![]() The last thing I wanted was to damage the magazine, so I negotiated a quiet settlement that allowed me to continue as Editor At Large. ![]() Many advertisers contacted me with offers to protest by pulling their advertising, but I told them not to. I could have dragged the whole sordid mess into court, but that might have hurt the magazine I’d devoted my life to, and made it impossible for me to continue as Editor anyway, so I chose to bow out gracefully. He really didn’t have the authority to do that, and when I went up to NYC to talk to the Primedia people it became clear that they had been told that I wanted to retire. After photokina 2000 I got a phone call from this guy telling me he was replacing me with someone else as Editor. They knew less than zip about the photography business, and put a man in as Publisher whose ideas of where the magazine should go and mine were like oil and water. I pretty much knew my days were numbered when they said, “We’re not going to change anything,” and promptly proceeded to change everything. I was very upset by this because I’d said many times that if the magazine was sold I wanted a chance to put together an offer. In 1997 Glenn, who’d declared for years that Shutterbug was never going to be sold, sold the magazine to a media conglomerate in NYC called Primedia. I ran the magazine, going down to Titusville several times a year for staff meetings, using FedEx to get my material there, later going to fax, and still later to email attachments and upload to their server.ĭuring my years as Editor the magazine grew every year, and the classified ads became less and less important as a source of income, displaced by the Internet, so editorial content became more and more important. I accepted, but on the condition that I could work from my home office in Radford, Virginia. For a while the magazine drifted along without an editor, but I kept being given more responsibility, and in 1991 I was offered the job of Editor. Eventually he got bored with the job and quit. Jack was independently wealthy from a major auto parts manufacturing business with factories worldwide, and so he took the job out of love of photography. Jack lived in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and had no interest in moving to Titusville, Florida, where Shutterbug was based, so he flew down one week a month to put the book together (in the magazine business magazines are called books). The next Editor was Jack Naylor, prominent photo historian and owner of the largest camera collection in private hands in the world. It was published under that name for a year or so, but circulation declined, George left, and the magazine was renamed Shutterbug, still in tabloid newspaper format. ![]() But he hated the Shutterbug Ads name and got it changed to Photographic News. Glenn asked me to find one, and I called my old friend Norman Rothschild, who recommended George Berkowitz, former Editor of Popular Photography magazine, then retired. But the magazine needed an editor, and I didn’t have the time to do that job and run my studio. At some point, once editorial content became more important, I was hired as Technical Editor, to bring the accuracy of the adticles up to a higher standard to compete with the major photo magazines. Editorial content came later, and originally wasn’t of very high quality. The magazine was founded by Glenn Patch as Shutterbug Ads, and was originally a tabloid printed on yellow paper (although the very first issue, which I still have, was printed on white paper), and was a buy/sell newspaper made up of classified ads for photo equipment and supplies. I don’t even remember exactly when I wrote my first article for them. My history with Shutterbug began in the mid-70s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |