Openers

Even before the advertising meltdown, magazines were struggling to find a place in the rapidly evolving world of information. We expect magazines to dig deeper than the daily news—analysis, criticism, investigation, punditry—pulling together what’s out there into themes and helping to puzzle out what it all means. But as with daily reporting, there’s less and less need for a print publication to explain it all for you.

Only a few years ago, we’d all patiently wait a month or longer for pundits and opinion journals to weigh in on the merits of pending legislation or a proposed corporate merger or a newly released album or a sports team’s title-match chances. Now a wide range of online voices—many of them literate, eloquent, and entirely credible—proffer views within minutes of a news development. Colleagues and friends post comments on Twitter and Facebook, giving an at-a-glance sense of what your particular circle is thinking. Which means that by the time the postman delivers the next glossy issue of your favorite periodical, it’s days or even weeks out of date.

No surprise, then, that many magazines seem unclear as to how to retain their long-held share of readers’ time and attention. Inertia—hoping people are too lazy to pick up the phone and cancel their subscriptions—isn’t much of a business plan. The solution, by no means a simple one, is to offer an editorial perspective that doesn’t lend itself to quick scans on laptops and iPhones—and that’s still relevant to readers’ lives and work.

Which brings me to the magazine you’re holding. Our website is much friendlier than it used to be—clean and navigable, with online-only feature stories—but fundamentally, TCB Review publishes the kind of articles most easily read on paper. (I’ve always envisioned our typical reader tossing each issue in a briefcase or shoulder bag and perusing it on the Acela or the Delta shuttle.) Ideally, the articles don’t lose their punch a week or a month after publication.

We try to tackle larger issues and questions; we try to take a step back from the fray. And yes, some of our articles demand more attention and concentration than do blog posts and Google News summaries. Knowing that’s part of our mandate means that when we have the opportunity to publish a feature as significant and in-depth as Michael Schrage’s cover story—a piece that may change the way you think about work today and tomorrow—we can give it the space it deserves.

Is it possible to read Schrage’s “A ‘Better’ Workforce?” onscreen? Of course. It’s right there at www.tcbreview.com. But I suspect you’ll have an easier time with the regular paper version.

Now, as far as that business-plan thing goes—as any regular reader can tell, this magazine has never been an ad-supported operation; The Conference Board picks up most of the tab to staff and publish us. Like almost every organization today, the Board is looking for short-term savings to get through the current slump, and one of the steps it’s taking is temporarily shifting TCB Review from bimonthly to quarterly. I won’t pretend this development is a welcome one, but the higher-ups have promised to resume our regular frequency “when the economic picture is more favorable,” and it’s vastly preferable to suffering the fate of, say, Condé Nast Portfolio.

So this is the summer issue of TCB Review rather than the July/August issue, and we’ll see you again in a few months—on paper, anyway. We’ll be in your e-mail inbox a couple of times before that.

Matthew Budman