Troubled Dream

Shortly after acquiring Saturday Review in July 1971, Publishing Entrepreneurs Nicolas Charney and John Veronis unveiled a startling plan for revamping the amiable middlebrow weekly into four special-interest monthlies. Following the successful pattern they had established at Psychology Today, Charney and Veronis also inaugurated a cornucopia of Saturday Review spinoffs, including book publishing, a book club and the sale of records and assorted cultural artifacts. At one point they were even vending mail-order fruit cakes. The idea, which seemed highly plausible, was to amass a large magazine-subscription list and to sell these customers a variety of products.

In stark contrast to this expansive dream, Saturday Review Industries has had to struggle to remain solvent. Backers have thus far plowed about $17 million into the privately held company, and more capital is now needed if the magazines and other divisions are to continue in their present form. SR Executive Editor Ronald P. Kriss says that there is a "cash-flow crisis." It is the second such crunch since last summer. Executive Committee Chairman Frederick S. Wyle, who represents the investors behind Veronis and Charney, confirmed last week that more funds are needed but denied the spate of rumors that one or more of the monthlies are about to fold. As part of a refinancing last fall, said Wyle, "we had planned to look for more money later. We've moved the plan forward."

One of the company's principal backers is Pioneer Lands Corp. Last week a spokesman for the venture capital partnership said: "They have enough money for several months. There is a squeeze, and orders are to control costs very tightly. There is an aggressive desire to form a partnership with a strong company, preferably a publishing company, and snatch this thing out of the jaws of failure."

What has gone wrong? The current trouble is at least in part attributable to the failure of an expensive 17 million-piece promotional mailing to boost circulation that went out just after Christmas. The post office, SR people charged, ruined the campaign by delaying or not delivering huge quantities of the mail. Said an ex-employee involved in the project: "Weeks and weeks later we discovered that bags and bags of mail were not even delivered." Thus the cash influx from the promotion was far below expectations. Approximately 1% of those who received the mailing have responded, and, given the cost of direct-mail advertising, SR in the end will have paid up to $25 for each $16 subscription obtained.

But Saturday Review's problems can hardly be explained away by a single botched promotion. Some observers think that the change in January 1972 from a weekly format to four different monthly magazines--covering science, the arts, education and the society--was a disaster. "Advertisers don't know if it's a weekly or a monthly," said Norman Cousins, SR's former owner and editor (and hardly an impartial critic). Cousins split with Charney and Veronis rather than fall in with their plans. He formed his own new magazine, World, which attracted some readers who otherwise would have stayed with SR.

Potential subscribers to SR have been faced with a dizzying choice of subscription deals for one or more of the magazines. In pushing four monthlies, SR lost the preferential treatment that the postal service gives to weeklies, and the slower service has meant late deliveries. Readers who take all four SR magazines sometimes receive two or three issues on the same day. Few newsstand dealers have displayed all four magazines for the period of a month, as the publishers had hoped; either out of habit or simple incomprehension, the vendors tend to remove one issue of Saturday Review when the next arrives the following week.

Circulation ranges from a low of 600,000, for Saturday Review of the Society, to a high of 750,000, for Saturday Review of Science. All four magazines are below the earlier projections and below the guaranteed circulation base on which advertising has been sold. Not surprisingly, ad pages for the first two months of this year are down by about 12% from the same period last year--and some of that space has been taken up with plugs for Saturday Review products and free trade-off ads with other publications.

Editorially, the new magazines have not caught fire. Many of the articles and reviews are solid but predictable--a serious handicap for publications seeking to establish a sharp new identity. Each monthly runs the inherent danger of telling the specialist less than he wants to know about a subject like science--while overloading the general reader. Indeed, the most recent Saturday Review promotional ads have begun to stress the "family" of magazines rather than the different areas covered by each. Such a roundabout return to the general-interest weekly approach would be an ironic and expensive circle for the Charney-Veronis venture--if in fact the journey is to last that long.

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