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David Neff
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Growing up in Lebanon I was very familiar with two American magazines that I saw on a regular basis. One I had to read in school: Time. The other my pastor passed along to me: Christianity Today. The first gave me a recap of the political news of the world, and the second gave me a recap of the status of Christianity around the world. Memories of both are still engraved in my psyche. That's why I consider it a great privilege to have had the opportunity to sit down with CT's editor David Neff after all these years to talk about a magazine that was a large part of my high school years and find out more about the ins and outs of Christianity Today…
"We were a magazine founded fifty years-ago, primarily for pastors. When Billy Graham and Carl Henry founded it, it was aimed at a particularly educated readership, and so, in some ways, it was much closer in terms of its reading level to the Atlantic or Harper's than it was to Time. And even when I came here 21 years ago, we were talking about it being a blend of Atlantic and Time in terms of its editorial flavor. We've never completely shaken that. Having said that, we did make a decision, shortly before I got here, that the magazine was not a pastor's magazine, because it wasn't paying for itself at that point. That's maybe twenty-five years ago now, and the decision was, lets edit it for the thoughtful, educated layperson that is a leader in a local church, and let the pastor read over that person's shoulder. And that formula has worked because we've been in the black ever since."
The formula for success that Christianity Today uses is a far cry from titles in other categories where staying in the black or being successful means 1million copies sold on the newsstand or half a million subscribers. Instead, Christianity Today relies on only 150,000 readers a month, a decrease from their high mark of 200,000 copies in circulation.
"I can say of the 200,000 figure that if you look far enough back, that was heavily subsidized by J. Howard Pugh's money in the early days. If you're talking about the almost 200,000 that we were 20 years ago when I came here, a lot of that was what I would call soft circulation that came through sweepstakes and other agency business that involved sticking stamps on postcards. And, as you know, that has disappeared largely from the scene. I would say of the 50,000 difference between the 200,000 then and the 150,000 now, maybe 35,000 to 40,000 of that was related to agency business. As I looked at the numbers back then, those people did not convert into long term subscribers, because all they knew was that they had a postage stamp that said "Christianity" on it, and so they hadn't been really sold on our content. I feel that our 150,000 now is a very solid 150,000 as opposed to what we were then where maybe one quarter of the readership was that kind of iffy, spongy, soft readership that came through sweepstakes agencies."
With a circulation of 150,000 readers, there is a large portion of the population that is not exposed to the information in Christianity Today. With few Christian titles available on the newsstand, this translates to readers missing out.
"They're missing a reasoned, thoughtful, conservative Christian viewpoint on issues that relate both to society and to church life. We use a phrase internally in our discussions something like this: Assessing biblically the people, events, and ideas that affect evangelical thought, life, and mission. So the very first word is assessing, that means that we try to take a critical approach, weighing everything; and the second word is biblically, meaning that like most conservative Christians, we use the Bible as our standard of truth. But from there you see its very wide, its events, people, and ideas. So, it's a broad scope, but from a definite, sort of historic, Christian point of view."
As mentioned earlier, that viewpoint is nearly non-existent on the newsstand.
"You might find Christianity Today, you might find Sojourners on the newsstand, but that's about it. You'll find Charisma on some newsstands, although I think Charisma's being placed more in the 7/11 and Wal-Mart type newsstands than in the Borders or Barnes and Noble bookstand, which is more where we tend to belong. Again circulation is not my specialty, I'm an editor, but it does seem to me that whoever the buyers are who make that kind of decision for those chains probably recognize that there's a certain social cache and cultural cache to religions that are still a little bit foreign feeling to the readership. A Buddhist magazine like Tricycle fits into that. Islam is certainly a hot topic now, so I can see that as having some cache on a newsstand. Christianity is the old religion of this country, nothing makes it stand out, and so it's just a harder sell I think for that reason."
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