Big Tent

Most publishers work mightily to achieve big circulations. But not the McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. It has become the world's biggest publisher of trade magazines and the fourth biggest U.S. magazine publisher* by carefully restricting its circulation. Newsstand sales, the lifeblood of most magazines, are not for McGraw-Hill, either. Last year although its 37 magazines made up two-thirds of McGraw-Hill's $62.5 million gross, it did not put a single one on newsstands. Nor do the seven McGraw-Hill bureaus and 46 part-time correspondents around the world cover the breaking news like other correspondents. In Korea, McGraw-Hill reporters pay little attention to battles; they are more interested in the performance of trucks and jeeps for Fleet Owner, or of airplanes, for Aviation Week. Covering the recent European floods for Engineering News-Record, McGraw-Hill correspondents left the human toll to other reporters, instead filed detailed stories on dike construction and how future floods could be prevented.

Exclusive Club. The 37 magazines, including four in Spanish for Latin America, have a circulation of only 1,085,000. But McGraw-Hill thinks the small circulations of its weeklies, fortnightlies and monthlies are parceled out where they count, among businessmen, technicians, scientists, and other specific groups. To advertisers, who pay high space rates, McGraw-Hill plugs the theme of a select audience, e.g., a tire manufacturer is assured that his ad in Bus Transportation will be read only by bus company executives, municipal officials, etc. "We put up a tent," says Editorial Director Ralph Smith, "and tell everyone we're going to put on a certain kind of show and sell admissions so that we know the people coming are really interested." Next week McGraw-Hill will put up a brand-new tent when it begins publishing two oil magazines (including the weekly National Petroleum News) and three daily services (e.g., Platt's Oilgram Price Report) bought from Cleveland's Warren C. Platt, giving it a magazine covering every major U.S. industry except steel production.

Over them all it has Business Week, the main tent in the profitable McGraw-Hill circus, which made $3,272,505 net after taxes in 1952. Last year, Business Week ran more ads than any other magazine in the world (5,502 pages), and took in an estimated $12 million. Business Week is run by Managing Editor Edgar Grunwald, 43, a McGraw-Hill veteran, while Editor & Publisher Elliott V. Bell, onetime New York State superintendent of banking and Dewey aide, looks after broad policy. The magazine puts little premium on literary graces, but tells businessmen in their own language what is happening in industry, government, technology, etc. And it makes sure that only businessmen read it; it screens subscriptions, refuses to take on business executives below the rank of assistant manager.

Following the Horses. McGraw-Hill owes its success to making trade-magazine publishing honest. Trade papers were paste-ups from advertisers' handouts when James H. McGraw, an ex-schoolteacher and part-time magazine salesman, started out in 1884. As payment for $1,500 in subscription commissions, he got an interest in a monthly called Street Railway Journal, insisted from the start that trade magazines "have an educational mission . . ." But when he tried to educate his partners (e.g., the magazine must concentrate on the new electric trolleys), they argued that trolley owners would never give up horses and lose their profitable sideline selling manure.

McGraw, disgusted that his partners "couldn't see over a pile of manure," split with them and took the streetcar magazine with him. Later, he met John Hill, onetime locomotive engineer who owned five trade papers (American Machinist, Power, Engineering News, Coal Age, Engineering and Mining Journal). Both McGraw and Hill had also started publishing books; in 1909 they formed a joint book-publishing firm. Eight years later, after Hill died, his estate sold out his magazines and book interests to McGraw.*

Atomic-Powered. To keep up with the technical progress in industry, McGraw added such new magazines as Electronics and Product Engineering. For the businessman who is more manager than technician, he started Business Week in 1929. Two months after Business Week was launched, the stock market crashed, and in 1932 and 1933 the company showed the only losses in its history. But Business Week pulled out of the red before Founder McGraw retired in 1935. His son James ("Jay") McGraw, a Princeton graduate ('15) and a stiff-collared executive who had grown up in the company, took over.

With American industry, McGraw-Hill continued to expand, and sometimes a popular department in one magazine budded into a new magazine, e.g., when one of the departments in Chemical Engineering grew too big, it became Food Engineering. Under Jay McGraw, the company made its only attempt--with Science Illustrated--to step out of the trade into the general circulation field. It was a resounding flop. Between 1945-47, the new magazine lost upwards of $2,000,000. It was beginning to find itself, when Jay McGraw folded it to get ready for the postwar depression mistakenly predicted by his economists.

When he retired in 1950, two years after his father's death, his younger brother, Curtis Whittlesey McGraw (Princeton '20), stepped into the job. Still called "Hack" from football days (he captained Princeton's '19 team), burly (6 ft. 2 1/2 in., 210 lbs.) President McGraw, 57, is as gregarious as his brother was reserved, delegates authority to his top aides, Publications Boss Paul Montgomery, Executive Vice President Willard Chevalier, and Editorial Director Smith, lets the magazines run their own shows.

Hack McGraw subscribes to his father's theory that his "editors must be part of industry before they can be part of the publishing business," would rather hire an engineer and teach him to write than try to make an engineer out of a writer.

Always on the alert for new fields, McGraw-Hill registered the title Atomic Power right after the first atom bomb, now publishes it as Nucleonics, which is still losing money. But the company has had to wait before for a new trade to catch up with its magazine, and Hack McGraw isn't worried. Said he: "It's another stake in the future. We think it will carry itself well when private industry really gets going in atomic energy."

*First three after deducting commissions: TIME Inc., whose gross in 1952 was $156 million; Curtis Publishing Co. (Satevepost, Holiday, Ladies' Home Journal, Country Gentleman), an estimated $140 million; Crowell-Collier Publishing Co. (Woman's Home Companion, American Magazine, Collier's), $68 million.

*Which now claims to be second only to Doubleday as biggest U.S. book publisher. It specializes in technical books but also puts out fiction, biography and nonfiction, including such bestsellers as A Man Called Peter, Peace of Soul, Boswell's London Journal, and A Lion in the Streets.

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