A friend writes…
How many of you are old enough to remember The New Yorker of 30 or 35 years ago, when it frequently published Talk of the Town pieces that began, “A friend writes . . .”? Well, here is a mystery guest post that could begin that very way:
Here’s something that every college and university magazine editor knows, but we never talk about it, because there’s no polite way to talk about it, so let’s try to talk gently around it, as it were.
It’s in class notes, the pages devoted to the activities of our alumni. In class notes there are lots of photographs of weddings. At every wedding reception there are photographs of happy lineups of raucous alumni, often crowded together and reveling and slightly disheveled from the energy and joy of the reception. And in many of these particular photographs there are women in low-cut dresses, and some of those women in some of those dresses are not quite as covered by the dresses as they would perhaps like to be.
This is what I am talking about.
Often the alumni who were just married send only one photograph, because the reception was chaotic and funny and organizing a pile of alumni for the university magazine was not high on the old priority list, so the editor of the magazine is confronted with a moral dilemma: Do you run the photograph as is, and hope no one notices? Or do you not run the photograph, and offer the newly wedded alumni the usual lies about space and resolution issues? Or do you beg your nose-studded surly tech intern to Photoshop just a touch more dress where a touch more dress would do a world of good? Or do you crop the photograph in such a way that the problem is solved and if anyone complains you as usual blame the poor printer? Or do you courteously ask the newly wedded couple for something a little less orthodox photographically, something unusual from their honeymoon in Belize, perhaps?
I don’t think we talk about the things we should talk about enough, and this is one of them. Perhaps in the world to come there will be sessions devoted to problems like this at the Editors Forum, but I suspect that will not happen in this century, so I think it’s good that we got it out on the table, so to speak, for all to see.
Cordially,
A Fellow Editor
It seems to me there are some questions that should be asked before that one: Why do we publish wedding photos? Is that the best use of alumni magazine space? I’m always amazed when magazines that turn their noses up to grip-and-grin photos of a dean with a donor gladly print the wedding equivalent—usually so small that readers can’t really see who’s who in the picture. Why?
This sparked some very lively conversation among my colleagues, so that’s a start. I’ll be looking forward to this session at the Editor’s Forum. Thanks for making my Friday morning entertaining!
I’m with Duane. There is no good reason to publish these photos, décolletage or not. Back in the day (mostly the 1950s and before) when the typical alumni magazine was more of a clubby newsletter, items like these abounded. Pictures of weddings, babies in collegiate sweaters, get-togethers at golf outings, and other such exclusive (as opposed to inclusive) alumni gatherings took up unconscionable amounts of space—and constituted a significant turnoff to folks who weren’t part of the in-crowd.
You have better things to put on your pages that wedding photos, don’t you? Please tell me that you do.
BTW, I like this “A friend writes … ” thing. It actually suggests that Dale has friends!
Once upon a time, an editor put his foot down and said, “No more wedding photos in Class Notes. They’re going into an online gallery instead.” Even though the editor tried to present the policy in the most positive light—”see bigger photos,” “download them,” “share them with friends”—the backlash from alumni was immediate and furious.
Many readers claimed that the wedding photos were the first thing they looked at. Other claimed the photos were the only thing they looked at. One alum offered to pay for the printing of the weddings section himself.
As several readers calmly explained, alumni in their 20s and early 30s spend a good part of their lives planning weddings, getting wed, and watching their classmates get wed. They go to a lot of trouble to arrange alumni wedding photos (many of which feature a university banner), and, damn it, they expect to see those photos in their alumni magazine. And, no, an online gallery doesn’t count.
The editor, who had gone into hiding by this point, got to thinking: We constantly worry about how to keep young alumni reading the magazine (I almost said “engaged”), and here the young alumni are telling us exactly how to do it. Maybe the wedding photos—inconsistent though they may be with the sophisticated pose we strike elsewhere in the magazine—are not such a bad thing after all. Anything that convinces people to open the magazine makes the editor’s job that much easier.
The wedding photos returned, and peace and sanity were restored. Since then, social media and mobile platforms have posed new challenges for reaching younger alumni—but those wedding photos have kept pouring in.
The editor in this story has never had the décolletage problem described earlier, but there’s always hope.