This week the Scope staff met with three Skiddies in the newspaper and magazine business:
* Phoebe Mitchell, parent of a Skidmore sophomore, is the arts editor for the Daily Hampshire Gazette, in central Massachusetts
* Tim Blagg, UWW ‘93, is editor of the Recorder, the daily in Greenfield, Mass.
* Diana Gold Murphy ‘85 was editor of Country Living Gardener and has led a number of related magazine and online projects
They each got a night at the fabulous old Surrey Inn on campus, and in return we got to pump them for advice, critiques, and ideas to improve Scope magazine.
They scolded us for not including enough faces, and not always identifying the ones we do use. And they urged us to add a bit of text on Scope covers, to explain or preview what the cover story is about, instead of expecting the cover’s mystery to pique readers’ curiosity enough for them to want to open the cover and read.
Dang! We’ve enjoyed the covers’ mystery and curiosity. But, oh, all right.
Our little advisory session also got us talking about topics and approaches for future articles, and generated a ton of ideas to increase the interactivity of Scope — ways to invite readers to chime in about a story through Scope’s Web site, ways to collect comments or stories through the Web site and then run a compilation on the Web and in a future issue of the printed magazine, and so on.
We’re pretty jazzed about some of these new ideas. Got any of your own to throw into the mix? We’d love to hear them — just e-mail me: srosenbe@skidmore.edu
