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The value of delight
comments (1) November 22nd, 2008 in Blogs
Kevin Ireton, editor-at-large
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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.
posted in: Blogs
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About this blog
As the editor of Fine Homebuilding, I spend my weekdays trying to produce a magazine that will satisfy 300,000 of the most demanding builders, both professional and amateur. As the owner of a 200-year old Cape in Connecticut’s Litchfield Hills, I spend weekends working on my house.
Each activity invariably informs, and complicates, the other. In this blog, I’ll offer observations from both worlds -- publishing and building -- with the hope of providing some useful or at least entertaining insights.
Comments (1)
Posted: 10:19 am on December 26th
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