This is a handsome issue, no? Two entities are responsible for that. The first is Point Five Design, our art consultant, comprised of Alissa Levin, Ben Levine, and Nathan Eames. Their classy and intelligent sensibility has graced our magazine and website since 2007. Point Five helps us turn ideas into images when illustrations are needed, and they always seem to find the right artist. They usually work within the confines of a miserly art budget, and it was nice to shake loose a few more dollars this time around to let them strut more stuff. Thanks to them.
The other entity is Tom O’Neill. His title is associate editor/copy manager, which comes nowhere near describing his role. Tom lays out a majority of the pages in the issue, finds most of the photos, edits some stories and copyedits others. More than that, every word and every image in the magazine, every semicolon and dash, goes through his discerning eye, and through his computer as he processes the whole shebang. He’s our last word on style. He pays all the writers and artists and supervises all the interns. He makes the magazine map and places every article and every ad. He never loses his cool, even on a 160-page issue like this one, except when the copy machine/printer breaks down. One. More. Time. Thanks to him.
Speaking of advertising, you may notice that this issue has quite a bit. We’re extremely grateful, first of all, to all of those advertisers who put their names in our pages, and we hope to see them again. And I bet that Christie Hefner will be asking them to return. Christie is the chairwoman of our fiftieth anniversary, which we intend to stretch through the coming year in various ways, and she has rolled up her sleeves on our behalf and proven that success is achievable. For this special anniversary issue, she and Dennis Giza, our intrepid acting publisher, filled every ad space in the book, with the help of Joe Duax and Louisa Kearney. Thanks to all of them, and to Cathy Harding, our determined and impressive new development director.
One person I’d like to thank had nothing to do with this print issue, but everything to do with our website, where more readers will see and read the articles in the issue than will do so on paper. That is Michael Murphy, our website developer, along with his team of mysterious people in multiple time zones, including Dean Pajevic.
Something they are working on as I write is a very big deal for us: by the time you read this, I hope, our website will be on a meter model. All this lovely print content—and any print content from over the past three years, and a few editor picks beyond that—will be available online to anyone, free, up to twenty-two articles over six months. Beyond that number, we’ll be asking readers who want more to get a web-only subscription or a print subscription, which will include web access. We are working with Steve Brill’s Press+ on the meter, and if it works we’ll soon be thanking him, too. I believe the meter will do everything we want it to—draw more subscriptions, more visitors to our website, and, eventually, more revenue, which we will convert into a better CJR.
Mike Hoyt was CJR’s executive editor from 2001 to 2013, teaches at Columbia’s Journalism School and is the editor of The Big Roundtable, a startup that is a home for narrative writing.