A little more than five years ago a few of us sat down around my dining room table with some legal pads, a laptop computer, and a long list of ideas. Our starting point was an executive summary of an idea for a magazine that I’d written up three years earlier. The magazine had the working title The Village Idiot.
Among the files in the computer’s “Idiot” folder were cash flow projections, printing cost estimates, rate cards, positioning statements, bios of prospective members of the founding team, lists of feature and department ideas, and a list of possible names. That last list was several pages long, and over the next few days, we added even more pages.
Among the prospective names were The Natural, The Local, and The Regular. We spent a good deal of time thinking of all the reasons we couldn’t call it The Regular. We wanted to make a magazine that would be as personable as your buddies at the bar, and although we were certain that concept would eventually get across to the readers, we weren’t so sure we could weather the inevitable storm of potty jokes. I had also once participated in the founding of a newspaper called Sweet Potato, and that was enough to convince me that we should spend as much time as it took to get the right name.
I had read an article about naming companies, which mentioned how George Eastman came up with the name Kodak. There was more to the story, of course, but the basic idea was that the name had the letter K in it, and the letter K made a strong, memorable sound, especially at the end of the word. We pored over the dictionary, the thesaurus, a book called Choose the Right Word, and eventually, after several more days of rejecting words like Crack, Smack, Clock, and Crock, we ended up with Rake, which doesn’t exactly end in a K, but is close enough for English majors.
Now all we had to do was explain our choice. There are lots of definitions and connotations. Rake as in muckraking; rake as in the slant of a theater floor which allows everyone to get a better view; the eighteenth-century Rake’s Progress engravings by Hogarth; and, our favorite meaning: a person who likes to, shall we say, have amorous encounters with other peoples’ spouses. (We don’t do that, of course. We prefer to alter the meaning to “sticking our noses into other peoples’ affairs.”)
So we got all that preliminary stuff out of the way, and, since our spreadsheets told us that it would be easy to make a profit, we made the financial commitment to start the magazine. By early in September, we had hired our first two employees, bought some furniture and computers, and signed an agreement with a web site developer. On September 10, 2001 we signed a five year lease on office space.
The next day, of course, changed the nation’s business climate. But since it hadn’t directly changed the numbers on the budget spreadsheets, we decided to go ahead and publish the first issue of The Rake in March 2002. It turned out that our Rake’s progress wasn’t as easily predicable as Hogarth’s, and there have been some hiccups on the way.
For instance, we still have trouble explaining the name, and what it says about what we do—and more to the point, how we fit into the local media scene. Since we started, we’ve received semi-regular encouragement in the trade press; they’ve recognized how The Rake is a groundbreaking addition to the magazine world. We’re one of very few glossy mags that are distributed free. We’re one of the only regional magazines that doesn’t compile incessant lists of best doctors, lawyers, colleges, restaurants and babysitters. We don’t produce “special sections” that are designed exclusively to sell advertising. (Though we like to sell advertising as much as the next guy, and we wish all of you readers would visit one of our advertisers today and say, “I want to buy that thing you advertised in The Rake, and by the way, thank you for supporting my favorite magazine.” Go ahead, you can do it.)
First and foremost, as I wrote in this space five years ago, we are story tellers. The fun for us in The Rake is to share all sorts of tales that are fascinating in the telling, and rewarding in the response. There’s a simple logic to how this works. Because you readers connect with us on an emotional level, you provide value to our advertisers. It’s gratifying to be told, again and again, that someone loved some story we published, admires our art direction, enjoys our ads, and, as one reader mentioned last week, because of our Rakish coverage, appreciates all the Twin Cities has to offer. Those are the best birthday greetings we could receive.
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