In December 2006 DrivingWheel was retained to carry out a complete top-to-bottom evaluation of Science News: editorial content, design, website, staff and staffing structure, circulation management and goals, advertising sales, and the structure of its business operations. The review was commissioned by Elizabeth Marincola, CEO of the magazine’s parent organization, then known as Science Service and since renamed Society for Science and the Public. The goal of the project was to present to the Science Service board credible options for the future of the publication.

The team that DrivingWheel assembled included experts in circulation management and financial modeling, advertising sales, quantitative and qualitative research, and magazine and website design. The large quantity of information gathered in the course of the team’s six months work was collected and synthesized by DrivingWheel. At a retreat of the board in June 2007, DrivingWheel presented its conclusions and worked through them with board members, reaching consensus on a plan for relaunching both magazine and website.

Science News was a pioneer in the field of science journalism. The publication has been widely respected for decades. DrivingWheel’s evaluation, however, found that the magazine faced serious challenges and that guaranteeing its viability required major change. The core problem was that Science News had been relatively static over the preceding 15 years while the landscape of publishing changed around it. A younger generation of science news consumers was getting their information online, and the magazine’s print readership had dropped from 250,000 a decade earlier to 125,000 when the project began.

Clearly, reinvention was necessary. The challenge was compounded by the fact that the magazine’s core audience was extremely loyal to Science News just the way it was and strongly resisted change. They show little interest in news online. Younger potential subscribers, however, wanted more information online and found the existing magazine dated in its look and feel. The challenge was to thread the needle: Keep the overwhelming majority of existing readers while drawing a new audience, hungry for science news in print and online. The relaunched version of the magazine would have to retain the publication’s tradition and uniqueness (short, timely takes on science across a wide range of disciplines) while presenting this news in formats much more attractive to a broader, younger audience.

DrivingWheel’s report included four entirely different scenarios, ranging from limited change (keeping the magazine a weekly) to radical change (publishing online only). With DrivingWheel’s participation, the board reached consensus on a scenario calling for relaunching the weekly magazine as a completely redesigned and reformatted biweekly. At the same time, its companion website (then updated weekly and essentially a passive reflection of the print publication) would be relaunched as a dynamic daily news operation. After the board retreat, DrivingWheel was retained by the publisher to assist in implementing the board’s conclusions. This implementation phase took one year from the start to its conclusion in the successful relaunch of magazine and website.

Along the way, DrivingWheel carried out, among many others, the following activities for the magazine’s publisher:

1. •identified an art director to redesign the print publication and worked closely with the art director during the redesign
   

2. •identified a web design and implementation firm to redesign the website and worked closely with the web designer and the magazine’s staff to implement the new design
   

3. •conducted the search for a new Editor in Chief, a search culminating in the hiring of award-winning science journalist Tom Siegfried
   

4. •conducted the search for a new head of the magazine’s business side, culminating in the hiring of Jonathan Oleisky, from a business publisher based in Baltimore, as Associate Publisher
   

5. •assisted the publisher in changing circulation fulfillment vendors, resulting in dramatically increased responsiveness to the magazine’s circulation needs
   

6. •helped develop a new overall circulation strategy, based on reduced dependence on direct mail efforts and developing new relationships with affinity organizations
   

In addition, in a general sense, DrivingWheel’s principal, John Benditt, was a strategic partner for Elizabeth Marincola, CEO of Society for Science and the Public and Publisher of Science News, in the process of transforming the publication. Benditt was available for consultations regarding personnel, overall strategic direction, and the nuts-and-bolts of implementation. He was personally involved in many key meetings with Science News staff and outside vendors during the relaunch. In a sense, during the implementation phase, DrivingWheel became part of the “extended staff” of the magazine’s parent organization.

This deep and integrated involvement worked well for this project. Working with the publisher, we were able to successfully thread the needle. The relaunched Science News has been very well received by the magazine’s loyal, conservative reader base. At the same time, it is much more appealing to a broader, younger audience, in print and online. Its business side has been expanded and professionalized and has begun the process of increasing ad revenues and circulation base.

This large, integrated effort is one of the ways DrivingWheel likes to work, but it isn’t the only way. We design the team and the style of the project to fit your needs. The only thing all our projects share is success.