There's no shortage of editorial ideas

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1985 by Peter Jacobi

Ideas are everywhere, in everything. The well of inspiration does not run dry; we only think it does, in moments of exasperation. As editors, we are at home in the realm of ideas. We nurture and expand them. We use them. We share them. If it is our audience that gives our magazine life, it is we as editors who sustain that life with the food of ideas.

Consider what thinkers have said about ideas, because what they've thought is food for our thought.

* W. Somerset Maugham, writer: "To conceive ideas is exhilarating, but it is only safe when you conceive so many that you ascribe no undue consequence to them and can take them for what they are worth."

An editor is safe only when he (along with those he calls upon to help him) thinks up so many ideas that nowhere near all of them could be used in an issue, in a year, in two or three.

* Susan K. Langer, philosopher: "A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form for us before the light fell on them."

Isn't it our job as editors (and writers) to alter people's perceptions about all or some aspect of our coverage area? We want them to be renewed or made new by what we have to teach and tell them.

* Alfred North Whitehead, philosopher: "Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. They must constantly be seen in some new aspect. Some element of novelty must be brought into it freshly from time to time; when that stops, it dies."

As journalists we know that ideas must be used, and usually used quickly. We also come to know that the somewhat different way of looking at and using an idea gains us that sought-after reader attention.

* Wallace Stevens, poet: "All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas."

Well, it won't hurt to look--really look--around us, away from the too close and the office-bound toward what's out there to inspire us.

* Grant Wood, painter: "All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow."

And like the artist, the editor must always be thinking. Ideas can come at the strangest times in the strangest places for the strangest reasons.

* Victor Hugo, writer: "A stand can be made against invasion by an army; no stand can be made against invasion by an idea."

We can subvert and exalt, or at least enrich our readers by invading their minds with the wealth of material in our publication. And isn't that what keeps us going? Doesn't that give a sense of beneficient power?

* Proverb: "Nothing is so new as what has long been forgotten."

Repetition doesn't hurt if sufficient time separates usages. And besides, we never look at a subject the same way twice; experience alters our approach. And besides, the audience is always changing.

Expansion and germination

A good editor takes the seemingly circumscribed world of GQ or Bride or Ceramics or Candy Manufacturer and turns a subject--which in an encyclopedia amounts to one compact article--into a continual flowering of information and expertise and entertainment.

"The best ideas generate in our offices," says Travel & Leisure's editor in chief Pamela Fiori, "as they should. They're based on our experiences and our knowledge of our subject matter and our spheres."

And that suggests full use of staff--even augmented staff (your trusted freelancers)--to brainstorm. Some of that thinking is best done alone. At other times, and with regularity, you should gather to talk. And to listen.

A journalist learns early that at least half of his success depends on listening. The editor must realize that listening is at the center of his job of magazine editing--listening for ideas, in this case.

Leo Lerman, the veteran of our business, told his "Dear Reader" of Vanity Fair in one of the few issues he edited:

We are constantly being asked how we get our "stories." "Crying Wolfe," in this issue--there's happy coincidence. Judith Martin, our critic at large, came to lunch to talk about future columns; I dropped her at her publisher's, returned to my office to find her on the blower. "Quick," she advised, "call Susan. They've found a lost Thomas Wolfe poem!" . . . Francine du Plessix Gray talked passionately about exploring national conscience, about the Klarsfelds--Beate, the daughter of a German soldier, and Serge, French-Jewish, his father killed by Nazis--the Klarsfelds who hunted down Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal. So we sent Francine and Dominique Nabokov, French-born photographer, to Paris. Francine worked four months on this piece . . . On a mid-spring evening I went to a party honoring A Celebrated American Author. So huge was this "affair" that I never got upstairs to join the brouhaha. I stood below, a sort of side-show on the way to the fair. Joseph Brodsky stopped for a moment. "You know about the Auden celebration in October?" he asked. "Will you write about Auden for us?" I asked, remembering Joseph's deep involvement with the other great poet. "Maybe." Months of nurturing telephone calls. Joseph would write "something short," then "no . . . no . . . I can't," then "well, maybe, perhaps . . ." Editors never give up. At last, "I wrote three pages . . ." Then a cliffhanger silence. And finally, Joseph sent us one of his most glorious essays.