02/05/2012
Welcome to the editor's blog at Fort Worth, Texas magazine.
In this little corner of the world, we'll answer questions and issue pleas, take suggestions and ideas and, in general, try to lift the veil of the magazine process. I'll do most of the posting here ... but from time to time and as appropriate, I'll invite other staff members to respond to questions or when they have something burning to say. Perhaps a way to start the dialogue is to address some frequent questions. In this posting, we'll examine the Events Listings. Perhaps you have been disappointed that your item did not appear in the listings.There could be several reasons for this. The most common one is that we didn't get the information soon enough. Very few people — even professional journalists — understand the very long lead times of magazines.
An example:
We'd like, say, the October magazine to be in distribution the last week of September. For that to happen, the magazine has to be at the printer about Sept. 10. For us to be able to make that deadline, we generally assign copy deadlines of Aug. 15 for the October magazine. Along about Sept. 1, it becomes difficult to swap things in and out of the book. Of course, we'll move heaven and earth to fix error if we know of it. But routine changes get rare the closer we get to press start.
So when we say in the introduction to the Events that we want your information two months in advance, we really mean it.
Another common reason — the event doesn't fit the definition for a listing.
An example:
You are attempting to raise funds to build a home for abandoned aardvarks and you can't understand why your event didn't make it. In general, items in the events listed are open to all members of the public either free or by admission. You won't generally see fund-raising events in the listings. These are handled elsewhere in the magazine and through direct solicitations by the sponsoring organizations. I make very few exceptions. Space is also a concern but not as critical to decision-making as the lead-time.
We print lots of pictures in the magazine as illustration in events and other articles. But we can't print just any image.
The magazine is printed on very high quality presses and that means that we have to go to press with a very high quality product.
So if you send pictures for us to consider whether voluntary or in response to a request from us, they must be high-resolution photographs. Our minimum is 300 dpi and sometimes, depending on image size, that may not be good enough. In a perfect world, we'd get them in RAW format but JPG and TIF are generally good enough.
I've included two photos here as examples:
One is normal. The other illustrates what happens when we attempt to print that same picture at too low a resolution. (OK, so this is an extreme exception, but you get the point.) Something similar happens when we try to reproduce a photograph printed in a book or a newspaper. It just doesn't work at our level of printing.
I can receive images of up to about 4 megabytes by e-mail. Above that, we have to switch to FTP or some other form of delivery.
And the illustration needs to be interesting — a judgment that always is in the eye of the beholder. We have an excellent design team and I always like to give them a selection of photos to consider, both vertical and horizontal.
One other thing: Images you send or offer to us must be images that we can reproduce without violating intellectual property laws. In other words, you must own them or be authorized to distribute them.
Back to Events
In the end, I am the primary contact for event listings and am the one responsible for them.
I actually (sort of) enjoy assembling the list. Even I don't know why.
