Someone in China opened Illinois Issues. Someone in Mexico did the same. Add France and Israel, South Africa and Japan. In fact, over the course of the past several months, individuals in 38 countries spent some time with — the term of art now is “visited” — an electronic edition of the magazine.
We know this because technology enables us to track such “hits” on the magazine’s Web site. We can calculate, too, the most popular times (Tuesday afternoons specifically, the height of the spring legislative session generally) and the most popular entry point (our news page). We know that among these cyber readers, state workers and employees of Illinois-based corporations are well represented. And we know they are looking for information about certain public figures and policy issues.
Such instant and detailed feedback is amazing in and of itself. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that one of the magazine’s graduate assistants created Illinois Issues’first home page. (In truth, he began by explaining what a home page is.)
But that’s just one of the changes we’ve made at the magazine over the years. And now seems a good time to take stock. Next month, we begin our 30th Anniversary year. To mark the occasion, we’ve spent the fall looking back over some of the issues Illinoisans faced in the past three decades. Next year, we’ll examine some of the challenges they could face in the coming years.
So it seems appropriate in this edition to assess the past and consider the future of Illinois Issues itself. This much is clear: The art and science of communication has changed radically in the magazine’s lifespan, especially over the past decade.
Illinois Issues, along with most other publications, had graduated to in-house computer editing and design by the 1990s, then ventured onto the Internet. Writers learned to submit assignments by e-mail, photographers learned to create digital images, and we learned to prepare and send editions to the printer electronically.
These changes meant significant advances for editors and readers. For starters, it got cheaper to produce a more attractive magazine. Our inaugural issue, published in January 1975, had a table of contents on the cover and little beyond text inside. By the 1980s, we had color covers and plenty of illustrations and photographs inside. By the mid-’90s, we were creating our own computer- generated illustrations and publishing occasional four-color pages.
The second advance was in editorial efficiency. Computers meant faster turnaround on writing, editing and production, which enhanced our ability to provide more up-to-date information in the printed magazine. We could more readily stay in sync with the policy debate. In addition, the Web site enabled us to fill the news gap between published editions and archive longer projects online.
But while technology has improved our capacity to transmit information, the driving force behind each of our strategic advances has been the changing needs of readers — indeed the changing nature of readership.
In its infancy, the magazine seemed under no special pressure to fight for readers’ time — or, for that matter, to fight for readers. In the mid-’70s, a ready audience for in-depth government reporting was assumed, and probably rightly so. Our text-heavy pages and 7,000-word articles were a reflection of this assumption. Soon enough, though, visual appeal became necessary to attract an increasingly distracted reader. And recently we’ve needed to get even more creative. We aimed for shorter features overall, promoted livelier writing and created a newsier section called Briefly. We framed governance in a broader context, too, adding the summer environmental issue and the winter arts issue. (This one is the magazine’s ninth.) And, of course, we created the Web site and continue to plan ways to enhance it, including an interactive component.
Today, in what has been called the age of infotainment, patient readers of state government news and analysis are no longer a given. And so, like planners in every other policy arena we’ll examine over the next year, public affairs journalists can expect to face rapid change over the coming decades without a lot of guideposts.
At best, we can foresee a number of challenges. Key among them will be continuing to find ways to offer responsible and insightful government reporting to a public that needs it to make informed choices, and to do so in a communications era that appears, for the time being, to have turned readers into online infograzers.
Certainly we’ve achieved global reach through our Web site. What isn’t yet clear is how much our newest readers are learning about our civic state.
Peggy Boyer Long can be reached at Peggyboy@aol.com.
Illinois Issues, December 2004
