These are hardly halcyon days for Chris Whittle, the media maverick who in the 1980s vowed to revolutionize the industry with his unorthodox magazines, books, television shows, posters, and pamphlets. Many of his high-profile, ambitious properties have been scuttled.

Whittle Communications, the company he established in 1986, once was home to more than thirty small-niche print properties. Today it has staked its future on three risky ventures: Medical News Network (MNN), an interactive information service for doctors; the Edison Project, a for-profit schools chain; and Channel One, the MTV-style classroom news show (see "On Chris Whittle's School-News Scheme," CJR, May/June 1989).

To focus on these electronic efforts the company has virtually abandoned print media and diminished its journalistic efforts. The latest such project to go was Special Report, the network of magazines, posters, and TV programs distributed to 32,000 doctors' offices m once one of its premier efforts. But nothing raises Whittle executives' ire more than the notion that journalism has faded at Whittle Communications. "Journalism is more vital to the company than it has ever been," says David Neuman, Channel One's president of programming. "Every day we do a national newscast that reaches 40 percent of all teenagers."

The privately held company, which has about $ 200 million in revenues, has also struggled with two years of sliding sales. One of its key financial partners, Time Warner Inc., wants to divest its 37 percent stake, and Whittle has recently taken on a new president, former Philips Consumer Electronics Company executive Donald F. Johnstone, to keep a closer eye on finance and operational matters. (Philips has a 25 percent stake in the company; other backers include Associated Newspaper Holdings, with 24.6 percent, and Chris Whittle and various limited partners, with 13.4 percent.)

All of this has pegged Chris Whittle as someone who promises too much. "Whittle is a big thinker, maybe too big," says George Hayes, senior vicepresident of McCann-Erickson New York, an advertising agency. "He made everything he did sound grandiose and revolutionary. But if you took a closer look, you could see he didn't build much groundwork for the future and his claims really didn't prove out."

Chris Whittle admits he made mistakes. "I think we were at one time arrogant," he says. "We thumbed our nose at conventional media and we paid a price for that." But he believes he has led the company on a sound, if sometimes rocky, road.

"We are fundamentally the same company we were five years ago: a place-based information company in the education and health care sectors," he says. "But we decided to move to a bigger pond, to electronic media, because we realized it would make this a much more valuable, powerful, and lucrative business."

To be sure, the TV efforts appear to have greater financial potential than Whittle's print endeavors. He estimates that Channel One could be a $ 250 million-a-year business, and MNN could do double that. Furthermore, these enterprises are pioneering interactive television at a time when many other media firms are only starting to talk about it. MNN, for example, offers its audience the chance to access everything from medical journals to product samples.

The company's news roots are certainly evident at MNN. In windowless studios in an underground floor of Rockefeller Center, a staff of 100 assembles a daily twelve-minute news program and various specials that report medical trends, events, conferences, and news.

"Everyone here is trying to create much more realistic expectations," says Geoffrey Darby, MNN's programming chief. Everyone, that is, but Chris Whittle. "Certainly, we didn't evolve gracefully, but we're always going to be out there carving our own path," he says. "I challenge you to think of any $ 200 million media company that has the prospects we have."

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe