MIT Technology Review

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  MIT Technology Review has been tracking the frontiers of science and invention since 1899, making it the oldest technology magazine in the world by its own account. That claim alone raises a question worth sitting with: what kind of publication survives for more than a century and still finds itself relevant? The answer turns out to involve a near-death experience, a wholesale staff firing, a mammoth-elephant hoax that fooled hundreds of newspapers, and a puzzle column that has been running for more than fifty years. The magazine has been many different things to many different eras. It was once a quiet alumni journal aligned with the interests of MIT graduates, written in a tone its own contributors sometimes found impenetrable. It became a glossy newsstand product targeting senior executives and venture capitalists. Then it folded most of that back into something resembling what it had originally been. The question that runs through the whole story is not simply what technology is, but who gets to say which technologies matter.

• 2. A Quarterly for the Alumni

  ›

  In 1899, the New York Times greeted the very first issue with a cordial welcome, describing it as "a clearing house of information and thought" and praising its cover, paper, typography, and illustrations. That debut issue carried the full name The Technology Review, a quarterly published in Boston under the Association of Class Secretaries. From the start, its intended audience was the MIT community, and it served that community for nearly a century before anyone seriously considered changing the arrangement.

  The career of James Rhyne Killian shows how tightly the magazine and the Institute were bound together. Killian graduated from college in 1926 and took his first job as assistant managing editor of Technology Review. He worked his way up to editor-in-chief, then crossed over into Institute administration, becoming executive assistant to MIT president Karl Taylor Compton in 1939, vice-president in 1945, and eventually president himself in 1949.

  The magazine was not shy about controversy in those early decades. The 4th of May 1929, issue published an article by Norbert Wiener, then an assistant professor of mathematics at MIT, pointing out deficiencies in a paper Albert Einstein had released that year. Wiener also took aim at a cardinal who had criticized Einstein's theory, writing that theological discussions have not always been distinguished by their lucidity. Later decades brought similarly pointed material: a 1980 issue attacked the Reagan administration's nuclear defense strategy, and a 1983 cover declared that even if the fusion program produces a reactor, no one will want it. The May 1984 issue ran an expose about hazards in microchip manufacturing.

  The magazine also left itself open to embarrassment. A 1984 April Fools' piece about a Russian scientist using frozen mammoth ova to create a mammoth-elephant hybrid called a "mammontelephas" was picked up by the Chicago Tribune News Service as genuine news and printed as fact in hundreds of newspapers. There were, as the source notes, no obvious giveaways beyond the April 1 date.

• 3. Crisis and Reinvention

  ›

  By 1996, according to the Boston Business Journal, Technology Review had lost one and a half million dollars over the previous seven years and was facing the possibility of folding. Advertising revenue had been declining for years, and the magazine that had once been a prestigious corner of MIT's alumni world was struggling to survive commercially.

  R. Bruce Journey was named publisher, the first full-time publisher in the magazine's history. His predecessor, William J. Hecht, framed the appointment plainly: Journey was there to enhance the magazine's commercial potential. Editor John Benditt replaced Steven J. Marcus. The entire editorial staff was fired. Before the relaunch in April 1998, the departing editor said publicly that nothing would be left of the old magazine except the name.

  Boston Globe columnist David Warsh captured the shift in character. The old magazine had offered what he called old 1960s views of things: humanist, populist, ruminative, suspicious of the unseen dimensions of new technologies. The new one, former editor Marcus said, had adopted a stance of cheerleading for innovation. Under Journey, the magazine billed itself as "MIT's Magazine of Innovation" and set its sights on business leaders, senior executives, researchers, financiers, and policymakers.

  The commercial transformation worked in circulation terms. By 2003, the subscriber base had more than tripled, rising from 92,000 to 315,000. That figure included 220,000 paid subscribers and 95,000 copies sent free to MIT alumni. A German edition launched in August 2003 in partnership with the publishing house Heinz Heise, reaching roughly 50,000 readers as of 2005. A 1994 survey of opinion leaders had already ranked Technology Review first in the nation for credibility, a reputation the new team was banking on.

• 4. Trademark, Trust, and a Retraction

  ›

  On the 6th of June 2001, Fortune and CNET Networks launched a publication called Fortune/CNET Technology Review. MIT sued Time, Inc., Fortune's parent, for infringement of the Technology Review trademark. The case settled quickly. In August of that year, MIT's student newspaper reported that lawyers on both sides were bound by a confidentiality agreement both described as very restrictive. Boston attorney Jason Kravitz, who represented MIT, noted that the rival magazine's mid-case name change to Fortune/CNET Tech Review may itself have been part of the settlement terms.

  A more damaging episode arrived in 2005. Technology Review, alongside Wired News and other publications, found itself embarrassed by a series of stories from freelancer Michelle Delio that contained claims no one could corroborate. Editor-in-chief Jason Pontin acknowledged that of the ten stories published, only three were entirely accurate. In two of them, Pontin said he was fairly confident Delio had either not spoken to the people she cited or had misrepresented those interviews. All the affected stories were retracted.

  Pontin's candor in handling the Delio situation reflected a broader editorial philosophy he brought to the magazine. He had argued that Technology Review's job was not to promote MIT but to analyze and explain emerging technologies. Because he believed new technologies were, generally speaking, a good thing, that analysis did indirectly promote MIT's core activity. His framing drew a careful line between institutional boosterism and genuine editorial independence.

• 5. Return to Seriousness

  ›

  On the 30th of August 2005, Technology Review announced that Journey, who had held the publisher role since 1996, would be replaced by Jason Pontin. The print edition would drop from eleven issues per year to six, while the website would be expanded to publish original daily news and analysis rather than simply republishing print content. The Boston Globe called it a strategic overhaul.

  Pontin said he wanted to focus the print magazine on what print does best: longer-format, investigative stories and colorful imagery. The editorial direction he charted resembled, in the words of the source, that of the historical Technology Review before the 1998 relaunch. He also pursued some idiosyncratic stylistic choices: he convinced copy editors to adopt the diaeresis mark for words like "coördinate," a rarity in native English usage, though he failed to win them over on logical punctuation.

  The shift in top leadership continued quietly. The July/August 2017 issue listed Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau as Chief Executive Officer and Publisher, and David Rotman as Editor, without any accompanying announcement. In November 2017, Gideon Lichfield was named editor-in-chief. In 2021, Mat Honan, who had previously worked at BuzzFeed News and WIRED, took on the editor-in-chief role. Through all of this, the magazine kept expanding internationally, launching a Brazilian edition in 2020 and maintaining editions in Italy, Spain, Germany, China, Japan, and Korea.

• 6. Lists That Shape Careers

  ›

  Every year since 1999, MIT Technology Review has published its Innovators Under 35 list, originally called the TR100. In its first form, it named 100 remarkable innovators under the age of 35. That list ran again from 2002 through 2004, then was renamed the TR35 in 2005 and cut to 35 individuals. In 2013, it became Innovators Under 35.

  The alumni of that list read like a partial history of the modern technology industry. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin received recognition, as did PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, Linux developer Linus Torvalds, and BitTorrent developer Bram Cohen. Ethan Zuckerman, who created Geekcorps, appeared on the list, along with bioengineer Jim Collins, who was later named a MacArthur Fellow, and investors Micah Siegel and Steve Jurvetson.

  The magazine also publishes its annual 10 Breakthrough Technologies list, a catalog of climate tech companies to watch, and a list of ten things that matter in artificial intelligence. In 2011, the Utne Reader gave Technology Review its Independent Press Award for best science and technology coverage. The puzzle column that first appeared in 1966, brought over from Tech Engineering News and authored by Allan Gottlieb, has continued to run for more than fifty years, outlasting every editorial regime the magazine has passed through.