Cahners halts 'Biotechnology Week' - Reed Publishing Inc.'s Cahners Publishing Co. discontinue publication

Instead of feting Biotechnology Weeks debut, the staff is looking for new jobs after Cahners Publishing Co. decided in late February to abort the launch and suspend publication only days before the start-up.

The 30,000-controlled-circulation magazine was originally slated to mark its premiere at an industry trade show March 9 and begin regular weekly publication in April.

Instead, the launch team is trying to find a new owner to take over the title. "We have a healthy baby, ready to be born, in this magazine," says publisher Robert Ziegel. He says discussions to find a buyer are ongoing.

Officially, Newton, Massachusetts-based Cahners describes the launch of Biotechnology Week as "delayed" and says the project could be relaunched "in the fourth quarter or early next year," says Cahners spokesman Steve Wallace. But at least one insider at Cahners says that most of the 20-person staff was dismissed on February 27.

The decision to suspend publication was a blow to the morale as much as it was to the pocketbook of Cahners, which reportedly spent close to $1 million on the launch. The move comes against a backdrop of continued economizing inside the nation's largest trade magazine publisher. Last year, the company cut 250 people from its payroll nationwide, and this year it instituted a salary freeze on all employees earning more than $35,000 a year. Sources say the salary freeze is in place until April 1993.

Biotechnology Week is not the first title to experience a serious jolt in the still-evolving biotechnology market. A top official at one of Cahner's rivals says the problem with the field is that it is often not seen as a single industry, but rather as a process that involves many narrow vertical niches. "A horizontal trade is difficult to launch in the market," he says. "You can't be sure who your readers are."

Ziegel insists the magazine would have racked up 24 display pages of advertising in its first issue.

In a recent interview, chief editor Richard Kraweic maintained that the long-term growth prospects for the marketplace are solid. "I think it will be one of the hot growth industries of the 1990s," he says.

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