Studio Blog

This afternoon, my fellow Studio editor Sarah and I ventured into Borders on our afternoon break so I could grab an interior-design magazine. As we walked toward the magazine section, I recalled the days when I’d wander into a magazine section in a bookstore and flip to the editor’s page. I was probably a freshman in high school back then, and I had just started considering becoming a writer/editor. I loved studying those pages in the front of the big magazines that said “A Note From the Editor” and then were signed by the editor-in-chief. I wanted to have my own page like that some day.

Well, I haven’t been the editor-in-chief of a magazine, but I did go on to get a bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism, and I have been an editor for a couple of them. I’ve learned I love editing. Words can be beautiful. Sometimes they require a little twisting, trimming and fine-tuning to be beautiful, and I love working with them until they become that piece of art.

However, while the written word will always exist in some form, it increasingly seems as though print journalism may not. I’ll admit it—this worries me. The die-hard, trained journalist in me mourns the potential losses of the many great newspapers and magazines that may get (or already are) lost in society’s transition to new media. I worry that we’ll lose the beauty of words in exchange for fast-paced, unedited, unsubstantiated citizen journalism.

This is just one of the reasons I’m so excited to be a part of Demand Studios. We’ve taken most of the great aspects of the print-journalism process and combined them with the strongest qualities of new media. We operate at a fast pace, but the information we publish is substantial and verified by qualified copy editors. Our articles are easy to discover online, but they’re found on high-quality authoritative websites of which we can be proud.

So, it has been with excitement for the future of opportunities in new media that I’ve slowly drifted away from my old dream of having an editor’s page of a big magazine. My byline appears in them from time to time, and that’s good enough. My writing appears all over the Internet, and far more people have access to the Internet than they do print issues of various magazines.

We all know we are at the forefront of a huge transformation in media, and I’m excited to be a part of ensuring it maintains journalistic integrity, high quality and, most of all, beauty.