We are tearing through the cabbage patch today, putting together the next issue,but we thought you might be interested in this over at MnSpeak, where we appreciate the frank talk about our humble little magazine, and we’d join in the fun, but too much too much too much.
Let me just say that the thread on columnists is one that’s been going on inner-office since we launched this thing three years ago, and probably goes on at every publication under the sun–at least the ones with regular columnists.
Twas ever thus. Suffice to say that people love them or hate them, and they certainly don’t mind speaking up about it. People feel the same way about Jim Walsh, Nick Coleman, Katherine Kersten, David Brooks, whomever. It’s the upside AND the downside of publishing columns. (You might have heard that the Times will soon require subscriptions to gain access to their columnists, which tells you something about how people congregate around columns.) It is also worth noting that a columnist that makes readers mad is frequently just as valuable as a columnist that makes readers glad; that means lots of people are reading and responding. Now the trick, from an editor’s point of view, is gauging whether MOST readers, whose feelings are not strong enough to disturb The Force one way or another, give a shit.
The worst thing is to have any space dedicated on a regular basis to something no one cares about, a place-holder, a contract being executed, whether that’s a column, a news department, a photo, or a standing head. If I had to defend The Rake in sixteen words or less, I would say every word in it is there for a reason, and that reason is to entertain readers. It’s not any more complicated than that. We do not always succeed, hell, we may never succeed, but we certainly don’t plan to stop trying. I frequently am asked by interested readers (and publishers and ad-sales folk) why any particular thing is in the magazine, and my capacity to astonish people with real, reasonable-sounding answers is endless. Want to know why it’s in the magazine? I have the answer!
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