As chemical enterprise has expanded, 'News Edition' has evolved from ACS house publication to global newsmagazine

T he American Chemical Society had been in existence 46 years by the end of 1922 and was an integral part of a fast-growing chemical enterprise. TheJournal of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry, a monthly journal published by the society since 1909, then served as the source of chemical news and society information for ACS members, informing them of new processes, events abroad, and activities of their fellow members.

But the pace of developments in the chemical world following World War I was quickening, and it became evident that the monthly I&EC was too slow to pass along timely news and information. So I&EC Editor Harrison E. Howe convinced the ACS Board of Directors that a more frequent and separate news publication was warranted.

Thus, on Jan. 10, 1923, ACS published the first issue of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry News Edition. "We offer for your approval the News Edition," wrote Howe in that issue. Its purpose was to "print personal items, a large range of industrial development information, and accounts of activities of local sections." It would also carry features on federal and state legislation, news of foreign events, announcements of new trade publications, and a host of similar topics. "We believe the News Edition will serve a useful purpose in knitting more closely together the various interests in the society membership," he concluded.

The News Edition started publication with a staff of four, and was supplemented with information from the ACS News Service and the cooperation of "staff correspondents." The same four people were the editorial staff for I&EC. The ACS Board had approved the creation of the twice-monthly publication at its Nov. 24, 1922, meeting, and, interestingly, the society's members were never officially informed of the change. In fact, I&EC regular editions continued to carry some news pages and editorials.

The News Edition was published on the 10th and 20th of each month, and, as was the custom at the time, it was included with all the other ACS publications (I&EC, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Chemical Abstracts) as part of the ACS dues package. Each issue was 12 pages, including ads. In 1925, the publication was expanded to 16 pages. That same year, some international news was added, usually in the form of" letters" from correspondents from various nations describing the chemical news from that country. Crossword puzzles with chemical solutions-very popular during that time-made frequent appearances in the News Edition.

From the start, the News Edition was printed in, and mailed from, Easton, Pa., by Eschenbach Printing Co., which had been printing all the ACS publications since 1893. In 1926, the company was renamed Mack Printing Co., the name it bears today, after Harvey F. Mack, who had joined the firm when it was Chemical Publishing Co. in 1900 and who eventually became part owner.

The publication changed little in the 1920s and early 1930s, slowly adding pages and staff. But in 1934, ACS decided to cut back on the publications package sent to all members, leaving the News Edition as the only ACS publication received by every member as part of the dues package. On Jan. 7, 1938, the board of directors voted to make the News Edition the "official organ" of the society, and, in 1940, the publication's dates were changed to the 10th and 25th of each month.

It was also in 1938 that the editorial content began to change. For the first time, occasional short articles of a more technical nature, which had appeared only in the monthly I&EC, were published in the News Edition, supplementing the strictly industrial and academic news features, ACS information, and market reports that were the staple of the magazine. Soon, other items were added, such as new developments in industry, chemistry, and economics, and the importance of the chemical enterprise to the U.S. defense program.

In 1940, the magazine published for the first time a list of university departments of chemistry that, in the judgment of the ACS Committee on Accrediting Education Institutions, offered bachelor's degrees fulfilling ACS requirements for professional training of chemists.

The expansion of coverage in the magazine and separate mailing to all ACS members led to consideration of a name change for the publication, and, on Jan. 10, 1942, the magazine was first published as Chemical & Engineering News.

Over those first 20 years, despite the efforts to increase the editorial scope of the magazine, it could still be fairly described as a house organ for the society. But by the early 1940s, C&EN had become the largest circulation publication serving the chemical profession and industry. In fact, its circulation had more than doubled in just eight years to more than 30,000 by 1943. The number of pages expanded during this time from about 16 pages per issue to more than 40 pages, and included some longer feature stories.

In response to this growth, ACS moved to expand C&EN's editorial mission to include more timely news about the chemical industry and science, in addition to ACS proceedings. The slogan "Newsmagazine of the Chemical World" was added to the masthead, and in 1943, for the first time, a contents page was added.

February 1943 marked the end of an era for ACS and its newsmagazine. Howe, founder and editor for the magazine's entire 20-year history, died suddenly. He had also been responsible for splitting off the I&EC Analytical Edition, which eventually became Analytical Chemistry in 1948. His efforts had a long-lasting impact on the society's publishing history.

Howe was succeeded as C&EN editor by Walter J. Murphy, who, in addition to having chemical research and industrial experience, had been an editor of another chemical-oriented news publication- McGraw-Hill's Chemical Industries, which later was renamed Chemical Week. Murphy was offered the position by ACS Secretary Charles Lathrop Parsons, and before Murphy agreed, it was arranged that the editor of C&EN would report directly to the society's board of directors, not to the ACS secretary as Howe had done.

Murphy decided the chemical profession was ready to support a larger, more professional news publication and used his experience to set up a more effective news-gathering organization. Until then, the magazine had only a small staff centered in Washington, D.C., and a single reporter in New York City. Starting in January 1945, Murphy opened a string of field offices and in 18 months had established C&EN news bureaus in Chicago, Houston, and San Francisco. This growing news strength convinced ACS to expand C&EN from a bimonthly to a weekly magazine at the beginning of 1947. The change actually was approved in April 1944, but war shortages in paper and personnel made it impossible to effect the change until nearly three years later.

Editorial improvements in the magazine accelerated throughout the 1940s. A back page column called "News Scripts" was added in July 1943. The first editorials appeared in C&EN in October 1945. These were seen by Murphy as a way to get the attention of chemists and chemical engineers on matters of importance to them and their industry. C&EN also began publishing symposia and annual reviews of the chemical industry, including, of course, stories on the chemical industry expansions that occurred during World War II.

Murphy wrote that, starting with the weekly magazine in 1947, "principal efforts were directed toward increasing the scope and timeliness of the material presented." For instance, when the news of the first use of the atomic bomb was announced, Murphy organized a major effort by the staff and produced an eight-page special insert for the Aug. 10, 1945, issue called "Harnessing of Nuclear Energy," which as far as is known, scooped every other technical and trade publication to get the nuclear power story to its readers. Through this period, C&EN's editorial views supported civilian control of nuclear energy.

Further boosting the magazine's professional appeal, C&EN published in its Feb. 17, 1947, issue a special insert, the 60-page "Hancock Report on Organization of the American Chemical Society," compiled by John M. Hancock, who authored several important manpower and postwar reports for various organizations. This report was a major study of the policies and organization of ACS, including opinion surveys of ACS members.

Murphy initiated another innovation to get timely news into the magazine, the C&EN Concentrates page, first published in the May 23, 1949, issue and printed as conCENtrates to incorporate the magazine's initials.

Another major change instituted by Murphy was in C&EN's appearance. Until 1946, all of the covers of the magazine were advertisements for chemical suppliers and companies (as were the covers of I&EC). But a series of articles on major personalities in the profession began in the Jan. 10, 1946, issue, the cover of which was a portrait of ACS Secretary Parsons, who was retiring after 39 years of service to ACS. Similar portraits and drawings of eminent chemists and chemical leaders became standard on the cover for more than 10 years. In late 1949, photos replaced the drawings, and gradually other photos appeared with the chemists. But it wasn't until about 1955 that a C&EN cover had no chemist on it at all. An early example is the Nov. 28, 1955, cover highlighting cancer chemotherapy. It featured a photo of a partially filled Erlenmeyer flask.

1947

Murphy's expansion of the magazine took a major leap in 1950 when he assigned Richard Kenyon from the Chicago field office to open a new C&EN field office in London. Kenyon's job was to report on the recovery of the European chemical industry following the war. The success of this international coverage for C&EN led to further expansion of overseas reporting in Europe and Asia in the 1960s.

By 1950, the magazine was printing more than 2,700 editorial pages yearly (compared with 324 pages in 1923), and that included a 176-page issue on the Diamond Jubilee of ACS. Among other changes during this era, the magazine dropped continuous pagination throughout the year and started using department logos on news pages. In 1955, the publication was entirely remodeled, including putting the news section-the Chemical World This Week-at the front, and initiating the C&EN career supplement in 1957. The news aspect of C&EN was reemphasized further when the Sept. 23, 1957, issue opened with a news lead instead of a feature or special report for the first time, with a two-page story on record attendance at the ACS meeting in New York City.

In 1955, Murphy was promoted to ACS editorial director for the applied journals, and in June 1956, he named Kenyon, who had become editor of the ACS publication Journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry, as the new editor of C&EN. Kenyon was subsequently appointed editorial director of ACS applied publications after Murphy's untimely death at the end of 1959.

Kenyon took the changes Murphy had made in C&EN and magnified them. He seemed to have a vision of C&EN as a truly global newsmagazine. By 1961, Kenyon had built up the magazine with a number of changes, including revising the makeup and typography, new pages for research and for government concentrates, and moving the Letters to the Editor department up front. The staff of reporters continued to grow, and new field offices were set up in Philadelphia (June 1961), Frankfurt (November 1961), and Cleveland and Los Angeles (December 1961). As the magazine expanded, future offices were contemplated for Boston, Montreal, and even Buenos Aires, but these three never materialized.

During this period of growth, Mack Printing also contributed to the success of ACS's publications program, and the two organizations maintained a close relationship with respect to modernization. For example, Mack's first web-fed rotary letterpress was installed in 1957 to handle the printing of C&EN. The faster press cut two days off the magazine's production time.

In August 1962, Kenyon was promoted to director of publications for applied journals, and he had to give up the editorship of C&EN. He was succeeded by Gordon Bixler, then the managing editor and a former chemical researcher who had been with the magazine since 1952. Bixler arrived at the helm at a time of rising revenues and rising editorial pages for the magazine, and he shortly began to reshape the magazine. By 1964, Bixler had reinvigorated the features program, with a reemphasis on detailed articles written by eminent scientists in the field and designed to bring readers the background and state-of-the-art science of interesting issues.

Of particular interest were three special reports written by C&EN staffers that included special commissioned art as illustrations. Watercolor artist Dong Kingman painted original pictures for a feature on the Earth, and Frank Mullins created illustrations for articles on oceanography and on the atmosphere. These three features were combined and sold as a reprint.

The technical production of the magazine moved ahead under Bixler's leadership as well. Full-color illustrations made their first appearance in C&EN articles in the early 1960s, made possible to some extent by the increased demand for color printing by C&EN advertisers. In 1964, the magazine introduced a Teletypesetter system for transmitting story copy from its Washington editorial office directly to Mack Printing. Using long-distance Teletype lines and coded punched paper tapes, the system fed into a Linotype hot-lead typesetting machine at Mack that set the type for each story. Before this, all editorial copy was typed (often from telegraph messages) and hand delivered to the printer, where it was set in type manually by typesetters.

Record levels of advertising from the chemical and allied products industry fed the C&EN expansion in the 1960s, leading to production of a record of nearly 3,100 editorial pages in 1966 and what was then a record $4 million in revenue. But 1966 was to be a high point for the magazine, and the next several years were to bring hardships for both C&EN and the chemical industry.

Beginning in 1967, advertising revenue began to slip as magazine production costs continued to rise. The chemical industry's financial problems stemmed from severe overcapacity, and subsequent lower profits led to drastic cutbacks in advertising. Editorial pages were trimmed each year to try to get the budget in balance, dropping to 2,900 pages in 1968 and 2,500 pages in 1969, but C&EN was falling into serious financial trouble. Bixler asked to be relieved as editor in early 1969, and was replaced by then-Managing Editor Patrick P. McCurdy.

McCurdy's job was unenviable. Faced with a badly deteriorating financial situation over which he had no control, he had to fight political and financial battles within ACS to try to maintain the magazine's credible journalistic content and its breadth. He pushed through a facelift for C&EN designed to bring it more of a look of national weekly newsmagazines and strove for more emphasis on news in the writing of department stories.

Still, McCurdy could not keep up the size of the publication in face of the poor advertising revenues. Editorial pages dropped steeply from 2,500 in 1970 to 1,980 in 1971, and to the lowest point of just more than 1,350 in 1972. The situation had sad consequences. By 1971, McCurdy was faced with a budget shortfall of $135,000 even after cutting the page budget by 400 pages. So in late 1971, faced with a choice of doing "irreparable harm to the core of the magazine," he made what he calls "the toughest decision of my life"-to cut staff. Six editors and two secretaries were laid off with three months' notice. Overall, the C&EN editorial staff dwindled between 1967 and 1973 from a high of nearly 50 to just 22 in 1973. Most of the far-flung field offices were closed as staff left or were brought back to Washington headquarters, eventually leaving just one-person operations in Chicago, Houston, New York, and London by 1976.

The situation forced ACS governance finally to do something about the deteriorating condition of C&EN. Many arguments were put forward about the future of the magazine, some that would have altered its fate forever. These included reverting back to a bimonthly newsmagazine, as it had been until 1947, or even just a monthly. There was also pressure to split the magazine into an ACS society house organ and a second magazine for general chemical news that financially would have to stand on its own.

One vocal faction of ACS members, perhaps responding to the mass firings of chemists that had come with the misfortunes of the chemical industry, pushed for C&EN to become the voice for "professionalism" in chemistry and to support the jobs of chemists. Others wanted C&EN to concentrate almost totally on coverage of science.

McCurdy held strongly to the idea of C&EN as a newsmagazine and convinced the society that C&EN's greatest value to ACS members was as a credible news source. A special committee was formed to consider the future of the magazine, and it concluded that C&EN was important as the one continuous contact between the society and its members. The magazine was called "the glue that holds the society together." It was retained as a weekly publication, with smaller staff and budget.

One decision to come out of this debate was the recognition that the society needed to provide C&EN with greater financial support. Since 1950, $3.00 of each member's dues had been allocated to C&EN, a sum that over the years covered very little of the magazine's actual costs. McCurdy successfully argued that, for the magazine's recovery, a larger allocation was needed. In April 1972, the ACS Council voted the first increase in 22 years, raising the C&EN allocation by $2.00 to reach $5.00 per member. By the end of the year, advertising revenues had stopped falling, and in 1973 subscription revenues increased 50%, putting C&EN back on a road of rebuilding. Although 1973 editorial pages still totaled only 1,380, at least the publication was no longer shrinking.

That year, the magazine published its 50th anniversary issue, on Jan. 15, that reviewed the status of chemistry and C&EN since 1923. The 100-page special issue included outlooks for the world of chemical science, industry, and education to the year 2000. Among the changes predicted by a panel of industrial experts at that time was that the chemical enterprise would become more diverse and international in scope, that it would become a major factor in an environmental cleanup industry, and that the federal government would have to take the lead in developing new energy sources before the world ran out of natural gas and oil.

But just as the magazine seemed to be stabilizing, McCurdy resigned as editor in November 1973. He had, ironically, been offered the job of editor of Chemical Week, C&EN's main competition in the chemical news field, and the publication that Walter Murphy had left to head C&EN almost 25 years before.

In June 1974, Albert F. Plant was named editor of C&EN. Plant had been editor of Industrial Research magazine and brought a sense of news and journalism to C&EN that continued the vision of Bixler and McCurdy. Although Plant was editor only until 1977, he oversaw the beginning of the publication's recovery from near disaster.

A comprehensive reader survey during that period indicated ACS members wanted more feature material and increased coverage of science and technology in C&EN, and efforts to meet that demand shaped many of the changes in the magazine over the next several years. The technical features had, through the 1960s, been part of I&EC, but that journal also was cut drastically by advertising misfortunes, reduced drastically in size, and converted to three quarterly editions with no news, only scientific papers. So ACS members had no ready source of technically written review papers available by the early 1970s. The result was, by 1976, most of the editorial expansion of C&EN was in scientific features. Staff size increased slowly, and 17 major features were printed that year. Revenues also started to rise for the magazine, including another increase in the dues allocation from $5.00 to $8.00, allowing for increasing page budgets, which were up to nearly 1,800 again by 1976. That was also the year C&EN published a special edition for the ACS 100th anniversary. This hardbound issue dated April 6 included a review of the past 100 years of chemical science and the profession of chemistry as written by eminent chemists.

After only three years as editor, Plant was moved to a newly created position of C&EN publisher, and Michael Heylin was named C&EN editor. Heylin had joined C&EN in 1963 and had served as managing editor since 1973 under editors McCurdy and Plant. Heylin's vision of C&EN as the "magazine that had to be read" by everyone in the chemical profession helped it grow to become a major player in the chemical publications field.

Aside from occasional longer features, C&EN had been doing mostly shorter news stories, a result of its diminished page budget and staff from the early 1970s. The magazine had kept its core features and strove to maintain its strength as a journalistic publication as it recovered financially. When the kepone story broke in August 1975-the episode of egregious carelessness in making the pesticide that contaminated the town of Hopewell, Va., and the surrounding area-C&EN didn't have a mechanism for giving such a broad story the scope it deserved. So Heylin and staff developed the News Focus, a story shorter than the magazine's special features but one that would cover an issue quickly and journalistically in depth and from all sides.

The News Focus concept provided the opportunity for significant coverage to a number of chemical issues, and its use increased substantially throughout the early 1980s. Steadily rising editorial page budgets fed this surge in longer stories, which reached a peak in 1984 when the staff produced 18 News Focus articles and nine Special Reports. Outside scientists wrote another eight special features, bringing the number of major articles to 35 that year. The year also marked an advertising and editorial change that still affects the magazine today.

The first so-called Product Reports were published in 1984. These News Focus-length features were staff written and researched, each covering a well-defined segment of the chemical industry-for example, paints and coatings, rubber, and pharmaceuticals. But they were scheduled far enough in advance that C&EN could attract significant advertising from that industrial sector, improving the magazine's revenue base. These articles have proven very successful, and issues of C&EN that feature these articles today are among the most heavily advertised of the year.

A high point for the magazine in 1984 was the awarding to Senior Editor Lois R. Ember of the Science-in-Society Journalism Award from the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) for her Jan. 9, 1984, report entitled "Yellow Rain." NASW judges said the story provided a "tough, painstakingly researched, and unbiased look" at evidence purporting to U.S. claims that the Soviet Union was using toxin weapons in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia. In 1985, Ember also won the prestigious George Polk Award for special-interest reporting for the same report.

Another first for the magazine was the June 6, 1983, issue, when C&EN devoted the entire content to the subject of a single chemical: 2,3,7,8-tetrachloro-p-dibenzodioxin. This compound, usually called just dioxin, was the focus of an enormous controversy because of its presence as a contaminant in the herbicide agent orange used in the Vietnam War, and its alleged responsibility for illness in Vietnam veterans. It had been found also contaminating many sites in the U.S. By using the talents of many staff members, C&EN provided the most comprehensive analysis of any magazine of the science, toxicology, health impact, history, regulatory outlook, and fears surrounding dioxin. A unique experiment for the magazine, it was extremely well received by readers.

A watershed event in the chemical world in 1984 highlighted how well this concept worked. When leaking methyl isocyanate killed thousands of people and maimed thousands more in the town of Bhopal, India, in the morning hours of Dec. 3, 1984, C&EN moved quickly to provide detailed information to its readers. C&EN Senior Editor Wil Lepkowski traveled to India to interview Indian leaders and Union Carbide officials to try to understand how the tragedy had occurred. The resulting feature on the political, industrial, and even social ramifications of the incident became a special issue of C&EN on Feb. 11, 1985.

Throughout his tenure, Heylin was able to slowly develop and expand C&EN staff and increase the magazine's reporting of science. Backed by generally steady advertising revenue increases and a 1977 change in the dues allocation from a fixed dollar amount to 23% of the dues, he was able to reopen and even expand some of the magazine's field offices. In July 1978, the West Coast field office was reopened. The New York office grew from two writers in 1977 to six in 1994 (and moved to New Jersey in July 1988). Total C&EN staff grew from just more than 20 to 37 in 1995, and the magazine's editorial page budget nearly doubled from its 1971 low to 2,400 editorial pages.

Along the way, the production and appearance of the magazine did not remain static. Abandoning the old Teletype tape method for transmitting copy to its printer, C&EN was an early user of telefacsimile machines in the early 1970s that sped the transfer of material to and from its field offices and to Mack Printing in Pennsylvania. For its part, Mack once again adopted new technology to speed up printing of the magazine, switching to web offset presses in 1971, and it began using computer photocomposition the next year. By the early 1980s, even faxes were considered slow and cumbersome for transmitting editorial material to the printer-and it all had to be retyped by Mack personnel to be readable on the computer scanner. The emerging computer industry provided new equipment to generate and edit copy, and to transmit articles via telephone lines to the printing company. A major redesign of the magazine in 1982, the first in a decade, enhanced the readability and appearance of C&EN and highlighted the increased use of color photographs and illustrations in the magazine.

Computer capabilities were expanded further in 1989 with the addition of computerized in-house typesetting that provided more overall control of the production of the magazine at ACS. More recently, increased use of computerized graphics and computer-scanned images has given the C&EN staff greater flexibility and opportunity to add vivid structures and chemical reactions to its pages.

Support from ACS also grew, when in 1993, an ACS bylaw change was passed that dropped the fixed 23% of dues allocation to C&EN and instead provided the magazine with the actual costs of printing and distributing the editorial (nonadvertising) portion of C&EN to its members and other subscribers.

In 1995, Heylin stepped down as editor, having served in that position for 18 years, a tenure exceeded only by the 20-year stint of the first editor, Harrison Howe. He has stayed on as editor-at-large. Over the years, Heylin says, the magazine has been buffeted by a variety of forces, a continual one being that C&EN should be a "mouthpiece" for chemists and the chemical profession and that one of its roles should be" to make chemists feel good about themselves." Instead, Heylin rebuilt C&EN, after its problems in the 1970s, back into a major news publication that "has to be read by those who make their living in the chemical professions."

His successor is the current editor, Madeleine Jacobs, who was a C&EN reporter from 1969 to 1972 and left C&EN for a writing and public affairs career with the federal government and then at the Smithsonian Institution. When she returned to the magazine in 1993, it was to revitalize the job of managing editor, a position Heylin had preferred not to have for the magazine for most of his term as editor. When Heylin stepped down, Jacobs was appointed editor in July 1995. Her goal was to create an environment where the C&EN staff "could do its finest work for its readers." The current staff of 39 full-time reporters and editors, Jacobs believes, is "the most technically astute and best qualified the magazine has ever had."

Jacobs also saw the need for a new overall design for C&EN. In her editorial introducing the refurbished product, she acknowledged that it had only been five years since the previous change, but, in the 1990s world of magazine publishing," that's an eternity to be wearing the same suit of clothes." The redesign is meant to emphasize the magazine's focus on chemistry and sharpen the appearance so readers can quickly find the articles they want to read.

Jacobs' energetic style and outreach to the readers and advertisers of C&EN has been successful, as the publication continues to fare well both in readership surveys and in rising pages of advertising. Editorial pages, too, are growing, reaching nearly 2,500 pages in 1996, the most since 1969, and advertising revenues have reached an all-time high. And Jacobs, completing plans Heylin had begun earlier, expanded the C&EN field staff in summer 1995 by reinstituting a news bureau in Asia for the first time in more than 19 years with a full-time correspondent based in Hong Kong.

Another dramatic change for the magazine occurred at the end of 1997, when C&EN ended its 75-year relationship with Mack Printing. Beginning this month, C&EN is printed by Brown Printing Co. in Waseca, Minn., an experienced printer of weekly magazines and the firm expected to carry C&EN into the next century.

"To come up with a package each week that all of our readers, a very heterogeneous group, will want to pick up and read is a daunting challenge," Jacobs says. "We need to continue to be on top of stories, making sure that our readers see the stories that concern them first in C&EN and not somewhere else."

In the immediate future, Jacobs shares the vision begun by Murphy many years ago, and continued ever since, of making C&EN the global chemical newsmagazine. "We will be adding to our international readership in the next few years," she says, "because of the increasing globalization of the chemical enterprise."

The magazine will be attracting more international readership, both because of its global coverage and because of a new Internet version of the magazine to be launched later this year. It will be a product that will be more than just an electronic copy of C&EN, Jacobs says. It will be searchable on-line and provide access to databases and journal references. "It may be especially useful to readers outside the U.S. who will be able to get the news in a more timely fashion," Jacobs adds.

"The function of C&EN will become even more central to the missions of ACS, as the society strives to enlarge its membership," according to Jacobs. And this function goes back to the founding of C&EN by Harrison Howe as a publication to knit together a diverse membership. "It cuts across all the diverse disciplines of our science and binds everyone together, giving them all something in common to read each week," Jacobs says. "Now, and in the future, we will continue to be the glue that holds the membership together."