Perspective: A Year Later

Perspective: A Year Later

The first issue of

EnvironmentalBuilding News was mailed out one year ago to a few hundred subscribers. Six issues later, we have a respectable circulation of well over 1,000. Judging from feedback received, we’re succeeding in what we set out to do: provide useful, unbiased information on how to make buildings less damaging to the environment.

While I feel very good about EBN, its first year has not been without difficulties. Like any business,

Environmental Building News not only has to provide good information, but it also has to be financially viable. We have to make enough money with subscriptions to be able to invest in the research for our articles. That means direct-mail promotions, brochures, maintaining an efficient database for keeping track of subscribers, renewal letters—lots of new stuff for us. We grossly underestimated the amount of time needed for the publishing side of the operation. The recent addition of Marianne Büttner as business manager is making a huge difference in freeing Nadav Malin and me to focus on editorial matters.

We have received a small number of letters and phone calls complaining about the cost of EBN. Sixty dollars per year is a lot for an individual or a small business to shell out. Why does it have to be so expensive when most magazines cost less than half that much? There are two answers. EBN is a specialized publication that will never have tens of thousands of subscribers to depend on for revenue. And to keep our coverage of issues and companies totally objective, we will never accept advertising—the primary revenue source for magazines. It may surprise some of our readers to learn that people in the publishing business have told us we’re crazy to offer a newsletter for such a low price (most are in the range of $200 to $400 per year), but we really want to make EBN accessible to small-scale builders and designers.

While we feel pretty good about

Environmental Building News after the first year, it is the realization that EBN is helping to bring about change in the building industry—making our buildings more environmentally friendly—that makes all our hard work so satisfying. Thank you for being a part of EBN and making this first year so satisfying.

–Alex Wilson