Last Friday the magazine’s editors, art staff, and publisher left the office to hang out at my house. It’s something we do once a year, and it’s a major component of how we bring you fresh, new ideas each year with the magazine and with our web site. Accompanied by throngs of magazines, covers, planning boards, and journals, we spread out with our pastries and orange juice and tackled the notions of what we should plan to do over the coming months to continue to make Astronomy the best it possibly can be.
Article ideas, new thoughts for the web site, potential special issues, new products, design tweaks, and much more found a way onto the agenda, and our group of 12 (if you don’t count our cat, Callie) talked, talked, and talked. We covered a lot of ground. (And this is a group that likes to talk.)
As we do each year, we had a tremendous time, came up with and shared a vast number of ideas, and enjoyed the day as breakfast transformed into box lunches and then into middle afternoon. Pages and pages of notes captured the results. As always, we broke up the party by about 3 p.m. after recording a huge amount of information — great ideas enough for years to come, some of which we’ll do in the next few months and some of which will have to wait until later.
In any event, we greatly enjoy this little exercise and wanted you to know that it’s a highly successful small piece of the strategy that brings you the best, most widely read magazine on astronomy in the world. Stay tuned for lots of fun stuff coming down the road.
Image info
Top: Astronomy’s staff convenes early on Friday morning at Editor Dave Eicher’s house to discuss future strategy for the magazine. Here, Online Editor Matt Quandt addresses the group with new ideas for Astronomy’s web site.
Bottom: Associate Editor Dan Pendick, Art Director LuAnn Belter, Intern Megan McChain, and Copy Editor Karri Ferron line up for comments on the ongoing strategic talk.