What? Me an Expert On ...

A funny thing happened on the way to becoming a newspaper journalist. In my first semester at Drake, around the same time I started reporting for the Times-Delphic, I heard about a brainstorming meeting for Drake Magazine. I was intrigued. So I attended the meeting, queried for a story, and somehow, surprisingly, managed to land a feature story (about the moms of the crazy Des Moines-based band Slipknot, of all things). Tracking the moms down and getting them to talk wasn’t easy, but I loved every minute of it. Before long, I was editing for Drake Magazine (thanks, Lexi). And I was hooked.

That’s the funny thing with magazines. You never know where life will take you. After a stint as a communications intern at the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation, an apprenticeship at Better Homes & Gardens, and a summer ASME internship at National Geographic Traveler in Washington, D.C. (yes, you can do all of these things as a Drake magazine student!), I spent my senior year interning for a small (read: one-person) custom-publishing company called Lexicon. And (lucky me) before I even got to that panic-stricken time senior year when most magazine students start flipping out because they don’t have jobs, my boss at Lexicon offered me a full-time position. And I took it, without a lick of trepidation.

Now I’m managing editor of the company, which has grown from just the two of us to five full-time employees and a couple of very capable interns (Drake students, of course). No, it’s not a big consumer magazine in New York. And it’s a long way from my dreams of Sports Illustrated or Newsweek. But you can’t beat the variety.

On any given day I might be writing or editing articles on everything from international travel and healthy eating to retirement living and how small businesses can increase traffic to their websites. On top of that, I regularly create editorial outlines for magazine and book projects, select photography for home design publications, work with graphic designers on a variety of web and print projects, assign articles to freelance writers, copy edit and proofread everything from book proposals to entire books, create proposals for new magazine or book projects, and pen posts for our blog. Whew.

Does this mean I’m an expert on any of these things? Not so much. I might edit stories on world travel, but I’m just now packing for my first trip to Europe (Italy, here I come). I’m not a small business owner and I’m certainly not retirement age. And I’ve written I don’t know how many stories and books on home design—bathrooms, kitchens, trimwork, decks and patios, you name it. But when I recently bought my first house and had to figure out what colors to paint the walls, did I rely on my expertise culled from hour upon hour of research on color schemes? Of course not. I called my mother.

The secret to surviving in the world of magazine publishing is that you have to be willing to research. To be a generalist. To have a passion for learning new things, even if they’re things you never in a million years thought you’d care enough to write about. Say yes to those assignments that don’t interest you in the least and an even bigger yes to the ones that do. And along the way, you just might find out where your passion lies and what you want to be when you grow up. (When I figure it out myself, I’ll let you know.)