Editor's Notebook
Editor's Notebook
There was a message on my voice mail the other day. The guy who called (I’ll call him “Eric”) said that he has been disappointed with how I’m shaping Out in the Mountains.
“It’s too focused on politics, too lesbian, too mainstream,” he said. He rarely read it any more, Eric said. “I just don’t bother picking it up.” Then he concluded, “I just wanted to let you know that in the rainbow flag that stands for our community, I feel like my stripe is not being represented in your pages.”
Wow.
I had a lot of responses, none of them having to do with taking his comments personally.
I wished he had left his last name and/or his phone number so I could respond. I wished he had sent me his comments on email so I could publish them. I wished I could encourage him to be a little more specific about what he’d like to see in the paper that’s not there now.
I wished I could thank him for speaking up.
I don’t ever expect to make everyone in our community happy with my decisions on what events and issues OITM covers and how it does so. To a sometimes alarming degree, the contents for any given month depend on who volunteers to write about something he, she, or hir is interested in. Some folks like to write and are receptive to suggestions about issues or events that might be important or interesting for our community to know about. Others write only when subjected to editor panic, promises of undying gratitude, and/or verbal arm-twisting. And then there’s the silent masses.
Of course editorial judgment always comes into play, fitting the pieces together into a more-or-less coherent whole. Some stories we go after; others we screen out.
These pages are yours – not mine (except for page 4 – the editorial – that’s mine). Every month I send out an email with the beginnings of ideas for stories, concerts, books, recordings, issues, people and more to be covered, looking for more input. When no response comes, I start emailing, calling, sometimes buttonholing particular individuals at meetings or social events, trying to find out what is on their minds and whether it might work for an article in OITM.
For any given article, if I didn’t write it, someone else in our community volunteered – and came through – to inform, persuade, enlighten, or entertain you. Everything that I didn’t write in the paper got there as someone else’s contribution. Ideally, I write only to fill in when an event or a story is orphaned by lack of volunteers.
One person cannot put this paper together. It just doesn’t happen that way. One editor cannot cover all the ground there is to cover.
Like building a community – or creating a Pride Festival – publishing Out in the Mountains takes all of us, of many political and personal stripes, to make it work. We need your contribution of time, energy, awareness, words, photos, artwork, stories, opinions, suggestions – and yeah, money wouldn’t hurt either.
OITM can only be as good as we, together, make it.
So, “Eric,” – and everyone else in the lgbtq rainbow – if you should happen pick up this issue, email me: I’d like to hear your suggestions on how we can get your stripe into OITM. You can reach me by email at editor@mountainpridemedia.org.
Corrections
On the front page of last month’s issue, the story on the St. Johnsbury needle exchange program was erroneously credited to Stacey Horn. It was written by Euan Bear.
And the email address for the UVM lgbtqa center was missing a letter. You can reach the center at www.uvm.edu/~lgbtqa.