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From: RDA

Date: 11/22/08

Like a lot of people these days, the editorial staff at Fine Homebuilding has been debating how best to survive these tough economic times. We’ve been meeting regularly to ask how we can improve the magazine, make it more compelling for our current readers or more accessible to new readers. That sort of thing.

As part of this process (which, by the way, is what had us wondering about a tagline), we’ve been looking at other magazines to see what we might learn from them. Wired and Outside got a lot of attention, especially from the younger guys. Esquire still stands out for its great writing. The musicians among us are impressed by The Fretboard Journal.



I spent some time with a magazine called Good, a two-year-old publication that’s been winning a lot of industry awards. Its tagline is “For people who give a damn,” which I like but doesn’t tell me much. The one online is a little better. It says, “An entertaining magazine about things that matter.”

I was reading the October issue and found something that I can’t stop thinking about. It was a two-page spread with a huge photo and only 130 words of text. The photo shows a big freighter out on the open ocean, with a parachutelike sail deployed at end of a long line. The SkySail, as it’s called, is the invention of a German engineer named Stephan Wrage, and using it can trim a freighter’s fuel costs by as much as 35%. That’s amazing to me, so much so that I keep telling people about it and showing them the photo in the magazine.

But here’s the thing: The story of the SkySail is of absolutely no practical use to me (unless you count fodder for cocktail-party small talk). That information won’t help me remodel a house or edit a magazine. Nonetheless, as a reader, I am utterly delighted by it. And as an editor, I’m trying to calculate its value.

You see, the editors of Good devoted two whole pages to the story. We would never have done that in Fine Homebuilding. I don’t mean that we would never have run a story about freighters using sails to conserve fuel. Obviously, we wouldn’t do such a thing in a magazine about building houses. What I mean is that whatever the equivalent home-building story might be, we would never have devoted so much space to it.

I, for one, would have argued that something of no practical use to any reader was therefore not valuable to any reader. If we ran the story at all, I would have said to give it one quarter of a page and surround it with four practical things. Fine Homebuilding is an expensive magazine, and I think people buy it because it is of use to them. I’ve always believed that people renew their subscriptions because the magazine helps them to earn a living or to save money by working on their own homes. And in tough economic times, I have thought it was even more important that we publish as much useful information as possible.

Suddenly, though, I am not so sure. I keep thinking about how that giant photo got my attention and how that brief story has resonated with me. And I keep wondering about value of delight.

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