There's no shortage of editorial ideas

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

And then there's the Cleveland guitar salesman who organized "The Committee Against Physical Prejudice" because movies and television tend to portray ordinary looking people unfavorably. Stories blossom from folks like this.

Yes, ideas come from everywhere and anyone.

* A neighbor wonders how he can pay for his youngster's college education. Light. A story with hints on how to do it.

* A national magazine pronounces the end of suburbia's golden age. Light. A local magazine can develop the local version.

* A dietician lectures other dieticians and charges that Canadians eat more than five pounds of food additives a year. Light. Do a story on chancy nonessentials in people's diets.

* A study by a team of psychologists reveals that children are not slaves to television, but can turn off in their minds material that doesn't interest them. Light. Does it teach them just to turn off?

* Bumper stickers shout, "A day without Jesus is like a day without sunshine," and "The end of starvation, an idea whose time has come." Light. Stories about new evangelical fervor and the world of the bumper sticker.

And if the bumper sticker, then the sloganed T-shirt. And if the sloganed T-shirt, then decaled buttons.

Stories of day to day

A New York City token booth attendant, down in the subway, says most of her time is spent watching the passengers: "They like to run," she's noticed. "They don't feel right if they don't run. This is what I watch--the rat race. I watch them run to work, and I watch them run home."

Stories about people watching people. And stories about people on their job. In The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" I read:

Probably we are not going to New Iberia, Louisiana, for the forty-third Louisiana Sugar Cane Festival, the last weekend of September, but we are looking at the brochure (entitled "Hi Sugar!") that a friend in New Orleans sent us, and are imagining all the events we'll miss, beginning on Friday the twenty-eighth ("Farmer's Day--All Day in City of New Iberia--Dress Farmer Attire") and including the "Blessing of the 1984 Sugar Cane Crop and Harvest Season in the Fields," the High Sugar Cane Yield Awards Luncheon, the coronation of Queen Sugar XLIII, who reigns over the festival with King Sucrose XLIII, and the "Queen's Parade of the Sugar Producing Parishes of Louisiana," with the Queen and her Sugar Lumps riding a float down Main Street. "Keep America Sweet," the brochure says.

Stories about celebrations and commemorations.

American Way served to shake loose a set of ideas with contributor Maureen Crockett's little piece about a much-used, little thought-about item:

One of the most pleasant aspects of flying is that the phone doesn't ring. Ownership of a phone, to paraphrase Faulkner, puts me at the mercy of any damn fool with a dime and a finger to dial with.

As a landscape artist I am working at home most of the day, and I get some weird calls. A ringing phone is importunate. It might be my husband calling to say, "Let me take you out to that new expensive restaurant tonight." It might be President Reagan wanting my input on the tax cut. It might be the bank saying, "We made a mistake in your checking account. Add $100 to your checkbook." What it really is is some com pany wanting to photograph my family cheap.