Interregnum, week one | Pinnacle Newsletter #59
#59 Interregnum, week one
As I write this, I can hear the ceaseless rotor roar of chinooks and the repetitive thumps as they drop hundreds of tons of ballast into a breach in the river wall of the River Steeping near Wainfleet a few miles away. The flooding in my area this week has been bad, thanks to two and a half months' worth of rainfall in only a few days. It’s put a stop to my morning walks until today, and has led to cancelled walking plans this weekend as well (the railway line in and out of Skegness is now expected to remain closed until Tuesday).
It’s been far from a typical week for me professionally too. This has been the first of my four weeks at the helm of The Great Outdoors magazine as acting editor, and week one in the production schedule for our August issue. Although I’ve helped get TGO issues to press before, this will be the first time I’ll have guided the whole process from start to finish, and also the first time overall responsibility has rested on my shoulders.
In no particular order, here are a few thoughts and impressions from this week.
Although all features were of course commissioned well in advance, it feels strange to know that I get the final say on design decisions – whether we need an info box or map in a particular feature, for example, or which letters we choose for the letters page.
The value of a good team really makes itself felt in a project like this. It’s great to know that there are highly experienced people I trust handling tasks in the background. Chiara, Roger, Chris, Helen and Sally are good people to have on the team. I’m usually a bit of a lone ranger in my editorial career, so being able to delegate is fantastic.
I’m spending far more time on email than I usually like to spend (my ideal time spent with email per day would be about ten minutes). However, the proportion of useful email time has also gone up. Put another way, in my usual working life, at least 50 per cent of email feels like a complete waste of time; this week it’s been down to around 30 per cent, which is impressive.
Actual editing – the deep, silent, creative work of honing and polishing prose – constitutes less of the overall process than some might expect, but it’s still my favourite part, and arguably the most important. I’m well aware how lucky we are to have sub-editors and proofreaders, too.
I’ve been away from my personal social media accounts this week, which has really helped me to find the focus and time I need to devote to the projects I have on the go at the moment.
There’s a great sense of excitement and anticipation in helping an issue of my favourite outdoor magazine take tangible form, rising out of a sea of Trello cards, emails, Word files, JPEGs and InDesign layouts. The craft of good storytelling may be an intensely personal thing, all about the connections and flashes of insight that take place in the brain of the individual contributor, but the process of creating a magazine is one of information manipulation, organisation, strategising, and good old-fashioned project management. The whole is, however, greater than the sum of its parts, and without that deep well of experience and creativity tapped by writers and photographers no outdoor magazine would even exist. As someone who is both a writer and an editor, I try to keep this fact foremost in my mind at all times.
In other news…
A little bird tells me that Bridgedale are actively seeking brand ambassadors. They are looking for outdoorsy people who can write well and who have an active social media presence. An official channel may open at some later point, but for now, if you think this could be for you, it’s worth emailing info@bridgedale.com with a subject line something like ‘Product Ambassador’.
Good news from Vertebrate Publishing, who have secured a £250,000 investment. If you haven’t noticed, Vertebrate have been producing top-quality books on mountaineering and the outdoors at a prodigious rate in recent years; long may it continue.
Recently published
What I’ve been reading this week – this week’s quality online reads on the outdoors, backpacking and environment.
The summer 2019 Twitter burnout – some thoughts on why I began this particular open-ended break from my personal Twitter account. I’ll be back, but I’m not sure when, and I’m really enjoying my time away from the whirlpool.
Until next time,
Alex
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