Inside Instrumentation

This week's issue of C&EN debuts a new monthly feature, Inside Instrumentation, which will highlight newsworthy developments in the instrumentation industry (see page 36). Inside Instrumentation, which will appear in the second issue of each month, is being reported and written by two C&EN veterans, Senior Correspondent Ann Thayer in Houston and Associate Editor Celia Henry in Washington, D.C.

Laboratory instrumentation is one of the drivers of progress in the chemical and life sciences enterprises. Whenever I tour a university or industry lab, I am astounded by the sophistication of the instrumentation that is being harnessed by researchers. I recall the nuclear magnetic resonance, infrared, and UV-visible spectrophotometers that were available in the labs when I was a student a long time ago. We thought they were really something, and, for their time, they were. But they were crude devices compared with those available today.

In Inside Instrumentation, Thayer and Henry will focus on both business developments in the instrumentation industry and significant new product introductions and applications. The items in the feature are being written the same way we produce Business, Government & Policy, and Science & Technology Concentrates: Thayer and Henry will follow up on leads they pick up from sources or at conferences and in the form of press releases, new product announcements, and journal articles. As always, we will work hard to ensure that what we report is timely and accurate.

Today marks C&EN's 82nd anniversary. The magazine debuted as the News Edition of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry on Jan. 10, 1923. C&EN has continually reinvented itself over those 82 years, usually by adding new areas of editorial coverage as chemistry evolved as a discipline and the chemical industry developed into the global enterprise that exists today.

Inside Instrumentation represents another kind of reinvention, a return of sorts to our roots. Editorial coverage of analytical instrumentation was a C&EN mainstay for much of the magazine's existence. We have, of course, always covered important developments in analytical chemistry and new instrumentation, and Pittcon is a meeting that several C&EN reporters attend each year. Nevertheless, over the past decade C&EN ceded to some extent the instrumentation beat to our sister ACS publication Today's Chemist at Work.

As readers of Today's Chemist at Work know, ACS made the difficult decision to terminate publication of that magazine at the end of 2004. Although TCAW was a fine publication that served its readers well, the severe contraction of advertising expenditures since 2000, which has affected all magazines in the "business-to-business" marketplace, made it financially impossible for ACS to continue to publish TCAW.

At C&EN, we view the loss of TCAW with sadness but also as an opportunity to renew C&EN's commitment to comprehensive coverage of the laboratory instrumentation business. Inside Instrumentation represents one manifestation of that commitment. There will be others in 2005, including major feature stories on the instrumentation used in food science labs and on separations science. Our coverage of Pittcon, already the most comprehensive report on this important annual event, will also have a new look this year with a detailed review of noteworthy instrumentation introduced at the exhibit.

C&EN's increased coverage of instrumentation is just one manifestation of the constant change that is the hallmark of a successful magazine. As I wrote one year ago in my first editorial as C&EN editor-in-chief, despite the changes, there are a number of important constants in what we do here at C&EN, and it is worthwhile reiterating them in this first editorial of 2005. C&EN's editorial mission is one such constant: "To cover news, events, and trends across the chemical enterprise–industry, academe, government, and other chemically related sectors–in a timely, accurate, and balanced way." Another constant is our dedication to accuracy, which is the bedrock on which one builds a credible newsmagazine. C&EN's staff of reporters and editors works diligently to get every fact right, and when we make a mistake, we correct it.

Please check out Inside Instrumentation each month. I think you will find it to be an informative and useful addition to the package of information contained in C&EN.

Thanks for reading.

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.