How Donald Christiansen Reinvented IEEE Spectrum magazine

After rising up in Plainfield, N.J., Don joined the U.S. Navy throughout World Conflict II as an 18-year-old. He
served aboard the aircraft carrierSan Jacinto, an expertise that led a few years later to a guide, The Saga of the San Jac. After the struggle, in 1950, he acquired a bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering at Cornell College. From 1950 to 1962 he labored for CBS’s Electronics division, an arm of the broadcasting community headquartered in Danvers, Mass. It manufactured vacuum tubes for radios and televisions, and later, semiconductors.

However Don wasn’t a typical engineer. He had a burning need to jot down and had a knack for crafting deft, partaking tales. By 1959 he was an everyday contributor to
Electronics World, a preferred newsstand journal printed by Hugo Gernsback.

It was a modest begin to what can be a speedy rise in publishing. A few years later, at age 35, he grew to become a full-time editor at
Digital Design. In 1966, he moved to McGraw-Hill’s Electronics magazine, the kingpin publication of a thriving subsegment of the enterprise press. And some years after that, he was editor in chief. In these days, a problem of Electronics might need as many as 250 pages. The journal had an editorial employees of about 50 folks, with bureaus in Bonn, London, and Tokyo.

IEEE Spectrum, in the meantime, was a fledgling journal. Following the IEEE’s formation in 1963, Spectrum made its debut in January 1964. These early problems with Spectrum had been a cool hybrid of home organ and journal. There was a “Information of the IEEE” column, typically illustrated with posed photos of convention organizers holding printed applications and smiling resolutely. A “Individuals” section famous profession milestones of IEEE members, illustrated with but extra resolute smiles.

In April 1993, IEEE Spectrum received a Nationwide Journal Award for its reporting on Iraq’s effort to construct an atomic bomb. The staffers who labored on the report had been John A. Adam [center] and Glenn Zorpette [right]. Editor in Chief Donald Christiansen is at left.IEEE Spectrum

The options had been a assorted combine, typically illustrated with graphs, charts, and tables. Some articles had been solely marginally extra readable than technical papers, whereas others had been sprawling, thinky items of precise or imagined social relevance. For instance, the second subject of
Spectrum featured an article titled “Graduate Training: A Fundamental Nationwide Useful resource.” Throughout this period, mathematical equations sporadically swarmed into the function properly like ants at a picnic.

After about seven years of this,
Donald G. Fink, the IEEE’s govt director (then referred to as a “normal supervisor”), decided it was time for Spectrum to have a full-time skilled editor in chief. By then, Fink had grown weary of fielding the query “Who’s actually operating this journal?” Fink additionally knew who he needed for the position: Christiansen. Like Christiansen, Fink had been the highest editor at Electronics.

Fink requested Christiansen to jot down a proposal describing what he would do with
Spectrum if he had been the editor. Christiansen’s plan was easy: Ban mathematical equations; publish shorter, tightly edited function articles; and embody extra staff-written options. And he insisted on being not simply the editor but additionally the writer of Spectrum. Fink submitted Christiansen’s proposal to the IEEE board of directors, which agreed to all of the circumstances.

As editor in chief, Don confirmed an everlasting curiosity in moral conflicts skilled by engineers. In 2014, he informed me how this preoccupation started. Within the late Nineteen Fifties, CBS was competing with RCA for an enormous contract from Motorola to supply tubes, together with cathode-ray tubes, for shade televisions. A bunch of Motorola executives needed to go to CBS’s manufacturing services to see the CRTs being produced. The issue was that on the time, CBS had solely six working CRTs and was experiencing issues with the manufacturing line. So that they mainly orchestrated a phony demonstration, making it seem as if the road was finishing the CRTs in actual time, earlier than the guests’ eyes.

The ruse labored. CBS landed the contract and shortly fastened the issues with the manufacturing line. However Don by no means forgot that have.

Spectrum’s November 1979 subject, containing a particular report on the accident on the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, received a Nationwide Journal Award.IEEE Spectrum

Don employed me to be a
Spectrum employees editor in 1984. In these days, the IEEE occupied a few flooring in a building on the northwest nook of forty seventh Road and First Ave., within the tony Turtle Bay space of Manhattan. Don’s workplace, on the eleventh flooring, was within the southeast nook of the constructing, overlooking the United Nations rose backyard and, past that, the East River and Queens. The immense workplace, flooded with pure gentle, was like a museum, decked out with numerous certificates, diplomas, recognitions, and awards Don had received in reference to Spectrum or considered one of his different ventures, together with McGraw-Hill’s Commonplace Handbook of Digital Engineering, a money cow for a few years.

Don, it may be mentioned, was not a gregarious man. Throughout a typical day, he largely saved to his workplace, his solitude gently however firmly protected by his assistant, the late
Nancy Hantman. Nonetheless, he sometimes stunned us staffers. Someday, out of the blue, he introduced a images contest after which submitted some entries of his personal. These included a few very slickly lit portraits of vogue fashions carrying leotards.

Don’s rigorously top-down managerial fashion was very a lot a product of his time. He had a watch for expertise, and he believed in giving folks loads of room to maneuver. It led to many nice tales—and journalism awards. In 1979,
Spectrum explained to the world precisely what prompted the partial meltdown in a reactor core on the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. In 1982, simply after the struggle within the Falklands, the journal made a wide-ranging assessment of quickly advancing army applied sciences. In 1985, we unraveled the chain of occasions that led inexorably to the breakup of AT&T and accurately predicted what it could imply for the way forward for communications. And in 1992, we detailed how Iraq tried to construct an atomic bomb, and the way the invention of that clandestine effort led to new concepts about safeguarding nuclear weaponry. All 4 of these investigations received Nationwide Journal Awards, placing Spectrum among the many only a few—rely ’em on one hand—affiliation magazines ever to win the awards repeatedly.