I consumed magazines voraciously in my youth, everything from Blitz and WWF to nature periodicals, Marvel Comics, and adult titles like People and Picture. No matter what the content, I always enjoyed the editor’s letter. Even back then, when I had no inkling that one day I would be an editor, I loved the form’s compactness, the sense that the reader was getting a peek behind the publishing curtain. In the case of Marvel Comics, it was the Stan Lee penning it in his inimitable chummy style, which made it feel as though he had written it just for true Marvel fans. “You know what?” he wrote at the end of one column, “I love comics.” I’ve never forgotten it.
As I got older, it became clear not every editor was good at writing an editor’s letter. I grew to detest columns that were little more than the contents page reworked, or which started out with some dismal cliché like, “As we move into the new year” or “With the weather warming up”.
I was fortunate – or perhaps unfortunate – to spend my first years as a journalist under Patrick Howard, then the managing editor of trade magazine Australian Printer. The man was (and still is) the absolute master of the editor’s letter. One he wrote in an issue of AP shortly before I arrived detailed the dual disaster of a server dying and the backup tapes failing just as the team was finishing an issue. “Easter, to say the least, was cancelled,” he wrote. I don’t think I’ve ever read a more compelling 400 or 500 words in my life. I can even remember the closing paragraph: “The moral of the story (and there has to be one, otherwise this is nothing but a giant whinge) is to make sure that your server’s backup system is working.” Years and later, while reading an edition of the graphic arts magazine he founded in concert with the Printing Industries Association, Print 21, I was so impressed with his editorial commentary that I got in touch via email to let him know. Nobody skims past a Patrick Howard editor’s letter.
I’m a pretty versatile writer, but a few years after I cut my teeth in publishing I was faced with tapping out an editor’s letter myself. The magazine, What DVD, was about film – a lifelong passion – so I never wanted for topics. Yet, I would write the editor’s letters in a flash of self-belief, publish them, then return to them a few months later and cringe. I don’t imagine many other editors give such things a single backward glance, but my benchmarks were Stan Lee and Patrick Howard. No matter what I wrote, I was doomed to fail.
Now, a small number did stand the test of time. One I wrote for Australian Classic Car after getting hands-on with a prototype of the first Holden 48/215 conveyed a nice sense of awe, and another – which poured out of me when I discovered a competing magazine was ‘reviewing’ DVDs off VHS tapes – struck the right balance between self-righteous disgust and reader affirmation. But I reckon I if I could, I would withdraw half the editor’s letters I’ve ever written.
They’re not something I have had to write for many years; nor am I in any hurry to start again. But it does raise the question: what makes for a good editor’s letter?
In my opinion, it should tell a story. There has to be a start, middle, and end, even if it’s discussing the right time to invest in new equipment (as Patrick Howard’s column does in the current edition of Print 21). It has to raise an issue, discuss it in an interesting fashion, then make some sort of conclusion or closing remark. Doesn’t sound so hard, right?
I wouldn’t have thought so, either. But my abysmal batting average suggests otherwise.
