John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part II

Enlarge Image Image Gallery John and Jane Shuttleworth started Mother Earth News in 1970. MOTHER EARTH NEWS STAFF

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Five years ago, with only $1,500 in operating capital and a kitchen table to work on, John and Jane Shuttleworth founded The Mother Earth News. The publication has since grown into a circulation of 250,000 and has "spunoff" a mail-order general store, a syndicated newspaper column, a syndicated. radio program, and several environmentally oriented research projects.

But why? Why did the Shuttleworth's found Mother Earth News in the first place? And why has the magazine grown so lustily during a period that has seen many other environmental and alternatives publications come and go? And where is Mother Earth News headed now? And why?

John Shuttleworth answered some of those questions in the first half of our two-part interview. Now, in the closing portion of that interview, he gives away more of the secrets of Mother Earth News' success.

Shuttleworth next explains how anyone he says can predict the future with accuracy and names some of the people whom he feels have done so in the past. He then closes by listing some of his own rather black forecasts ... and the steps he feels we must take immediately if we expect to save ourselves, humanity, and the planet during the cataclysmic times he sees lying just ahead.

PLOWBOY: John, you've evaded the question long enough. Just what is "positioning"? And how have you used it to make Mother Earth News grow so rapidly during the past five years years that have seen a great number of other — and often far better financed — environmental and alternatives publications come and go?

SHUTTLEWORTH: All right. Here's where we strike a small blow against what the American system has become and for what it's supposed to be. Because the way I used positioning was by not using it at all. I used "identity" instead.

PLOWBOY: Please explain the difference.

SHUTTLEWORTH: I can best do that by using another magazine as an example. A magazine which unlike Mother Earth News does play The Great American Marketing Game. A magazine which, therefore, has both. an identity and positioning. A magazine by the name of Sports Illustrated. 

Now it should be obvious to anyone who hears that title and to anyone who actually reads the periodical that Sports Illustrated is a sports magazine. Right? Wrong!

Wrong, that is, according to the hucksters responsible for creating a Sports Illustrated image in the public mind. Because when you say "sports magazine," the public thinks blue collar images. Beer and sweat socks and boxing pugs and things like that. Which doesn't sell many copies of your publication to the upwardly mobile strivers the big spenders that advertisers love so well. Which, in turn, means that if you're in the business for the money — which Time-Life was when it launched Sports Illustrated — you fold the periodical and try something else. Right? Wrong!

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