The Penn Stater Magazine

More From San Francisco

March 26, 2009 at 12:03 pm Tina Hay Leave a comment

One of the fun things about the annual editors’ conference is that we editors get to see all our buddies from other alumni magazines, most of whom we only see once a year at most. At breakfast this morning, for example, I bumped into David Gibson, who won two Sibley Awards when he was editor of the Cornell University alumni magazine (the Sibley is the top award in our field—we won it two years ago), and Bob Bliwise, who is the editor of the Duke University magazine and who has two Sibleys of his own.

David is the guy on the left; this morning he’s giving a session on how to cover fund-raising news in your magazine in a graceful way. That’s a big issue in our field—many alumni magazines are constantly under pressure from the development folks to do profiles on major donors, stories about how the capital campaign is going, and so on, and yet most reader surveys show that readers have little or no interest in the subject. It’s important to cover that stuff, but how do you do it in a way that readers will actually read? David’s session this morning may answer some of those questions. Oh, and he’s not at Cornell anymore—he left the alumni magazine world and is now director of development communications at Dartmouth, so he has a unique perspective on the subject.

The restaurant at our hotel—the Grand Hyatt on Union Square—is on the top (36th) floor and gives us some spectacular views of the city. Here’s one from this morning where you can see the Golden Gate Bridge.

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: The Penn Stater magazine. Tags: Bob Bliwise, capital campaigns, CASE Editors Forum, Cornell Alumni Magazine, Cornell University, David Gibson, Duke Magazine, Duke University, Golden Gate Bridge, Robert Sibley Award, San Francisco.