If it weren’t for the age of its founder and editor, Seed might be just another magazine launch. True, an interesting one, with its mission to examine the intersection of science and culture. And an audacious one, starting up during a recession that has killed off some major periodicals. But Adam Bly, Seed’s editor and president, is only 21.
“Wow,” says John Rennie, editor in chief of Scientific American, who notes that, at 42, he is “precisely twice the age” of Bly. Persuading backers to put up the millions needed to start a magazine “would be very impressive for a person of any age,” Rennie says.
“I’ve always had an affinity for people who do something wild and wonderful,” says Rick Leckner, a Montreal businessman who owns a financial communications agency and is a Seed investor. Seed is based in Montreal, but most of its 100,000 copies, which reached newsstands in March, are distributed in the United States through Warner Publishing Services, a division of AOL Time Warner.
Because Leckner started as a radio reporter at age 16, he’s not fazed by Bly’s youth. “As an entrepreneur, I saw in Adam all the right signs.” . . .
Indeed, sitting in his publicist’s office recently, Bly presents his case with all the panache of a seasoned pitchman. In his dark suit, white shirt and striped tie, he looks 21 but has the bearing of a 40-something.
Bly was a whiz who won science fairs, did cancer research at Canada’s National Research Council at age 16, got a chapter published in a book at that age and traveled to international conferences. He later attended McGill University for one year but dropped out because, he says, he found college too confining. In 1999, when he represented Canada at a UNESCO-sponsored world science conference in Budapest, Hungary, “I had an epiphany about where science is going,” he says. “Science is having a greater impact on society. . . . Stem cells, climate change, cloning, bioterrorism — they’re . . . making headlines, Page 1, above-the-fold headlines,” he adds.
It was in Budapest that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman first met Bly. Lederman, who’s based in Chicago, wrote for an initial issue of Seed that came out last year (though Bly considers the one now on newsstands the beginning of the launch). “I was amazed at how much support he has acquired,” Lederman says.
As with Leckner, Lederman, who’s almost 80, isn’t taken aback by Bly’s youth. “In science you’re beginning to be over the hill at 21,” he says. Bly hopes that by 2004 he’ll have 250,000 affluent readers aged 25-45 — “a lucrative market segment,” as he puts it.
One sees the young professionals demographic addressed at all levels in the magazine’s pages. The ads include full-page spreads from Skyy Vodka, Skechers shoes, Lucky jeans and other trendy purveyors (though not all paid full price, Bly acknowledges).
Rennie, of Scientific American (700,000 circulation), compares Seed to Wired, the technology magazine with a lifestyle approach. Rennie applauds Seed’s goals, photography and some of its articles, but said the magazine is “superficial.”
Lederman, on the other hand, says he’s “bowled over” by the “high quality” of the articles.
