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Dear Mr. President...
comments (0) December 23rd, 2008 in Blogs
Kevin Ireton, editor-at-large
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By last Friday, my office looked like a tornado had struck. I had over 300 unread emails in my inbox. The latest round of budget cuts was due to the management team. The February/March issue of Fine Homebuilding was shipping to the printer. And just to keep things interesting, our first winter storm was bearing down on us, closing schools and promising a foot or more of snow. Is it any wonder I sometimes have trouble feeling festive at the holidays?
Most of the maelstrom mentioned above was beyond our control at the magazine. But we had, in fact, voluntarily contributed to the craziness several weeks earlier when we commissioned a story at the last minute. Now the first thing you have to understand is that we never do anything at the last minute. The New York Times we ain’t. Most of our issues are scheduled six months to a year ahead of time. Nobody comes to Fine Homebuilding for breaking news. We get that.
But recently, for one of our brainstorming meetings about how to improve the magazine, Brian Pontolilo asked each of us to come in with three ideas for articles that we would never publish. It was a compelling idea. None of us did it. Instead, we all came in with articles that we would publish if Fine Homebuilding were just a little edgier, more risk-taking. For instance, “How to Install an Illegal Gray-Water System” or, my personal favorite, “HRV? ERV? WTF?”
One of the ideas, though, was “What President Obama Should Know About Housing.” I had just read Michael Pollan’s article “Farmer in Chief” in The New York Times Magazine, which was an open letter to our next president about food policy. I was captivated by the idea of addressing a subject through this lens. So I suggested it at our meeting, and much to my surprise, everybody said that not only should we do this article, but that we should do it in the next issue. Oh great.
I invited Alex Wilson to write the letter. Alex is the founder of BuildingGreen, a longtime advocate for environmentally responsible construction, and one of the most reasonable people I know. I actually had him in mind when I suggested the open letter to Obama because of a speech I heard Alex give earlier this year. It was the keynote address at the Northeast Sustainable Energy Conference, and in it, Alex outlined a 10-point plan for fixing America’s energy problems. Among his ideas was the suggestion that we create an environmental service corps, based on the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s, and use it to insulate our 85 million existing houses.
Alex jumped at the idea, despite the limited time frame for executing it. In fact, he devoted most of a Thanksgiving vacation in Florida to working on it. He and I went back and forth on several drafts, as the ad sales and page count for the February/March issue were being finalized. We put together Alex’s letter to Obama three days before we shipped, which for us is cutting it pretty close.
Despite the snowstorm, we pretty much got the whole issue together on time, everything except for one drawing. It’s being done by a freelance illustrator out in Washington State who said he couldn’t get to his studio because of a snow storm. Did it really snow in Seattle?
posted in: Blogs, green building
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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.
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