Thank you, Abe Peck

As you go over this column piece, you will read Abe Peck's credentials in full. But let me tell you the circumstances surrounding the short but meaningful (to me, anyway!) connection between Abe and me.

I had just voluntarily closed one more chapter in my seemingly strike-anywhere media career--this time as regional executive editor of a lifestyle magazine with Asian editorial and marketing offices--when I saw a classified advertisement for an editor with experience in managing a regional editorial network. My application actually traveled a circuitous route, which I plan to detail in another of my three blogs. The net result was that I was recruited into the extremely challenging world of global trade journalism.

It was, looking on my whole career in hindsight, the most exciting phase of my intellectual growth. I never thought my brain cells could soak up so much primary, secondary, tertiary, peripheral data, details, knowledge, information, even rumor. Never in my history of working for local media did I ever feel as intellectually alive as when I was editor of one of the global sourcing magazines of an international trade media group.

Abe Peck made it easier for somebody like me, who built an OK enough name in the world of local mainstream media, to do acceptable work in the more faceless, more demanding, more information-overloaded but definitely less-byline-conscious discipline that is trade journalism.

And by the way, look at the magazines on the shelves of our local bookstores today. Most of the titles you will see are titles that confirm what Abe Peck and his fellow first-world journalism professors teach: There is no substitute for studying, knowing, focusing on, and targeting your subject area and your potential market before and during the life of your magazine. Then perhaps you will not have to worry about your magazine's after-life.

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Editorial Page column, The Evening Paper
Issue of 16 November 1995

It was the first week of November in 1992 and the fourth day of a week-long editorial training seminar. I had doodled my way through the first day, when editors of the different publications delivered their annual state-of-the-magazine speeches. A series of talks by publishers and top honchos followed on the second and third days. Except for the insights on repositioning, redesigning, and regionalizing magazines, I had found no other subjects worth staying awake for.

Outside the French doors of the second-floor function room at the Hong Kong Marina Club, a balcony overlooked the posh yachts elegantly taking in the sun on Aberdeen's calm waters. My eyes were often turned to the looming hulk of earth nearby, bluish-green and lush with trees, where every now and then I would seek the thin ribbon of brown wound around the mountain, evidence of human life even at such imperial heights.

I wished urgently for a day out in the bracing mountain air and sun instead of endless hours listening to lectures on subjects I always thought any journalist knew as well as his name and occupation: improving your headlines, writing attention-getting subheads and blurbs, captions and their relationship to pictures.

By the fourth day, I had reached the end of my patience. Seeking a whispered moment with the seminar director, I asked him almost desperately: "Abe, will you please explain to me why we are discussing topics we--all the editors here--should have mastered in journalism school?"

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Learning from a former colleague early this week that Abe Peck was in town, I knew I had to write this little piece about him. I can hear your questions: Who is Abe Peck? Abe who?

Abe Peck is a professor at Northwestern University in Illinois, chairman of magazine studies at the University's Medill School of Journalism, and director of the National Arts Journalism Program sponsored by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Those credentials, while impressive enough, are only three items in his long and glorious CV.

As magazine studies chairman at Medill, he directs six full-time professors and about 10 adjunct instructors. I know Abe enough to say that his baby is the graduate magazine-publishing program, which shapes, directs, instructs, and babysits graduate students through the critical business of launching original publications.

But Abe is more than the magazine program at Medill. He teaches the graduate program's writing and editing course, is a member of the dean's strategic planning committee and the school's curriculum, search, and promotion and tenure committees. Every year, together with the school's placement office, he hosts Medill's annual Magazine Jobs Fair.

Outside Medill, Abe Peck's byline has appeared in such magazines as Rolling Stone (where he has been associate or contributing editor since 1975), Esquire, GQ, Advertising Age, Library Quarterly. He has been or is still consultant to, organizes workshops and seminars for, is strategic and editorial adviser to, or serves on the advisory boards of the ABA Journal, American Medical News, Cahners Publishing, Crain Communications, Eaton Corp., Johnson Hill Press, Kalmbach Publishing, Restaurants and Institutions, Abbott Laboratories, Eastman Kodak, Whittle Communications, The Smithsonian, Cowles Magazines, Asian Sources Media Group, and a slew of US national and regional editors', magazines', and publishers' associations.

He has judged for both the National Magazine and Jesse Neal awards, and is an instructor on magazine startups for the Folio conference held annually in Chicago. Entries on Abe appear in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Education, and Who's Who in the World.

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You say all that would have been easy to get from a two-page write-up. But more difficult, though certainly more lasting, were very personal lessons from three formal training sessions and informal sit-ins with Abe.

There I was at the Marina Club in 1992, feeling bored by all the discussions about things we all should have learned in journalism school, except that the British, Scottish, Indian, American, Chinese, and Filipino editors with me were not all journalism graduates: the majority, in fact, were technicians-- engineers, mechanics, IT and marketing executives.

It was not long after that November 1992 seminar that I admitted they may not know as much as I do about journalism, but they certainly knew more than I did about the industries our international magazines covered and, as a result, may have communicated more effectively with their readers.

Where many Filipino publications are weak is often where Filipino editors and publishers erroneously believe they are strong. Created from the feeble materials of whimsy, wish fulfillment, personal ambition, or a pipe dream, a new Filipino magazine makes a great, big splash at birth, only to die from an excess of misdirected and indiscriminate love only a few issues after. Others hang on, offsetting losses with profits from other businesses, but never quite making it to awards nights, citations of excellence, halls of fame--or readers' attention, either.

I remember one particular session, again on a beautiful November week, also at the Marina Club, but this time a year after, when Abe presented a video package of an original magazine launch by his students at Medill--for a catering magazine, I remember quite well.

Every step of the launch was documented, from the initial brainstorming, to the comprehensive industry study, to the series of market research surveys, to the circulation and advertising studies and surveys, to the preproduction and production runs. At every stage, the market was tested, reactions and responses were collected, statistics were interpreted, and very thorough presentations were made to the school and the staff. The editorial coverage was not simply the product of one man's mind or one woman's dreams; its roots were firmly planted on a firm mission statement and an educated and intelligent approach to an identified market.

******

Abe had answered the question I asked him, almost in desperation, that November day in 1992. Now, more than two years after, I have outgrown my journalistic indignation enough to accept it. Thank you, Abe Peck.

-- NBT