FOCUS

editor’s letter
Our focus is changing
LESLIE CAMPBELL
After 28 years as a monthly, we’re going to decarbonize a bit.
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In 1988 I started the pre-cursor to Focus, a monthly magazine called
Focus on Women. Those were the days when a person with no
money, a friend’s Mac Plus, a waxer, a bit of moxie, and a lot of
help from friends, could start a magazine. And survive. Although
when I think of producing page layouts on that six-inch screen, I am
not sure how we did it.
Technology has always been key to being able to produce a monthly
magazine. From 28 years on, though, the “advanced desktop publishing
technology” we used back in ’88 seems archaic. When I rented a
photocopier that could re-size logos for the ads, which were all cut
and paste affairs, it was a huge step forward. Those were pre-scanner
days. The “waxer” was a little electric hand-roller that had a cavity
containing melted wax. You rolled the back of pages with the wax
and pasted them onto large, four-page printer flats, carefully aligning
them with the print area (a light table helped). Then we had to paste
up the editorial images and ads. Photo mechanical transfers (PMTs)
were screened photos made for us to the needed size at Island Blueprint
on a room-size camera.
Once completed, the flats were driven to the printer—after which
I collapsed for a few days. Then I and some volunteers loaded our
cars with bundles of magazines and dropped them off at numerous
distribution sites.
It’s fascinating for me—321 editions later—to reflect on such beginnings
and the changes I’ve lived through as an editor and owner of a
local magazine. I was there before scanners and faxes and pagers
and cell phones, let alone digital cameras, the internet and online
proofing. When I compare the early days of producing Focus on
Women to our pre-press production now, about the only similarity is
still having a few late nights prior to our press deadline—and thankfully
not as late.
Besides the technology, there have been other changes of course.
The biggest one was the shift in focus. In 2004, David Broadland and
I transformed Focus on Women to Focus: “Victoria’s monthly magazine
of people, ideas, and culture.” Around the same time, we went
from newsprint to full-colour glossy pages. And soon thereafter,
we started publishing our stories on our website, www.focusonline.ca.
Though there’ve been plateaus, change has been a near constant
in our publishing careers. But it’s the web that has been the biggest
game-changer. Research is so much easier that we do a lot more of
it. We can publish stories almost instantaneously. Online, we can reach
far more people, for far less cost, at the expense of far fewer or no
trees. If we find out a new fact, or heaven forbid, find out something
we published is not accurate, we can immediately correct it online,
rather than wait a full month. We can reach younger people for whom
a printed product seems a bit alien. The web allows more possibilities,
too, for interaction, between Focus and our readers, as well as
between readers who share the stories. It also allows stories to be told
with sound and moving images.
For those very reasons, the web has been massively disruptive to
the publishing industry. For years now we’ve been hearing of the
transformations among media players; the movement of ad revenue
away from print and towards the web; the lack of a sustainable model
4 February 2016 • FOCUS