Acumen Journal of Life Sciences, a promising and thoughtful bio-sciences journal edited by former Red Herring editor and a good friend of ours, Jason Pontin has decided to cease publication. This is yet another San Francisco media outlet that has fallen on hard times. We had heard about this last week but were not able to confirm. Given that there was little reliance on advertising, this comes as a surprise. Clearly, Bio Sciences is not ready to support a standalone magazine of its own. It was funded by Eric Greenberg who in previous life had started Scient and Viant, two defunct internet consulting firms. He could not run a business then, and it is clear he cannot run it now.
Acumen was originally formed as a consulting operation – a startup I was working for met with them – they had the most incomprehensible presentation I’ve ever seen. It was completely unclear what service they actually delivered. Anyway, then they turned into the journal and we know the rest.
how does one go about trying to recoup the subscription fee paid to this magazine ………….. as to Jason Pontin, I think he specializes in getting wealthy individuals to front his attempts to put out magazines ……… he can’t do it and generally speaking the folks he cons definitely can’t run a publication