RE:CC MAGAZINE BLOG

It's an exciting and busy time of year here on campus as the spring semester winds down, and with it the undergraduate careers of the Class of 2009. Commencement is right around the corner, on May 17, and just three days later the Summer issue of the magazine will go to print.

Because of our deadlines, every year we have this mad scramble to get the Commencement story into the magazine. At the last minute we're editing hundreds of photos, writing stories and captions, and designing the pages to create a feature that truly captures the spirit and significance of the event.

One part that's never a struggle is making the story new and fresh each year. Of course, there are the friends and families of the graduates filling the crowd, new speeches, and different singers and musicians. This year, for example, will be the very first time the CoCo Beaux sing the Alma Mater at Commencement!

But it's the graduates themselves who make each Commencement special and unique. The 450 or so seniors who walk across the stage and receive their diplomas each bring their own stories to this finale to four years of hard work, and it's those stories we'll try to capture in the magazine you'll receive in June.

Like most staff and faculty, we've gotten to know many of these incredible young people during their time here, and we're looking forward to wishing them well at Commencement and in the magazine.

Posted by Phoebe Hall at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week I had the pleasure of spending a half day at Wesleyan University as a judge in a very important national contest: the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Circle of Excellence Awards for alumni magazines. No, there wasn’t a conflict of interest here because I’d been asked to join a committee judging university alumni magazines with circulations of more than 75,000. (Your very own CC: Magazine is less than half that circulation, seldom printing more than 27,000.)

It was a terrific opportunity to meet with my peers from Wesleyan University and Trinity College as well as several others in the communication arts in Connecticut and to review some of the very best magazines from the U.S., Canada and Great Britain. At first it was a daunting experience to enter a room and see nearly 60 magazines arrayed in line on a long conference table. There they were, like the troops lined up for our inspection. I asked myself, was this the last hurrah? Would we see some of these giants start to fold, victims of whatever economic climate lies ahead?

Most Connecticut College households receive more than one alumni magazine from other colleges and universities, but the recipients might be surprised to hear how many hundreds of these publications are produced around the country. Or to learn that every year CASE holds an editors conference that attracts hundreds of our peer editors. Although most now have online magazines, the print versions are going strong; alumni are also connecting to their alma maters through their class notes, online communities, Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In and all the other forms of social networking.

Yet this morning when I opened my e-mail I received a message that reminded me that the magazine plays a unique role in the lives of alumni. Two young alumni, both graduates of the last five years, wrote to tell us that they are moving to Alaska and would like to make sure we have their address so they can keep receiving the alumni magazine. Don’t worry, I wanted to tell them, you may be leaving the lower 48 behind for the land of caribou, but you won’t be leaving your CC:Magazine!

Meanwhile, I can’t tell you who the winners are in the university magazine contest because they have yet to be notified, and I’m sworn to secrecy, but I can tell you I had a wonderful lesson in good design, great writing and the power of communications.

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