Interview With an Online Editor Pt.1
Sueli Brodin is the editor of Crossroads, an online magazine published by the European Journalism Centre (EJC). She has been involved with it since it was first launched in December 2001. Crossroads targets the expat community in Maastricht and deals mostly with topics related to the Dutch region of Limburg. Sueli is also the editor of the EJC’s Media News section since September 2005. It contains a daily updated selection of the latest developments in European and international media.
Hania Piotrowska: Crossroads first started as a print newsletter. What made you change to the online format and abandon the print version?
Sueli Brodin: Crossroads was first published as a quarterly newsletter and copies were distributed by mail or delivered directly to various European and international institutes in Maastricht.
However, we didn’t know how many people we were actually reaching because we had no way to monitor that the people who had received an issue actually took the time to read it. Another drawback was the costs involved in producing a paper newsletter.
Therefore, we decided that going online would be a more efficient business plan. and in May 2006 we relaunched Crossroads as a web magazine. This move helped to significantly reduce costs. Thanks to web statistics tools (such as Sitemeter and Google Analytics) it became much easier to monitor our readership. Going online also produced a very nice side-effect: we started reaching people from all over the world. Most of our readers come from Europe, the US and Canada, and mainly from English-speaking countries. Some specific stories attract a large audience from Asia, especially Japan and Korea.
Since the online launch, only one person can take care of the whole project. Before, with the printed newsletter, the director of the EJC used to supervise the stories, keep in touch with the writers, if necessary ask someone to take pictures to illustrate the stories, and make sure all the content would be ready on time. Then an external editor would edit the stories, which would take another few days. And someone else with the proper technical skills, usually the EJC webmaster, would do the layout with QuarkXpres.
After that we still needed to go to the printer and wait for a few days for the newsletter to be ready. And then we would need to print address labels, prepare the mailing and take the pile of newsletters to the post office to send them out.
Now with the online magazine, one person does everything: the selection of writers and stories, all the forthcoming correspondence, and the entire publishing process. Everything can happen much faster and the stories reach a much larger audience and have a much larger impact! There are no deadlines to be met and everything goes much smoother. And the costs are obviously considerably lower.
HP: Has the magazine somehow changed due to this transformation?
SB: Most definitely! Crossroads changed in many ways. Our writers are not limited by the number of words anymore. It happened sometimes with the printed version that we had to delete some excellent paragraphs due to space constraints. It was heart-breaking.
The only criterion online is quality – as long as the text adds value to the article, there is no problem publishing it all.
The same goes for images. Sometimes authors send me a big set of pictures to chose from and I find them all very good. We can use as many of them as we wish to illustrate the article. This wouldn’t work on paper.
The magazine has become much more dynamic, because we are able to publish new feature stories any time, not just once every three months. The online format also allows us more flexibility in our contact with our contributors: we no longer need to press them to meet specific deadlines.
