Editor Branches Out From His Technical Training

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, whom he knew to be young, but not that young. 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.

Since 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. I see a motivated, intelligent, articulate individual. He presented his case exceedingly well.”

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 infiltrating pop culture and making headlines, Page One, 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. Is Bly’s defection to media a loss to science? “If he were an Einstein, I’d say yes. But he’s a good scientist, and he has this other ability.” About 40,000 people in North America can do high-level physics, he says, but the number who know science “and have the ability to manage an organization ... is in the ones and twos.”

Lederman says he’s impressed that Bly, on a recent trip to London, had lunch with Sir John Maddox, a former editor of the journal Nature, which is largely read by scientists. “It was one of [Bly’s] efforts to become known, to find out who the movers and shakers are.”

Bly hopes that by 2004 he’ll have 250,000 affluent readers aged 25 to 45--”a lucrative market segment,” he says. He plans to expand Seed, which has a staff of 15, into a “major player” in television and other media. Seed is to publish four issues this year, eight next year and 10 in 2004. “I see it as a brand,” he says. “I see myself at the helm of that,” though the magazine “will always be our flagship.” One sees how he raises money.

And 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), applauds Seed’s goals, photography and some of its articles, but said the magazine is “superficial. I worry that people could have the sense that they’re better informed about these things than they actually are.”

Lederman, on the other hand, says he’s “bowled over” by the “high quality” of the articles.

Aileen Jacobson writes for Newsday, a Tribune company.