of the plan as possible within a meager budget.

WHAT WORKED AND WHAT DIDN’T

The news section took several years to find its footing. The biggest problem was finding news items that would still be fresh by the time the issue was published.

“Computing Practices” was our biggest challenge. Many practitioners are not inclined to publish and so it is necessary for the editorial staff to visit many conferences as well as solicit and write articles. We hired journalist Karen Frenkel, who wrote many articles and conducted many interviews; but these articles were quite labor-intensive. We needed three more Karens, but we did not have the budget. Her works were a big hit with readers. Once, Karen and I visited Apple Computer to interview Steve Jobs (published April 1989). When we asked if he thought the Internet would be crippled by hackers, he buried his head in his hands for a full minute; then looked up and said, “No, they see it as a critical infrastructure for their own work.”

Another major success was the case studies conducted by Alfred Spector and David Gifford of MIT, who visited project managers and engineers at major companies and interviewed them about their projects, producing no-holds-barred pieces. This section was wildly popular among the readers. Unfortunately, the labor-intensive demands of the post got the best of them after three years, and we were not able to replace them. Also by that time, companies were getting more circumspect about dis-

cussing failures and lessons learned in public forums.

I would say we improved CACM’s coverage of computing practices, but not to the degree we envisioned. In 2002, former ACM president Stephen Bourne persuaded Council to undertake a major initiative in the computing practices area by founding Queue magazine. Queue got the budget needed to do this right and ACM finally learned how to do it well.

Readable research. We found that many of the articles submitted to the remaining research departments were much less technical than articles submitted to the old departments. It was much easier to edit them into the article format. We also found that making arrangements with SIG conferences for best papers was much more difficult than we thought; they were not a fruitful source for CACM.

When we saw this approach to research was not viable, we seriously investigated imitating Science magazine’s approach. The idea would be to invite research papers from all sectors of computing, edit the acceptable ones heavily to make them accessible to our audience, and have a rapid review process. We envisioned a day when the New York Times would cite a scientific breakthrough in a forthcoming article in the CACM—just like in Science. We visited Science magazine to find out how they do it. To our dismay, we discovered that the number of staff required to handle the rapid review and editing process was well beyond our means. We abandoned this idea.

Eventually we decided to discontinue the research category

altogether and concentrate on doing the articles category well.

Articles. It was quickly apparent that our resources would not allow us to realize our dream of giving articles the full Abacus treatment. we would need 10 articles editors and we only had two. Moreover, we knew that many Scientific American readers found the articles shallow, and many authors felt their work was so rewritten it was no longer theirs. By 1985 we had abandoned the Scientific American model and settled instead on Sigma X’s American Scientist model. Their editors solicit papers from leading researchers, asking them to write articles specifically for their publication. Editors work with authors to improve sentence and article structure for the best connection with the reader; the objective is to improve readability while retaining the author’s own voice. American Scientist readers felt its articles had good depth, and authors felt it was still their own work. We could provide the editing and scouting needed to run this model from within our existing resources.

We established regular special sections to concentrate on emerging areas discovered by our editors. One of our first was a compendium of the best computing humor of all time (Apr. 1984, with Peter Neumann as editor). Our first outreach section—Computing in the Frontiers of Science—was published as a joint venture with the IEEE Computer Society (Nov. 1985).

Columns. We cultivated a stable of regular columnists to comment on a variety of issues. The first was Jon Bentley’s “Program-