Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Static Here it is ladies and gentleman, Static. That is the cover to our journalism department's first (and probably only) literary/visual arts magazine. A little bizarre? Indeed, lol, but that is exactly what we wanted. It is personally one of the greatest things I have ever been a part of, in my opinion. The cover is printed on a matte finish, heavy-weight paper; comparable to cardstock, but perhaps a bit more durable. You may notice the babyhead's left eye (its left, not yours) looks a little funky. That is because we have a di-cut in the cover as well, meaning there is a hole there teasing the reader to look on to the next page. This one girl said she could just sit there and flip back and forth between the cover and page one for a while before actually reading the content, lol. The smaller text you cannot read beneath the name "static" says, "confusion enlightenment knowledge explosion." We used those four words to generate a theme to the magazine and each of our four sections was headed with one of them: poetry (confusion), commentary (enlightenment), short stories (knowledge) and visuals (explosion). The sales went very well, in my opinion. We did not sell enough to break even with what it cost us to print this, but for a product that no one has ever heard of before and we were not letting anyone see until our sales were over we did very well, especially considering our audience: 2,500 apathetic students. We were only about 184 copies sort of our financial goal. We needed to sell 720, I think, and we sold 536. We have 2,000 copies of it all together, lol, because it was cheaper to print 2,000 instead of 1,000 for whatever reason. Though we were a bit short in sales, our adviser is debating whether or not to open them up again later. He does not want to simply because he believes it would send the wrong message, that we could not hold ourselves to just the amount of time we did have them being sold. However, there is still the fact this is a new product that no one was suspecting and may not have had money at the time. There is no tradition behind it as there is with purchasing yearbooks. So in that instance he might open them up again closer to the end of the year before seniors leave. The main negative feedback we have gotten on it was simply from one of the staff member's mother who did not like the fact her son's story was changed by our editor. I mean, she really was not happy about it. She was asking for some sort of retraction, or sending copies of the original story to everyone who bought a magazine. We simply said, "No." She argues that she has shown the original story to psychology and English professors at a college she works at and they think it is really good. She fails to see, however, that our audience is not people on that thinking level. Most teenagers are not going to care about any undertone to a story, let alone even see it is there. Let us not forget that her son had plenty of chances to come in and change it himself. He even said he would at times, but never did. We do not even know if he is upset that it is changed. This is just his mother. It is simply the editor's license to freely edit content the way he or she sees fit. We change things all of the time. We even had to cut things out simply so the story would fit the space we had. We did the best we could do with in the time we had (which was very short), and with almost no support from the rest of the staff. When it came to the final stretch about placing the content on pages, editing and developing a style, there were usually no more than four people up there including the adviser with only two computers that can handle the program we use for pages (Adobe InDesign). His mother is trying to cheapen the entire product because of one story ... I remember our adviser just started laugh almost hysterically after he hung up the phone because the entire arguement was just so pathetic. We can understand why should we be upset, but to the measures she is taking it is a bit drastic. Look at the big picture for once: Her son has been part of one of the greatest publications to come out of that school when he hardly deserves to be on staff (because he rarely does any of his work). Anyway, I am extremely satisfied with the product. All of my graphics and illustrations look great and totally kick the ass of our other visual editor's stuff, lol.

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