now, any one of them could buy the big book for a buck. It’s circulation is still over 900,000, but ad revenues have plunged with other print media’s and it loses money…ever week, as the expression goes.

It’s had a great run. I think of comparisons such as Digital Equipment Corporation. Some might say DEC failed as it went from mini-computer giant to subset of Compaq and then HP and then to nothing. I say despite founder Ken Olsen’s stupidities about personal computers and other blunders, DEC paid a lot of salaries and shareholder dividends for decades. It was successful for most of its run, as has been BW.

Like Greek myths, such tales can be sad. The Titans and heroes have their flaws or lose out to the next generation. Maybe it is better to turn to Latin — sic transit gloria mundi..

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, BusinessWeek, Cahners, Conover-Mast, McGraw-Hill, Rehfield