2: New York State Conservationist
Interview with Editor David Nelson, October 2006
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
Our program today is about the magazine New York State Conservationist. This glossy, colorful bimonthly magazine is an official publication of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Quoting from the Contributor's Guide on their website: <http://www.dec.state.ny.us/website/dpae/cons/contribguide.html>
"As an official publication of NYSDEC, Conservationist reflects and interprets the missions and goals of the department [NYSDEC] and New York State. Typical topics include fishing, hunting, natural history, nature viewing and all forms of outdoor recreation. Other topics will be considered if they relate to the natural, environmental, cultural or historical resources of New York State. Conservationist is not a scientific journal. It is intended for a lay audience. Our readers rely on this magazine for scientific accuracy; please be sure of your facts."
The New York State Conservationist began publication in 1946. In 1960, the title was changed to simply Conservationist. In 1995, it absorbed a periodical called Wild in New York: Division of Fish and Wildlife newsletter and the title was changed back to New York State Conservationist. However, many readers still think of it as The Conservationist.
Recent issues begin with messages from Governor George Pataki and Department of Conservation (DEC) Commissioner Denise Sheehan. Each issue has 32 richly illustrated pages. Articles are brief, and the photos and illustrations are often key sources of information. For example, a piece on the relationship Native Americans had with white-tailed deer features photographs of the tools described in the text. Conservationist articles provide the reader ample "if you want to know more" information. The article about Native American tools has sidebars with URLs for organizations involved with primitive tools and information about the Annual Stone Craftsmen's Show. The writing style of the articles is simple but with substance. It should be equally entertaining and informative to middle and high school students and to adults. Typical topics include encounters with specific flora and fauna of NY, travel opportunities, and conservation efforts. Recent issues have included features on animals of New York—lizards, snakes, woodcocks. Did you know a woodcock can eat its weight in worms each day?
Each issue includes 4 regular departments. "Rangers to the Rescue" recounts actual accounts of DEC Forest Rangers and their work. "On Patrol" does the same for Department of Environmental Conservation police, recounting stories of catching people illegally hunting, fishing, or otherwise harming the environment. There is a "News" department. Finally, in “Letters” from readers, questions about wildlife are answered by experts.
Conservationist has no advertisements. The magazine's subscription price of $12 a year includes a "Critters of New York" pocket guide. The web site for the magazine is http://www.TheConservationist.org.
To learn more about New York State Conservationist, my guest is editor David Nelson.
Steve: Welcome, David. In a nutshell, what is New York State Conservationist about?
David: Well the Conservationist is all about the outdoors and natural resources in New York State, so we feature articles on wildlife, birds, mammals, things that people are interested in about what they might see out their back door. Day hikes, activities, outdoor education, and also environmental topics, as well. Certainly the environment is on the forefront of many people throughout the northeast and throughout the country. As the official publication of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, we use the magazine to try and convey important messages about the department’s programs and about the natural resources of New York State.
Steve: Who are your readers?
David: We have approximately 100,000 paid subscribers, and at least an equal number of secondary readers in schools and libraries throughout the country. We have more people obviously in New York State who are interested in New York state government and natural resources, but we do have subscribers in all 50 states, and in several foreign countries.
Steve: I noticed when I looked online in a resource called WorldCat, which is a catalog of catalogs, the Conservationist is in about a thousand libraries, which is an impressive number. What does that tell you about Conservationist?
David: We have a very strong and proud history. The magazine originally was published in the time of World War One, around 1917 to 1921 or thereabouts. It was digest size, and it had a period of not being published, and then was picked up again 1946, interestingly right after World War II, in the current format, which is magazine sized. It was black and white at the time, with a one color cover. It went to color about four years later, and since that time there really hasn’t been much change in format. So we’ve been around a long time, we cover important topics, and topics that people are interested in. And especially in the sciences, I think there’s an appeal to anyone who has an interest in what they might see out their window, or out their back door, and for that reason I think people are interested in having it available in schools and in libraries.
Steve: How did you come to be the editor of Conservationist?
David: Well, that’s a really interesting story. I would’ve bet probably my last dollar that I wouldn’t be sitting here today, or in the chair as editor. For myself, at once knowing from a very early age, that I was interested in wildlife biology, and in nature, it made it very easy for me to know how I would spend my career. On the other hand, it’s a bit of an affliction, too. There was never any option to pursue anything else. So from the age of 3 or 4, literally, I was flipping rocks and looking at salamanders and identifying birds with bird field guides and that kind of thing. Fast forward a little bit to eventually getting a job with the Department of Environmental Conservation, which was a long term goal, as a biologist, and layering upon that being sort of late to the table in the sense that I was one of the last baby boomers. Many of the jobs that I was most interested in were already taken, and are still taken by those kinds of people who were a little bit older than I am. I had it in mind that I was going to be jumping out of helicopters and roping down moose and elk and chasing wolves with radio telemetry, and being the next L. David Mech. It turned out that, although I don’t consider myself a very good writer, many biologists do not like that aspect of the work. They’re more interested in being field biologists, and banding birds, and doing biological studies, and I naturally gravitated towards more and more writing. That led to a position with the Division of Fish and Wildlife in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, where I wrote many of the press releases, and was a media relations person. Then when the job of editor of the Conservationist came open, it was a pretty natural fit at that point.
Steve: And when was that?
David: About six years ago, in 2000.
Steve: What’s your favorite part of the job?
David: My favorite part of the job is the mail bag, no question about it. We get some tremendous mail. If I could just digress for a second…
Steve: Sure!
David: I brought along a couple of things that, just to give you an example of the kinds of mail we receive.
Steve: Oh great!
David: Here’s one I received just last week, and just to show you I’m not pulling out the best of the best, this a hand written letter from a little boy named Quinn Sherwood, and it’s interesting, some letters are capital, and some are small, and he says, “My grandpa gives me his magazine when he is done reading it. I love all the pictures, the lizards and snakes are great. Please send me Frogs and Toads of New York State.” And then here’s a typewritten note from another reader that said, “This is just a note to tell you that the October issue was the greatest. Every article screamed for my attention, and it was a challenge to decide which one to read first, and then next, and next. Congratulations to you and your staff. Keep up the good work.” Anybody, I think, would appreciate getting that kind of feedback.
Steve: Sure.
David: Of course they’re not always quite so complimentary. But again, mail bag is fun. People will send us leaves for identification, animal scat for identification, photographs of what they’ve seen in their back yard.
Steve: And you include those sometimes in the letters section of the magazine?
David: We do, and you know it….
Steve: Not the scat, the photos…
David: [laughs] It’s a fairly light part of the magazine. On the other hand, I get the feeling it is perhaps some of the most read parts of the magazine. People are very interested to see what their neighbors saw out their back door, and oftentimes someone will send us a photograph of a fox or a deer that they’ve seen, maybe an albino animal that they’re interested to know how it became that way. Sometimes they’ll ask us behavioral questions, too. That’s fun, going though that information. Unfortunately, at my level I don’t spend a lot of time, as you can imagine, doing that particular work. But I do ask my staff to come forward and show me some of these more fun examples from time to time.
Steve: Maybe we could digress and you could address the mountain lion question.
David: Yes! While we don’t have a breeding population of mountain lions in New York State, people do report sightings of mountain lions from time to time. Sometimes these are quite reputable sightings. By and large, for the most part, what people think are mountain lions are not. They are fishers, they are bobcat, they’re some other kind of predatory animal with which people are not familiar, or perhaps did not get a very good look at it. We do have biologists and technicians across the state who will go out and research some of the sightings. But they’re not ghosts. If they were out there, they would be getting hit by cars, they would be seen by people with good cameras and recording equipment, and we would get better evidence of them. So I don’t believe that there are mountain lions living in New York state, other than an occasional released captive. There’s an interesting group of wild animal trade. Sometimes an animal that looks cute and cuddly when it’s little but grows beyond someone’s ability to care for it. If they are released, then certainly they will be seen by others, especially in the case of an animal that has grown more accustomed to people.
Steve: I see. I know that’s a story that’s been on the cover of the Times Union, the local Albany paper, and of interest to a lot of people.
David: Everyone has an opinion about these wolves, and coyotes, and mountain lions. Right now we don’t have mountain lions in New York, but you know it’s interesting, I do keep abreast of what’s going on in the rest of the country, and they are moving East. They did occur here historically, and they’re probably on a slow migration back from western states, toward the East. They have been seen, for example, in South Dakota, Iowa, and Arkansas, I believe. But that’s still a long way from New York.
Steve: So back being editor of Conservationist. What are the biggest challenges of being editor?
David: I have a saying in the office, and that is, “I’ve gotta get a magazine out.” Just as soon as a magazine hits the mail stream, obviously there’s a quick breath, a sigh, and then we move on to the next one. In fact, we’re already working on the next one before the last one hits the mail. The production schedule is reasonably demanding, it’s every other month, so we do have a reasonable schedule. But given some of the other things that people who work for the state are involved with, and doing, we don’t have the kinds of richness of time to really focus as would be appreciated. You see, I have a Blackberry, I check my e-mail at home, I’m constantly hooked up, cell phones, the job is very demanding. Largely that’s based on a production schedule. We have people who are paying customers for a product, and we have to make sure that they get their product, that they’re happy with the product, and that they get the product on time. I’m very happy to report that we have made our production schedule throughout my entire time as editor. And sometimes that’s quite a challenge. We have bidding processes that force us to use low bidders. For example, we have had printers in the past, I’m happy to say we don’t have that problem now, who were going bankrupt, and we had difficulties in getting the product out in time. So there are a multitude of challenges in producing a quality product every two months.
Steve: I can imagine. Who are your writers?
David: We have a variety of people. We use internal DEC engineers and scientists from time to time to talk about their programs. I’ll give you an example. The Department is right now sitting on the heels of a big agreement on the cleanup of Onondaga Lake, with Honeywell Corporation. There’s going to be a large announcement soon about an agreement on what will be done to remedy Onondaga Lake, and the substrate underneath the lake. We talk to folks within our agency to help us tell that story, environmental engineers, water scientists, those kinds of folks. We also use freelance authors, people who have written books, people who write columns for magazines or newspapers. We also have stringers. We have people who are outdoor writers who know the kinds of information that I’d like to see, and in a format I’d like to see it in. In fact, there are some outdoor writers that I work with, and have worked with for years and years, and have never met, which is quite a statement about the times, I believe. But they develop an appreciation for what I need, and in the format I need it in, and they’re able to give me a package that I can work with. So we use a variety of writers.
Steve: There’s a very clear style of the magazine. It’s easily read, but substantive. How difficult is it to maintain a style of writing for the magazine as a whole? It seems relatively consistent when I read the issues.
David: Well that of course is the difficulty of my job. As an editor, you want to take someone’s draft and put it into the style and format that you need without them noticing. So hopefully the author’s voice comes through in their essays and in their articles. This is sometimes easier said than done. We have articles that come in all across the board, some of which we just reject out of hand, they’re not written well enough. Others, you can just about do a dance when you open the envelope. You read an article, and you say, “Aha! I have found someone who can write! Maybe they’ve never written before, but they understand how to make something interesting to the public. I’m thrilled to get in touch with that person and say, ‘You’ve made my day, this is going to be a great article, and we’d love to run it’.” The magazine is produced many, many months in advance. We have stories scheduled through 2007, 2008. Obviously, the further out you get, the more of a moving target that is. From time to time articles are removed at the last minute, and we have to scramble to put something else in, but for the most part we can predict for going forward what’s going to be in any issue for at least two or three issues, four to six months in advance.
Steve: That’s excellent that you have the content to do that, because of course that’s an important piece of keeping on a schedule. Some scholarly journals have difficulty for that reason.
David: We have an eighteen page “story list” I call it, which is kind of funny, it’s really just a list of ideas, in one sense. The closer you get to publication, of course, those ideas have to turn into real articles. But they may be articles that we have in our files that we need to work on. We are limited by real estate. We only have a 32 page magazine, so there are many more who are interested in getting their stories told through the Conservationist than we have place and time to put them in. So we are limited the size of the publication.
Steve: Let’s talk about that limit of thirty-two pages. Why thirty-two pages?
David: Well, this is something, another saying we have in the office is “they didn’t cover that in Natural Resources 101.” I went to college for natural resource management. I learned a lot about birds and wildlife and forestry and those kinds of things, and nothing about magazine production, as you can imagine. The printing industry, and especially I’ll talk about the offset web press printing industry, is all done by printing two sides of the piece of paper, and then folding it. So for that reason, everything is done in factors of two, or powers of two. We can’t produce a one page piece of paper, because the other side of it would be blank. So in most instances, if something is going to be handled as a document unto itself, we’re talking about a two page article. A page I’m defining as an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper. So text and pictures on both sides would be a two-pager. You go from that to a four, obviously you wouldn’t have a three, because you’d have a blank sheet. Then you go from a four to an eight, and then eight to a sixteen, and sixteen to a thirty-two and so on. This is for economy. You wouldn’t want to buy paper, cut it off, and throw it away, or buy paper, not print something on it, and then send it out. The absolute best you can do for offset web printing is either an eight, or a sixteen, or a thirty-two page document, in terms of economy, with the least waste possible. There are a couple of corollaries to that, but I would probably bore people to sleep. We have a cover that goes around our 32-page document, so someone looking at the magazine may call it a 36-page document. And you can put in what the industry calls signatures of any of those beginning with four pages, any of those length articles. You can add a four, add an eight, add a sixteen. And in fact, some of our printers do two 16 page signatures to create a 32 page magazine. Then they’re stapled down the spine, and that creates your 32-pager. But again you couldn’t put a two pager in there because it would simply fall out. So over the years, looking at ways to save money, we have gone to a 32 page book, as it were. Paper is about half the cost of the magazine, so that’s why that’s so important.
Steve: Well that leads to my next question. The subscription price to the Conservationist is only $12 a year, which is a relatively low price, especially for a magazine with no advertising. I’m interested to know how Conservationist has set that price, what policies go into that, and maintaining it when the printing cost is fully half of that.
David: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. We consider the magazine to be an important medium to convey environmental and natural resource messages to a wide audience, the official publication of the Department. So for that reason, we don’t look at it as a profit making entity. In fact, it probably couldn’t be so. There’s a reason that business is business and government is government, and if you’re working in government, it’s very difficult to “turn a profit.” So we try to keep the price at a level that allows the masses of people who are interested in this product to be able to purchase it easily. At the same time, they are literally subsidizing our ability to share important environmental education messages with a wide audience. The magazine does not make money, we don’t pursue advertising. In fact, we lose a little money each year. But when you consider that 100,000 people a year are actually helping us share those messages, it’s a very inexpensive way for the government to share those messages.
Steve: I want to ask a picky librarian question. In OCLC, which is the database librarians to use for the bibliographic records of journals and books, Conservationist has gone through a few name changes since 1946. In 1960, the title went officially from New York State Conservationist to The Conservationist. Then in 1995, New York was added back into the title. In your mind, is it really an official title change, or has it been the same magazine the whole time?
David: Oh, I think it’s been the same magazine all along. Paperwork we’re required to file with the U.S. Library of Congress probably shows the evolution of those names, those various names, but they’re just an annoyance to me. I would love to call it The Conservationist, because I think it’s very important and important historically. On the other hand, there are several other states who have similar publications, and many of those are called Conservationist, for example Iowa Conservationist, Louisiana Conservationist. So it probably makes sense to call it the New York State Conservationist.
Steve: To distinguish it from the others.
David: Yes.
Steve: I see. I want to go back to the question of the content and the Department of Environmental Conservation’s goals. What are some of the most important or urgent issues that you cover in the Conservationist?
David: Well, I would say probably the most important are the global and far-reaching environmental messages that we cover. What’s going on with air quality in our country. What’s going on with the regulations that affect emissions into the airs, and into the waters that surround us. We have, for example, an article that is scheduled for production soon that talks about mercury. It was a fascinating journey for me to work with a scientist in one of the department’s divisions, who talked about mercury cleanups at schools. She came back with images of pure mercury in crocks that someone might make wine in, ceramic crocks labeled “mercury” on the outside, and these were from local schools. Elemental mercury that is out there in the environment that is not protected very well, mercury in thermometers, mercury in hygrometers, and in blood pressure instruments. These are very important issues facing all of our public health and safety. On the other hand, they are sometimes not as interesting reading as something about mountain lions, or something about wolves, or coyotes. So we have to make a mix of those environmental stories, and make them important and germane to our readers, and what a homeowner can do with the mercury they have in their own household, and how they can dispose of toxic and hazardous materials, while at the same time keeping their interest by talking about hummingbirds, or wildflowers, or fall foliage, that kind of thing.
Steve: The web site for the magazine, www.theconservationist.org, has the tables of contents from the magazine from 2005, and a few of the full articles, but many of the articles are not online. Why is that?
David: We’re struggling with this right now, so you’ve made a very good observation. The entire digital medium has sort of rocked the world of print media. Newspapers and magazines across the globe are struggling with how to deal with electronic information conveyance. We feel that we want people to still subscribe the magazine itself, it’s hard to snuggle up with a laptop. We are interested in having a web presence to entice people to purchase our magazine, but like many other magazines and newspapers out there, we haven’t yet reached a balance of exactly how much information we’re going to post online versus having it available only in the magazine. This is a very timely topic. On the way in this morning, I was thinking along the lines of how do we provide perhaps additional content on the web for subscribers, in a way that maybe a Sports Illustrated does. If you are a subscriber, you can go to the SI web site and read articles that may not appear in the printed publication. But we have gone back and forth a little bit on that. We have included some articles on the web in full that are about topics that perhaps affect public safety, like poison ivy. We want everyone to know how to avoid getting poison ivy, and what to do if you contact it. On the other hand, we may use just a little teaser for an article, and say “subscribe here if you want the entire article.” Then a person can go to our subscription page and subscribe. We feel that our price is very reasonable, and we’d like to have that person commit to buying the magazine for an entire year.
Steve: Do you see continuing a print magazine for the forseeable future?
David: Yes, I do. I do. You know, here I am at the end of the baby boomers, late to the table again, I’m finding myself in a similar situation where a few years ago I signed on to a print medium that is under siege right now by the internet. On the other hand, I think all of us remember how the video industry was going to kill the movie theaters, and no one would have that option any more. There will be some times of change going forward. We may enjoy a smaller subscribership than we have in the past. But at the end of the day, people are very interested in their magazine, they’re very loyal. They call us if they don’t get it. They want us to know that they’re very interested in what we have to say, and they really like the Conservationist.
Steve: Well David, thank you very much for joining us today. It’s been a very interesting interview.
David: Thank you, Steve.
Steve: If you would like to subscribe to New York State Conservationist, you may send a check for $12 to The Conservationist, NYSDEC, P.O. Box 1500, Latham, NY, 12110. The web site is www.theconservationist.org. Links at the top of the magazine's web page lead to extensive information about the New York Department of Conservation and its activities. Thank you for listening to Periodical Radio. I'm your host, Steve Black.