How an association magazine adapted to change; a shift in the demographics of the American Welding Society's membership drove the revamping of Welding Journal - Column

Welding Journal began publishing 75 years ago and is still distributed as a membership benefit. Today, however, in contrast to the time when members ranged from highly technically oriented people, such as theoretical engineers and metallurgists to researchers, marketing efforts have made welders the society's fastest-growing segment. Other disparate members of the Miamibased monthly now include educators, shop foremen, salespeople and students. In 1992, publisher Jeff Weber's team helped formulate a plan to invest in technology, and redesign, expand and upgrade editorial to overhaul the title's image and serve readers better: Circulation rose 11 percent from the end of 1991 to the end of 1995, according to ABC. Here's how they did it.--Suzanne Zelkowitz, contributing editor

Although the American Welding Society runs education programs and an annual exposition, conducts certification programs. does employment referral, administers a foundation, and publishes the Welding Handbook as well as Technical Standards and other publications, to a large number of readers, Welding Journal is the society: It is perceived as a major benefit of membership.

Survey results, however, were telling us that while marketing efforts to broaden our membership base were starting to pay off, the magazine was not serving these readers' needs. Our challenge was to keep our readership growing, while still retaining the society's original core members.

Graphically, we had an academic look that tended not to appeal to new members, who were not scholarly themselves. It also kept advertisers at bay. We decided that we had to redesign and make the magazine have the look and feel of a consumer book. We also recognized that we needed to deliver more up-to-the-minute information and cover late-breaking news.

The first key thing we did to improve the look of the magazine was go completely desktop in the spring of 1992. Initially, we put around $100,000 into the conversion, and we have added a lot. We found that the return on investment was very quick. With the increase in members and ad revenue, we got everything back within a year.

We had been doing color photography since I came on board in 1977, but were able to become much more sophisticated; we started emphasizing four-color throughout from '92 on. We acquired an on-site imagesetter, a Linotronic 330, and have cut out the time our printer, R.R. Donnelley, had to spend stripping things in. To cut prepress time even more, we're exploring direct-to-plate technology.

On the editorial front, we analyzed what we needed to do to become more handson and more interesting. One of the first things we did was to take a gamble and increase our staff size. That allowed us to stop relying on articles coming in over the transom and really start directing the magazine in terms of subject, content and theme issues.

Historically and traditionally, we tended to be highly engineering-oriented and also had very technical metallurgical research, computer modeling and the like. Essentially, the decision was made to keep these valuable elements, but make the publication bigger and timelier.

We began by expanding and broadening our news coverage, adding more articles with a welding slant that relate to national and world news events. An example is a story we ran on how steel structures fared during the Kobe, Japan, earthquake.

We also implemented a political column that reports on the effects that legislation and pending legislation in Washington, D.C., may have on our industry.

We now also cover emerging technologies--information readers can't put to use in their shops right now but that will be important later on. In addition, we report immediately on new welding applications.

Moreover, we're now spotlighting welding business manufacturers, and have also increased the number of hands-on applications stories and back-to-basic pieces that members, such as students, find useful.

We've also put more emphasis on people by doing more profiles to offset technology's dryness. At the same time, we are offering a greater variety of member news.

Speaking of people, staff people are important, too. When I came here 19 years ago, there was an editor, an assistant editor and an editorial assistant. We've increased the editorial staff to 10, which now gives us the flexibility to go out into the field. We are actively investing money in computer and desktop training to make the staff better at what they do in magazine

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