9: Weatherwise
Interview with Margaret Benner, Managing Editor
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
This installment of Periodical Radio is about Weatherwise: The Magazine about the Weather. Weatherwise was founded by David M. Ludlum in 1948 at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia as the magazine of the Amateur Weathermen of America. Mr. Ludlum, a leading scholar in the history of weather, edited Weatherwise until 1978. The American Meteorological Society published the magazine from 1952 through 1976, when the publisher became Heldref, a non-profit publisher of educational journals and magazines.
Weatherwise is a glossy magazine published bimonthly, 6 issues per year. The mission of the magazine is “to explore how weather impacts every aspect of culture and society.” Each issue runs 80 pages. Compared to most magazines, it has few advertisements. The target audience is individuals with amateur interest in meteorology, who want to know more about the weather than they get from local newscasts. The articles have plenty of substance, but are not difficult to read. Meteorological terms one would not usually hear from the local weathercaster are defined in the text of the articles.
Weatherwise serves as a publication of record for weather in the United States. For example, each year there are summaries of the hurricane and tornado seasons, complete with lists of storms, their intensities, and the damage they caused. The magazine has several regular departments. Rather than list and describe them now, I will let my guest tell you about them. I’m pleased to have as my guest Margaret Benner, Managing Editor of Weatherwise.
Steve: Margaret, welcome to Periodical Radio.
Margaret: Thank you for having me, I’m excited to be here.
Steve: I noted in my introduction that the mission of Weatherwise is to "explore how weather impacts every aspect of culture and society." Can you share a few examples of the impact of weather from stories in the magazine?
Margaret: Sure. One of our most recent issues . . .I have two good ones you might want to hear about and the audience might be interested in. We actually took a look in our November/December issue at how weather impacted ancient Egyptians. That’s an example of how we look at how weather might impact history in a specific period or a specific civilization’s history. We looked at how weather affected the aging of the monuments, for example the ancient Sphinx was buried by dust storms for many hundreds, thousands of years, and it was only recently uncovered in the last century. That’s sort of one of the ways we look at how weather impacts history. Another more recent example of how weather impacts culture, society and all that kind of thing, is we recently interviewed one of the fire chiefs of a department in California who fought the deadly Esperanza fire in which five firefighters were killed. The fire took place this last October and we asked him a lot of questions about how fire affects jobs, how it impacts the way they fight fires, how difficult fires are to fight. It sort of an aspect of society you wouldn’t necessarily think about weather affecting us much, but it really does.
Steve: What does a reader get from Weatherwise that they don't get from television or weather sites on the web?
Margaret: They get an in depth look at the fun or interesting aspects of weather. I think a lot of the, for example, the Weather Channel, or other weather programs, they look at the drama involved, and maybe the human tragedy story. What a lot of media outlets do is they try to bring the audience in by involving lots of pathos and playing on people’s emotions. We look at it from a more factual point of view, and get in depth into how weather impacts every aspect of society, whether it’s fires, or ancient civilizations, or the internet, or deicing planes, you name it. We look at how it affects everybody’s lives, and that’s something that a lot of internet sites are not able to do as well.
Steve: So it’s not really a scholarly journal, yet there’s more substance than one would find in television shows, for the most part.
Margaret: That’s right. It’s sort of the magazine for the weather enthusiast, for the person who, you know, whether they are working in the field, or loved the weather since they were a child, and they’ve subscribed to Weatherwise since they were 11 years old, or somebody who’s just interested in weather, and loves seeing beautiful pictures of different types of weather, or how weather impacts a particular topic that they’re interested in. It’s really sort of a way for people to escape the technical part of weather and get into the more fun aspect, or the more interesting aspect of it.
Steve: A distinctive characteristic of Weatherwise is its regular departments. One is Weather Front; news items about weather and meteorology.
Margaret: That’s right.
Steve: How do you select which stories to include in Weather Front?
Margaret: Throughout the two month publication process between each issue, we get a lot of press releases from different governmental and non-profit and for-profit organizations, such as the American Geophysical Union and NASA [National Aeronautical and Space Administration] and NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]. They let us know what their newest scientific research updates are, and what their product updates are. We choose which ones we think will be most interesting to readers. We try to get a variety of different topics, and we aim for humor as well as some offbeat news. We also do our own research on the web. We look at Yahoo!, we look at Google News, and try to find things that we think are interesting and that we also think our readers will be interested in.
Steve: Tell us about the Weather Queries department.
Margaret: The Weather Queries department is written by one of our longest contributors, Tom Schlatter. He’s been contributing for decades, and he has been writing weather queries for almost as long as he’s been contributing, I believe. In that section we have readers write in with any weather related or meteorology related questions. They write to the magazine, we forward them on to Tom. He has a stack that he compiles, and he chooses which questions he’d like to answer. He usually answers two or three per issue. Many of the questions include pictures or diagrams that he can refer to. It’s a just great way for the readers to participate a little in the magazine and get some of their burning weather questions answered.
Steve: I see. I found the Retrospect department especially interesting. Can you describe it briefly?
Margaret: Absolutely. Our Retrospect department is written by one of our newest contributing editors, Sean Potter. It is a look at how the weather impacted a specific event in history. One of our most recent issues of Weatherwise took a look at how weather affected the crash of the plane that killed Buddy Holly. What factors went into that crash? It was a really interesting Retrospect. It was the basis of Don McLean’s ballad “American Pie.” It was an interesting look at how people can learn a little a bit about meteorology and how it affected the great events in history.
Steve: Margaret, please tell us about your annual photo contest. It must be a favorite feature among your readers.
Margaret: It is. It really is. They absolutely love it. In fact, I was recently at a conference for the American Meteorological Society and brought far too few of our most recent photo contest issues. People really wanted me to bring more copies of that. That is something we’ve had going for . . . I believe it started in the last 20 years. We solicit submissions of photographs throughout the year from anybody who would like to submit photographs. It can be anything related to weather that they’re interested in. We get hundreds of photographs, and we publish the photographs of the winners in the September/October issue. Some time in July we have our two executive editors and several other judges come down to our offices in D.C. and judge which photographs are the best. We choose a grand prize winner, as well as first prize, second prize, and a number of third prize winners. We give prizes that have been donated by different companies. It’s a great way for us to not only showcase the beauty and power of nature, but the people who read the magazine absolutely love the photos, and we certainly enjoy looking at the photos as well.
Steve: What are some of your criteria for best photo? They must be different criteria than a photography magazine would have.
Margaret: Yeah, I mean these are all amateur photographers. Obviously it has to be a real event in meteorology, it has to be weather related. It just has to showcase something unusual and beautiful. Just taking a picture of mammatus clouds probably won’t win you the grand prize, but if it’s a picture of mammatus clouds with four rainbows over a sparkling ocean, that might get you higher up there in the prizewinning. It’s what strikes us as being the most spectacular, the most unusual, and the best quality.
Steve: Tell my listeners what a mammatus cloud is.
Margaret: A mammatus cloud is one of the, I guess in layman’s terms, the puffier formations of clouds that you might see on the horizon. Without getting into the specifics of it, you look up in the sky and see cotton puff clouds, that would frequently be a mammatus cloud, with grey underlying it.
Steve: Weatherwise began publication in 1948, is that correct?
Margaret: That’s right.
Steve: And David Ludlum was the original editor.
Margaret: Yes.
Steve: He stepped down as editor in 1978. Did he continue influencing Weatherwise after he retired as editor?
Margaret: Yes, he did. That was obviously before my time, but I know that he continued writing articles and contributing to the annual almanac issue, which comes out in the March/April issue. He has sort of, because he was the founding editor, and it was his vision, he still influences what I do today, so many decades later. He had such a great love of meteorology and love of history, and just a real interest in the power and beauty of weather. That’s sort of how I look at what my goal is to keep the magazine going, is continuing the tradition he started, impressing people with how interesting and amazing and beautiful weather is. So as far as that goes, he is still very much present. I’ve heard so much about him in the five months that I’ve been here, it’s impressive. He was a great guy.
Steve: I'd like to change gears now and ask a few questions about the business of operating Weatherwise. Your magazine is one of about 50 periodicals published by Heldref, a nonprofit publisher. What are the advantages of the relationship with Heldref, as opposed to independently handling the business of publishing?
Margaret: The purpose of Heldref is to create economies of scale for many of the journals and magazines that have been acquired by the organization. The organization is able to consolidate things like the business office-- accounting, finances, advertising, marketing--all of those different departments that would difficult for publications to run on their own. But if all the publications have one marketing department, the overhead is lowered considerably. They can then concentrate largely on the editorial side of their publications. That’s absolutely true for Weatherwise.
Steve: I noticed that articles from Weatherwise are included in many full text in many databases produced by EBSCO, ProQuest, Wilson, other large database producers. Can you explain for us how that works? How it is that articles from your magazine appear in full text databases?
Margaret: Absolutely. The way it works is that many libraries and institutions purchase full subscriptions to these consolidators such as EBSCO and ProQuest. Basically EBSCO, ProQuest, Wilson, others like that, they sell packages of journals. For example, they might sell an environmental journal package that could include the magazines Environment, Weatherwise, and others that could be published by other organizations. Then they price it according to how many journals and what kind of content there is in that kind of package. The library then agrees to buy the entire package as a bundled policy. Then they distribute it to their organization.
Steve: What does Weatherwise or Heldref get out of the agreement? There must be a return, I mean, you’re not giving it to them for free.
Margaret: We do get a monetary return. It is not substantial, because EBSCO is sort of the middleman in all this. It actually comes down to us getting pennies per article, really. But what we do get, on a larger scale, is wider exposure of our publication to different institutions and different people in academia.
Steve: I see. Have you noticed a drop in subscriptions with those articles being available in full text databases?
Margaret: We really haven’t. Particularly Weatherwise, most of our subscribers are not actually libraries and institutions, it’s largely individuals. So the people who are getting them through their libraries, the libraries would have subscribed, anyway, on their own without ProQuest. So in that way we really haven’t. It’s imperative that Weatherwise be online. That’s really just adding to our marketing.
Steve: Why is it imperative for you to have it online? You mentioned that you want broad exposure. Why is that a goal?
Margaret: Well, the younger people in America don’t really know something exists unless it’s on the internet, and I include myself in that category. So if somebody is looking up weather on Google, they are going to come across Weatherwise, hopefully as one of the top things they look up. But otherwise they might not know about it. That’s sort of a theme across the board in all of print publications in the U.S. Subscriptions are going down for people who aren’t getting online as fast as they need to. People don’t necessarily want to read articles and magazines in their print form as much. So we really need to work to make sure they can read them online if they want. Weatherwise is a bit different in that we have very, very loyal long term subscribers who really enjoy seeing the photographs in print and enjoy the quality of the paper that we put out, and they just like having Weatherwise to read on the train or on an airplane. So we’ve got pretty loyal subscribers, but in general in the print industry it’s been an ongoing problem.
Steve: I noticed on your website, http://weatherwise.org, that there is an option to purchase articles with a one month subscription you can get so many articles. Do you see that being the future of the magazine?
Margaret: We are actually in the process of implementing a new system for Weatherwise and all of the publications at Heldref Publications, actually. We’re going to be working with a new company to try to get individual articles as well as entire subscriptions online for each of the publications. So while you can’t buy a subscription to the Weatherwise magazine online right now, you will be able to soon. We think we’ll get this up and running some time in March [2007]. Unfortunately I don’t know as much about this as I wish I did at the moment, but I probably will in another four months or so. The marketing department is working very hard on that right now, and we hope to have the entire thing up and running in the next few weeks.
Steve: You say entire thing. Do you know whether it will be an exact duplicate of the print, or will it be a somewhat different publication once it’s in the online environment?
Margaret: It should be largely an exact duplicate, because we’ll be providing it in PDF format.
Steve: I see, well that makes sense. Margaret, what do you enjoy most about being the managing editor of Weatherwise? And I should ask, too, can you explain for us the difference between a managing editor and some other sort of editor.
Margaret: Absolutely. Well first of all, the managing editor is the one who oversees the entire publication, from start to finish, ranging from deciding what articles to publish, contacting authors, making sure the authors make deadlines, making sure that the articles that we’re running are interesting to our readers, choosing which articles to run, as well as overseeing the entire editing process and publishing process, okaying design of the magazine and making sure we make deadlines to the printers. We have on our staff as well as the managing editor we have an associate editor, Meghan Joyce, who is an integral part of the magazine. She does a lot of the editing, she does some first edits on articles with me, and then does many, many second edits. She helps find photographs and is just sort of my go-to person. We also have an editorial assistant who helps with day to day things as we need them, as well as a fantastic graphic designer who designs the entire magazine. So an associate editor is there to support and help with the managing editor’s day to day duties and the managing editor is in charge of making sure we get the magazine out, essentially.
Steve: Is the biggest challenge keeping everything on schedule?
Margaret: It probably is at this point. We’ve had some changes in schedule in the last couple of issues that have thrown things off a little bit and made it a bit of a challenge at the last minute to get the magazine out. It’s a challenge that I really enjoy. I would say that the thing I enjoy most about the magazine is probably the variety of things that I get to do. I’ve always enjoyed editing. I really like taking an article and seeing what the author is trying to do, and seeing what they’ve written and working with them to make it better. Then I can go from editing an article about deicing a plane one minute to the next minute looking online for photos of a fire in California. So it’s a very varied thing that I do, and I enjoy overseeing the entire process.
Steve: Are many of your submissions unsolicited?
Margaret: We do get some unsolicited submissions. Not that many of them make it into the magazine, simply because they haven’t read the guidelines online, or they don’t have enough expertise in meteorology for us to accept their article. We really like all of our authors to be fairly well trained in meteorology, or at least very knowledgeable about it. So we do get a certain percentage, and if it looks like it’s very promising, we will work with the author to turn it into a great article. But most of our authors are experienced Weatherwise writers.
Steve: How do you decide when to define a term? When I was reading articles preparing for the interview, I could generally understand what the article was about. When a term came up that I was unfamiliar with, I generally found that it was defined within the text of the article. How do you make that decision, of when to offer a definition, and when you assume the reader will know?
Margaret: It’s a little bit of a personal thing. Neither Meghan nor I have a strict background in meteorology. Our backgrounds are in journalism, actually. We confer with each other, and think “Well, is this something either of us knows?” If the answer is no, then we do a little bit of research, and if it looks like it’s a very, very obvious meteorology term that we probably should know, then we might not define it. But if it’s something that seems a bit more obscure, after doing some research on the web or in a geographical dictionary or a meteorological dictionary, then we probably will define it.
Steve: Margaret, could you share with us how you came to be managing editor? You mentioned that you are fairly new to the job, and some of my listeners are no doubt interested in the career of being an editor of a magazine. Can you explain how you got to this position and what your background was?
Margaret: Absolutely. I worked for the past five years in the health policy field, actually. I’ve worked on several newsletters, daily newsletters that came out about health policy and went largely to people on Capitol Hill. I started as a staff writer and over the next five years moved on up to managing editor of the Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report. I worked on that for several months, and it was a fantastic experience. I got a lot of editing experience doing that, and got so much daily writing experience that I felt very comfortable with the editing position. Once I felt like I had outgrown that position, where I stopped learning as much as I wanted to learn, I decided to move into the world of magazine editing, because it just seemed like such a great opportunity. I’ve always wanted to enter that field, and I was thrilled when they accepted my application. I knew it would be a challenge. It’s very different from writing about policy or writing on a daily deadline. Although I no longer have to get up at 5:30 in the morning, which I’m thrilled about. It’s a bit different, but it’s been a great challenge. My background in writing about health made it so I’m very familiar with having to keep abreast of scientific topics, so it’s sort of trading meteorology for health care.
Steve: Would being an editor of a magazine be a career that you would recommend to others?
Margaret: Yes. I have really enjoyed it. It’s so different from anything I’ve done before, but it is something that keeps you on your toes, is constantly a challenge, and it’s so varied in everything you do. I had to create a budget for the first time about four months ago, having never done it. It was a very steep learning curve, and now I’m ready to do it again next year. I have to find photographs from NASA, or from Somalia, and I have to solicit articles from people in Canada, or the Arctic. It’s just a very varied profession, and the people are fantastic, and I would recommend it to anybody who is interested in the career.
Steve: What have you learned about weather that you had no idea about six months ago?
Margaret: [laughs] Oh, let’s see, what have I learned about weather? I have learned that it really does impact everything, even if you don’t think about it. It really impacts every part of your day, and every . . .you can come up with any event in history, and somehow the weather will have impacted it, and it will have changed the outcome of the event, or it will have changed how people reacted to the event. I find that to be the most fascinating thing I didn’t realize. My background is actually in history before I went into journalism, and as a historian I just find that fascinating.
Steve: Margaret, is there anything I’ve not asked you about, that we haven’t addressed, that you’d like to talk about before we conclude?
Margaret: I don’t think so, just that I hope your listeners would be interested in going out and picking up a copy of Weatherwise. We’d love to hear their feedback on what they think of it.
Steve: All right. Thank you very much, Margaret Benner for being my guest on Periodical Radio.
Margaret: Okay, thank you.
Steve: To subscribe to Weatherwise, visit www.weatherwise.org. Subscriptions for individuals are $40 a year. Several pricing options are available for purchasing articles online. Thank you for listening to this installment of Periodical Radio. I'm your host, Steve Black.