James K. A. Smith, editor of Comment magazine, reflects on the publishing of journals:
I want to begin at 30,000 feet, thinking about the “big picture” of why we’re doing what we’re doing and then slowly descend to some maxims that are at least a little closer to the ground of practicality. You might just think of these as a collection of proverbs from an editor in media res.
Here are his five big-picture exhortations:
- Fill the Earth
- Target Influencers
- Curate the World
- Publish to be Overheard
- Extend the Sacramental
He then offers four concrete principles editors should keep in mind, and I think they are worth quoting at length:
Always Be Editing | Editing isn’t just an assignment or a task; it’s kind of a way of life. You are always on the lookout. You need to be both fueling your own imagination [I’ll talk more about this tomorrow] and looking out on the world. You need to be both investing in your knowledge and deepening your convictions while curating the world for your readers. You need to keep an ear to the ground to discern what we need to be talking about it but also keep an eye on the horizon to see the up-and-coming writers who are going to help us winsomely make sense of our world. You don’t “do” editing; you are an editor.
Take Joy in Others | A good editor is someone who finds joy in fostering the work of others. If you always need to be center stage, or if you always need to get credit, you won’t be a very good editor. Much of what an editor does never sees the light of day. The labor of conceiving, crafting, and critique articles alongside their authors will sometimes be thankless. But if you’re a good editor, your writers should be able to concede that despite the fact you pushed back on them, and half of the first draft is on the cutting room floor, the article is now better. No reader is ever going to know your role in that. To be an editor is to take joy in being the skeleton not the skin.
Ideas Matter Too Much to Tolerate Bad Writing | You don’t have to choose between form and content. And you certainly shouldn’t choose one over the other. Our incarnational or sacramental conviction means, in some sense, that we eschew the very distinction between form and content. Good form is its own kind of thinking; clear, powerful, winsome, captivating writing is an argument.
Here’s the disheartening realization I’ve had since becoming an editor: there just aren’t that many Christian intellectuals who are good writers. I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant or dismissive. But it has been my experience: there are hoards of scholars who wouldn’t know a winsome sentence if it hit them upside the head. And there are hoards of bloggers who traffic in the poignant turn of phrase but have nothing to say. The club of thoughtful Christian cultural commenters who are also good writers is discouragingly small. [Here’s a plug for all of you: please become the solution to this problem!]
Editors need to have the sensibility to recognize good (and bad) writing, and then the courage to both demand and cultivate winsome writing from authors. Now, you can save yourself a lot of time and frustration by just identifying writers who already have these gifts. But you can also cultivate such writers by investing in the process. I’m convinced that any good author welcomes such editing. (To be edited is to be loved, I tell my authors.)
Resist Easy Metrics | How do you know if you are successful as an editor and as a magazine? It’s harder than you might think. This is in part because the sort of cultural influence exercised by a magazine can often be a long game—it’s like growing an oak tree rather than growing asparagus. The fruit of your labors might even be enjoyed by your successors. Measuring success for such ventures is incredibly difficult. You often won’t know the impact you’re having.
I don’t want to give excuses for retreating to the anecdotal or insulating our endeavors from accountability. It’s just that there is something unquantifiable about the sort of cultural work we’re talking about.
At the very least I know this: Comboxes and social media are not barometers of influence; they are just easy metrics of popularity. Those are two very different things. Don’t judge your influence by page views or “Likes” or retweets. I know this is easier said than done. But we need to resist the cheap, quick feedback of a click-bait culture. It’s heartbreaking to watch previously thoughtful magazines slowly become little more than Facebook feeds clamoring for emotive responses. I would trade 10,000 “likes” for one substantive engagement from a reader who is—or one day will be—a thought leader in society.
You can read the whole thing here.