Posted by Matt Simpson (Editorial Director)
Two weeks ago, ahead of the Six Nations, England rugby player Jonny Wilkinson was given the chance to become Guest Editor of Sport magazine. No doubt, then, that as editor of a 64-page title, Jonny had a pretty busy week.
We can expect that Jonny spent hours conceiving feature ideas, thinking about fresh angles on the stories and working out who was best placed to write and photograph them to give new insight. He obviously slaved away assessing the balance of editorial across the magazine, positioning the features in a logical order and ensuring that all the editorial was consistent with the magazine’s tone of voice while allowing individual contributors the freedom to write in their own style... as well as doing all the other things editors do. He was no doubt there at midnight on deadline day pushing through those last couple of pages, too.
Or probably not. More likely Jonny swanned in to Sport’s offices for a couple of hours, had his photo taken, said, "Hey, I like that Boris Becker fella. Why not write something about him?" and then left the skilled Sport team to get the magazine out on his behalf.
Photo credit: Guardian.co.uk
Not that I'm attacking Jonny — or any of the other people who’ve guest-edited magazines over the years. (U2, Blur, Freddie Flintoff, Rio Ferdinand and Borat, for example.) It’s celebrity, it’s a bit of fun and it seems a bit churlish to point out that, while not exactly rocket science, editing a magazine requires a degree of experience, knowledge, flair and insight and isn’t something you can just rock up and do.
But we live in times where anyone can be an editor if they want - at least of their own website. Similarly anyone can be a writer if they’ve got their own blog. So what makes us professionals stand out?
Well, Zone are actually producing a magazine at the moment. We don’t do that many any more, although our heritage is in print (the official Manchester United magazine was our first). But we have great fun producing the official magazine for the Cheltenham Festival every year. Our contacts allow us unique access to talent (in this issue we get Paul Nicholls and Ruby Walsh together to find out the secrets of their success and have a brutally honest chat with Nicky Henderson about his annus horribilis) and to use the best racing writers in the country (such as Alan Lee and Jonathan Powell). Our picture editors know where to get the best racing images available and our design team knows how to make it all look beautiful.
Not that I want to bang on about how great we are. There are loads of brilliant fan websites and racing blogs out there that all add insight to the subject. It’s just that, well, professionals bring a certain quality to media. It’s why people are still willing to pay for good newspapers, magazines… and sometimes even websites. Will they still do so in the future? Rupert Murdoch certainly thinks so: he’s about to stick a load of online content for his newspapers behind a pay wall. But more on that at a later date. For the moment I’m off to ring the England rugby team to see if they’ll let me make a guest appearance at fly half in their next game. Can’t be that hard, right?