IEEE Spectrum February, 2014 - 8

Remember the Reader
Donald Christiansen and the making of IEEE Spectrum
Editor's note: In this 50th anniversary year of IEEE Spectrum,
we are using each month's Spectral Lines column to describe some
pivotal moments of the magazine's history. Here we celebrate the
tenure of Spectrum's first full-time editor, Donald Christiansen.

t was the summer of 1963, and at a staff meeting at Electronic Design magazine,
the topic of the day was a potentially fearsome new competitor. The IEEE, only a
few months old, was about to introduce a magazine. Around the table at Electronic
Design, there was a palpable sense of concern that the upstart publication, which
would be called IEEE Spectrum, would draw away readers and advertisers.
But the worry soon passed, says an editor who was at the meeting, when the
IEEE revealed that the new magazine wouldn't be led by an experienced publishing hand. In keeping with the usual practice of association publications, the
name at the top of the masthead would be that of a part-time volunteer. And
his responsibilities would include not only Spectrum but all the publications of the
individual IEEE societies.
The story doesn't end there. That Electronic Design staff
editor was Donald Christiansen, and eight years after
Spectrum's launch, he took charge of the magazine, to the
great benefit of both. During a 21-year run as Spectrum's
editor, Christiansen would mold the magazine into the basic
IEEE SPECTRUM 1964 / 2014
form it still occupies today. Under his direction, the magazine would do pathbreaking coverage and analyses of the Bay Area Rapid Transit engineering
whistle-blower case, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the AT&T divestiture, the space
shuttle Challenger explosion, the performance of the weaponry in the first Persian Gulf War,
the Iraqi nuclear weapons project, and the Shoreham nuclear power plant in New York state.
Under Christiansen, Spectrum would win four National Magazine Awards, the highest honor
in U.S. magazine publishing, along with scores of other honors.
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To appreciate Christiansen's transformation of Spectrum, you have to begin with what
it was prior to his arrival in late 1971. For its
first eight years, the day-to-day running of
the magazine was left to a managing editor.
That editor-Elwood K. Gannett at first, and
Ronald K. Jurgen later-pursued sound journalism. But the lack of publishing expertise
and vision at the top of the masthead put the
magazine at a disadvantage.
In those days, Spectrum competed with
formidable and well-run magazines for advertising and readers. They included not
only Hayden Publishing's Electronic Design
but also McGraw-Hill's biweekly Electronics-
which Christiansen had joined in 1966 and
ultimately led as the editor. In the 1960s, it
wasn't uncommon for an issue of Electronics
to have 250 pages. The magazine had an editorial staff of about 50 people, with bureaus
in Bonn, London, and Tokyo. Spectrum had
half a dozen staff editors in New York and
no bureaus at all.
By the early 1970s, Donald G. Fink, the
IEEE's first general manager, decided that
Spectrum needed a professional editor. Fink,
who had himself been the editor of Electronics
before Christiansen, wasn't driven just by
the need to compete with professionally
run magazines. He also sought to defuse an
impassioned debate within the IEEE about
what kind of magazine Spectrum should be.
Spectrum's last two volunteer editors, J.J.G.
McCue of MIT's Lincoln Laboratories and
David DeWitt of IBM, had both unflinchingly steered Spectrum into some of the biggest technology-related controversies of the
late 1960s and early 1970s. One involved a
huge U.S. antiballistic missile (ABM) project. Spectrum's coverage included not just
technical aspects but also letters and other
material that criticized the ABM work on
ethical and social grounds. The criticisms
in turn provoked a deluge of letters, many
of them quite irate.
With input from members, IEEE president
F. Karl Willenbrock responded by formulating
a policy statement that affirmed Spectrum's
mandate to cover controversial topics, so long
as "reasonable efforts" were made to include
different points of view. The statement also

DonalD Christiansen

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum February, 2014