My Dot Com Beat Up Your Magazine

Before you skip over this post entirely because you’re a mag major completely uninterested in anything not bound, glossy, and sold for $3.99, let me say this: I was you. Ok, maybe not you, exactly—I don’t know what beverage you’re smuggling into Carnegie to finish up Drake Mag, or what fight you’re having with the copyeditor of your capstone pub, but basically you, if you ever thought, “By the grace of Sallie Mae, I will never lame out my career to some preachy website when there’s prettiness and profit in the world of magazines.”

I never intended on becoming a web editor. In fact, when I took Wright’s web design class my senior year and barely waded through Flash (project extraordinaire: 12 poorly image-mapped pages about my cats), all the while I thought, This is why I have a magazine internship. I used the internet for my job, relied on it for class, Friendstered until my fingers were numb—but I was a magazine gal, through and through. Chicago style. Breaks of books. BRC cards. “Drafts in my inbox by 8:01.”

But three years into my Meredith Integrated Marketing internship (duties: getting bagels for photo shoots; phone-heckling PR hacks; writing sidebars), I landed a full-time position there writing new magazine proposals and managing the production of an infant formula’s brochure and mini-magazine campaign for new and expectant moms. (I also studied child development in school; I’m not just a stickler for punishment.) And in between trips to LA to talk with formula management folk and begging Des Moines copyeditors, often literally on their doorsteps and many times my own Drake J-profs, to rush-CE my Xerox proofs, something incredible happened: The damn web snuck onto my to-do list.

I was to write copy for the formula company’s website, promoting their new product, but only insofar as it related to typical formula choices. Mini service articles with incognito product endorsements. I loved it. To be honest, I loved every part of that crazy job: Its wackpack pace, its seriously smart editors. But this web stuff was especially neat: Writing punchy copy snippets that would be live by the end of the week? O-kay!

Because what I loved about magazines, and you are a Liar McLiar Pants if you say you disagree, is that at the end of the process, MY NAME was going to be on something in someone else's hands. And even when it wasn’t my name, it was my stuff, my golden pearls of copy, my photo choices and dumb pull-quotes buried in the depths of a newsstand (or a pile of mail, à la Integrated Marketing). And on the web, it was still all mine—I just didn’t need to wait 94 light years and three issues later to see it there.

Fast-forward a year. Over lunch with a Totally Awesome Editor at A-Dong (8C, 3C), I’m told of a job in New York City: the editor position of American Baby magazine’s website. Am I interested? She’s heard of my work on web sites, and few people had interest in editing baby copy and had experience on the web —can she recommend me? I’m hesitant—I spent a good chunk of my childhood in New York and have never been jazzed by subway schlepping—but agree. Literally three weeks later, I am unpacking a UHaul in Park Slope, Brooklyn, two days (and 53 outfit try-ons) away from starting at AmericanBaby.com. (TIP: When hiring managers ask how fast you can be there, calculate in hours, not weeks.)

I spent two years at AmericanBaby.com, spelunking through content management systems, search engine optimization guidelines, and web-writing tutorials. Some days, I missed magazines something fierce: Languid editing! Deadlines that stretched for months! Flourishing headlines and prize-worthy prose! It was a tough transition to writing for search engines, clipping the decks and intros that I knew my old editors would have applauded but web folk saw as a hindrance to the pacing of the story. Whaddya mean, no closing paragraphs? AP STYLE!?

But I latched onto something huge—enormous, really, but painfully cloying. I realized that I was finally contributing to the something I was using every day. (Ok, not breastfeeding logs, but you get it.) I’d spent years using the internet to get done what I needed. And finally, I was adding to that pot of information and service goo. (This was pre-Wiki, which could have sailed me past this milestone without taking a web job, I know. I also know how lame this all sounds, but bear with me.)

And the stuff I was putting out there was fun, and, as reader feedback relayed, useful. I created a virtual nursery, full of safety hotspots that gave babyproofing advice. (I didn’t understand load times then.) I wrote weekly newsletters, had dialogues with Mom-readers who thought I had answers. I took classes, but in web and child development know-how; all my editors were serious about me knowing my field. I started looking at story ideas in bigger ways: Could I make this topic an e-mail newsletter course instead of an article? Could we add links within slideshows to increase page views? And meanwhile, all the rules were changing: How fast could I reprogram stories so Google picked them up easier?

And then, on a limb (and the promise of contributing to a start-up), I left NYC and went back to print. And it was … print. A brilliant magazine, with super-talented people, but not the job or industry that I’d spent the previous years excited about—and pretty good at.

Enter the Totally Awesome Editor from A-Dong (TIP: Never, never lose touch with good colleagues, even if you just send a "Happy Tuesday!" once a year), and I’m now back on the web, a senior editor at a great parenting website that’s been around long before the dot-com bust whose infamy probably turned you off to the web in the first place. I write about all types of shit—literally—and help build new tools. Everyday, I’m tasked with taking story kernels and making them pop—a new link-optimized quiz? Interactive checklist?

Basically, I love working on the web because it stretches my brain—and actually pays my bills. Full disclosure, though: I still subscribe to 16 magazines.