My Three Children
I am the proud father of a five-month-old girl, a two-year-old boy and a three-year old magazine.
Like most new parents, I worry about my children. Why does Catie have so much gas at night? How can I help Christopher with his separation anxiety? How did that typo get into last month's issue?
I search for metrics to assure myself that everyone is OK. Catie and Christopher weigh 14 and 31 lbs. respectively; both are healthy weights for their ages.
TechNews also appears to be thriving. Throughout most of its life, it has been a 32-page magazine--a typical issue might have 22 pages of editorial and 10 pages of ads. Occasionally, especially around NEXPO, our crack advertising sales team might deliver closer to 18 ad pages, and we'd bump the total page count to 40.
Recently, my eldest has been on a growth spurt. We've begun putting out 40-page issues on a fairly regular basis, even during the non-NEXPO season.
As I started to lay out this issue, the advertising folks told me we'd have 22 pages of ads. Wow. That would leave only 18 pages of edit in a 40-page book, probably not enough to get the job done. So I decided to take a small risk and plan our first-ever 48-page issue.
This was a risk because we would have to fill 26 pages of edit, more than we'd ever attempted. The risk was small because I had an ace-in-the-hole: our new associate editor, Mark Toner.
Many of you probably know Mark as the technology staff writer for Presstime. Or, I should say, the "award-winning" technology staff writer for Presstime--Mark recently won the Society of National Association Publications Gold Award for feature writing. (The winning story was his Special Report on digital photography, "Photo Realism," in the October 1997 Presstime.)
Mark now divides his time between writing for Presstime and editing TechNews. He joins me as we get close to our deadline, making the all-important first cut at stories and clearing out the edit queue.
It's a good deal all around. The increase in ad pages has given us sufficient revenue to add a half-time editor, which has allowed us to add more edit pages, which allows us to serve you better. Mark Toner gets a well-deserved promotion and some additional editing experience.
And me? I get to spend more time with my human children.
Clark Robinson
Editor