Posts tagged ‘CASE’
Hauling in a Little Hardware
We’ve been so swamped this summer that I haven’t had a chance to share the news that the magazine has won some more awards. Heck, I haven’t even had a chance to tell the magazine staff—or the boss—about some of these. Anyway, here’s the scoop:
—We won the Public Relations Society of America‘s “Bronze Anvil” award as the top magazine in the country. (Why it’s called the Bronze Anvil when it’s for first place, not third, has always been a mystery to me.) I have to say that we’re always a little ambivalent about winning an award for public relations efforts, because we don’t think of The Penn Stater as being a stereotypically PR-oriented magazine, full of happy talk about how great everything is at Dear Old State. But we’d like to believe that our (more…)
Two Articles Worth Reading
I mentioned the other day that we hadn’t won anything in the overall magazine category in this year’s CASE awards, but that we did win two gold medals in the category called “Best Articles of the Year.” I thought you might want to see the two articles that won.
One of the gold awards was for “The Family Tree” (Nov-Dec 2008), a story by Vicki Glembocki ’93, ’02g, about the film No. 4 Street of Our Lady, which chronicles the heroic efforts of a Polish woman to shelter several Jewish families from the Nazis during the Holocaust. The film is the work of three Penn State faculty members—one of whom is the daughter of one of the Jews who was saved.
As for the other gold award, well, a year or so we learned of a Penn State grad, Andrew Bieniawski ’89, who leads a U.S. government effort to track down and remove nuclear materials that are still scattered throughout eastern Europe, remnants of the Cold War. The effort often involves delicate negotiations with other countries, and lots of secretive work under cover of darkness. We sent Jason Fagone ’01 over to Hungary to follow one such cloak-and-dagger mission, and the resulting article, “The Hungary Job” (Jan-Feb 2009) is one of the most engrossing reads we’ve printed in a long time. It won the other gold medal.
You can download a PDF of “The Family Tree” here and a PDF of “The Hungary Job” here.
And, if you don’t already get the print version of The Penn Stater magazine, you can have it sent to your mailbox six times a year simply by joining the Penn State Alumni Association. Click here to sign up.
Tina Hay, editor
The Best Alumni Magazines in the Country
Stanford Magazine, one of my favorites—and a gold medal winner this year
You may remember that two years ago we were named the top alumni magazine in the country—we won the “grand gold” from our national professional group, called the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, or CASE.
The grand gold is better known as the Sibley Award, and it’s what pretty much every alumni magazine editor dreams of winning someday.
Last year we won a gold, though not the Sibley—that went to the very fine Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. But we were very happy with our gold, happy to again be considered one of the best alumni magazines in the country.
This year? We didn’t win a danged thing.
(Well, not in the overall magazines category anyway. We did win two golds in CASE’s “Best Articles of the Year” category, but more about that another time.)
The Carleton College Voice, consistently one of the best alumni magazines in the country
CASE recently announced this year’s winners in College and University General Interest Magazines, as the category is called, and while we’re of course disappointed not to be among them, it’s very much a deserving bunch. I thought you might be interested in seeing what the really good alumni magazines across the nation are, in the eyes of this year’s judges.
Gold (one of these will get chosen next week to win the Sibley Award):
Kenyon College Alumni Bulletin
In Touch (King’s College London)
Princeton Alumni Weekly
Stanford Magazine
The alumni mag of the Fashion Institute of Technology is gorgeous.
Silver:
Hue (Fashion Institute of Technology)
Middlebury Magazine
Suffolk Alumni Magazine (Suffolk University)
Notre Dame Magazine
Bronze:
Carleton College Voice
Columbia Magazine (Columbia University)
Dartmouth Alumni Magazine
Duke Magazine
Pomona College Magazine
Smith Alumnae Magazine
We get a lot of these magazines at the office, and it’s hard to argue with the judges—these are great magazines. I love the Stanford and Carleton magazines especially—when they come in the mail, I drop what I’m doing to take a look, and inevitably there’s something in there that makes me say, “Why didn’t I think of that?” That often happens with the Kenyon, Dartmouth, and Middlebury magazines too. Notre Dame’s magazine is very thoughtful and writerly, while Hue is visually stunning; I’m glad to see that the judges appreciated both.
There are a few magazines on the list here that I’m not as familiar with, and that’s part of the value of the awards competition—we’ll contact the editors of those magazines and see if we can get on their mailing list (and offer to send them The Penn Stater in exchange). A few months from now, we’ll gain access to the judges’ reports, and that can be educational as well.
And, of course, there’s always next year….
Tina Hay, editor
Your Chance to Weigh In
We’re in the middle of a survey of our readers (or, more accurately, a randomly selected sample of them) to gauge their impressions of the magazine, what they’re interested in reading, and related questions.
We sent what’s called an “e-mail blast” on Wednesday to a group of Alumni Association members chosen at random from our alumni database, asking them to click on a link to take them to an online survey. If you received an e-mail that looks like the one here, I hope you’ll fill out the survey.
We do a smaller-scale survey after every issue of the magazine—we’ve been doing that for 12 years now—and while that gives us good anecdotal information about what readers think about specific covers and feature stories, the sample size is pretty small. The big survey we’re doing right now should produce a sample size big enough to yield very solid results.
We’re doing the survey in conjunction with our national professional association, called the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, who has in turn contracted with a vendor called Qualtrics Inc. We’ll not only get detailed results about The Penn Stater but also be able to see how we compare to alumni magazines from other schools. And best of all, it costs us nothing—CASE is doing the survey project as a service to our members.
So, again, if you received an e-mail about the survey (it should have arrived Wednesday afternoon), I hope you’ll take the time to complete it. If you already have, that’s wonderful. And if you weren’t among the random sample that got tapped, but you still have something you want to tell us, by all means feel free to e-mail me anytime at tinahay@psu.edu.
Tina Hay, editor
Greetings from San Francisco
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
No, I Don’t Have Any Antlers to Check, Thank You
I was just checking in online for my flight to San Francisco tomorrow for the aforementioned editors’ conference and was pleasantly surprised to see that the airline lets you pay the not-so-pleasant checked-bag fee ahead of time, online. One fewer thing to do at the airport. And I was amused at the pop-up list of items that you can’t check ahead of time:
Do they get a lot of passengers bringing Christmas trees on board? How much extra would it cost to check a vaulting pole, I wonder? (And where exactly would they stow it?)
Tina Hay, editor
Off to California (Soon, Anyway)
This weekend I’ve been finishing up a presentation on sports coverage that I’ll be making at our national editors’ conference next week in San Francisco. Alumni magazine editors gather once a year to talk about their craft, and while the tough economy means that a lot of editors won’t be able to attend this year, we still should have more than 200 in attendance.
The description of the sports panel mentions that “Our team of experts consists of a sports nut at a sports nutty school, a self-avowed sports novice who nonetheless has published a memorable athletics cover story, and one of Sports Illustrated’s finest practitioners of literary journalism.” Apparently the sports nut at the sports nutty school is me.
It’s true that I’ve been paying attention to sports since I was a kid. As evidence of that, I plan to show attendees this gem from a scrapbook I kept when I was about 11: an autographed photo of Roman Gabriel. I had quite the crush on Roman Gabriel. If you look closely, you can see that he wrote: “To Tina – Always a 110% – Roman Gabriel.”
I also read all of the books in the Chip Hilton sports series (anyone else remember those?), went to Pirate baseball games at Forbes Field, the whole bit.
And, as evidence that I work at a sports-nutty school, I’ll show them this information from our reader surveys:
A lot of alumni magazines don’t even have a sports section, but at The Penn Stater, it’s readers’ second-most popular section. I know that a lot of editors in the audience work at schools where sports isn’t quite as dominant as it is at Penn State, so my challenge will be to offer advice that’s useful to them as well.
Tina Hay, editor
Courageous Content
I had an unusual speaking gig the other day (well, OK, it was a week ago Thursday … but I forgot to mention it until now). I was talking to about 250 magazine editors and administrators at 49 schools in the U.S. and Canada—all of whom were invisible to me. Yup, a webinar. The topic was “Courageous Content” and we advertised it this way:
For alumni magazines to have credibility, readers need to trust that they’re getting the straight story about their alma mater—both the good news and the bad. All too often, though, campus publications shy away from reporting on controversial events or meaty issues. Learn why it’s useful to take on some of those touchier topics, as well as strategies for gently moving your magazine in that direction.
Jeez, why so serious?
The event was sponsored by our national professional organization, called CASE, and the presenters were supposed to be my boss (Roger Williams ’73, ’75g, ’88g, executive director of the Alumni Association) and me. But Roger was stuck in an ice storm in Arkansas, so I did it solo. Barb Marshall, our staff assistant, snapped this picture of me in the act. (I got to use Roger’s office, since he wasn’t there.)
Our basic philosophy at The Penn Stater is that we need to give readers both the good news and the bad about Penn State—we can’t just be a “happy talk” publication, as Roger calls it. So we haven’t shied away from reporting on some touchy subjects over the years (the Rene Portland controversy comes to mind, along with profiles of controversial alumni like Valerie Plame ’85 and Rick Santorum ’80, ’86g), nor do we hesitate to print letters to the editor that are critical of either the magazine or Penn State. Not all alumni magazines are able to take this stance, but hopefully the webinar got some good conversations started at the schools that participated.
Tina Hay, editor
Subscribe
