The Penn Stater Magazine

Greetings from San Francisco

March 25, 2009 at 4:13 pm Tina Hay Leave a comment

So I’m out here for the CASE Editors Forum, the annual get-together for those of us who do alumni magazines—mostly at the college and university level, but there also are some folks here from what we call “independent schools,” i.e., private K-12 schools. For example, I had the editor of the Sidwell Friends School alumni magazine in my session this morning.

The session I gave was a three-hour workshop called “Magazines 101,” aimed primarily at rookie editors, although there were quite a few veterans in the room. (I still don’t get why they signed up for the workshop!) I talked about some basic principles that guide us at The Penn Stater—for example, we make the assumption that people are fundamentally disinclined to read our magazines, that they’re busy and they’re bombarded with information from other sources, and that somehow we have to be engaging enough that they’ll read us in spite of themselves. I also talked a lot about storytelling, about design principles I’ve picked up over the years, about covers, stuff like that.

I heard a couple of things that made me realize how lucky we are to have the support of our higher-ups to produce a quality magazine. One was during the Q&A portion of my workshop, when someone asked how to turn a story about their school’s new strategic plan into an interesting magazine cover. I had just gotten done talking about the reality that your readers don’t care about your school’s new strategic plan, and putting it on the cover is not going to make them want to open the magazine. But she has no choice—her boss insists that this be on the cover. I tried to think of how she could make that into a good cover, and I just had nothing to offer her. The best I could tell her to do was to just hold her nose and do it, just get it over with—and be grateful that in a few months she’ll be putting out the next issue and that stupid strategic-planning cover will be behind her.

The other sobering moment was when the editor of one of the best alumni magazines in the country told me at lunch that her magazine is essentially being discontinued by her administration, and replaced with some sort of slick marketing magazine that she will merely “lead the editing of,” in the words of one of her higher-ups. She’s very savvy about how to produce an engaging magazine, and it sounds like the new administrators above her don’t really have much respect for her expertise. It made me very sad.

Dale Keiger of Johns Hopkins magazine was sitting next to me and said something like, “All of us are only one administrator away from having everything change for us.” I’m not remembering his quote exactly, but basically he was saying that all it takes is one new, unenlightened boss, and we too could be putting stories about strategic plans on our covers.

On a happier note, San Francisco is gorgeous! The weather is beautiful and, of course, so is the city. I got in early yesterday afternoon and bumped into two colleagues from Swarthmore’s alumni magazine and we spent the afternoon poking around the city with our cameras. (We weren’t playing hooky—the conference hadn’t started yet.) Here’s Jeff Lott, the Swarthmore editor, at (no duh) the Golden Gate Bridge, which we walked the whole way across!

And here’s a shot of the view from the top-floor restaurant in our hotel.

Not too slouchy, huh?

OK, lunch break is over. Off to the afternoon sessions.

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: The Penn Stater magazine. Tags: CASE, CASE Editors Forum, Dale Keiger, Golden Gate Bridge, Jeff Lott, Johns Hopkins, Magazines 101, Sidwell Friends School, Swarthmore.