35 – A Visit to Fine Woodworking Magazine

Marc: Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes of your favorite woodworking magazines? I did. That’s why we packed our bags and headed out to Connecticut for a visit to the one and only Taunton Press. (upbeat guitar music) Marc: Well here we are at the Taunton Press, publisher of your favorite magazine and mine, Fun Woodworking. It’s a pretty cloudy, overcast, rainy day so we’ve got to hustle up and get inside before it starts raining. We’ve got some great things in store for you. Let’s go inside and check it out. Taunton has a proud history, dating back to 1975. That’s two years before I was born. That’s a lot of magazines between then and now. Amazingly, it all started in this humble little house. Who better to bring us up to speed on the history of the company than one of Tauton’s own senior team members. Anatole: Hi, I’m Anatole Burkin, publisher of Fine Woodworking. We’re here in my shop in Oxford, Connecticut. Well, the legend goes that Paul Roman was working for GE, and then he was also a amateur woodworker. He just loved to craft, but he couldn’t find much good information on woodworking. He decided to take a chance and start a small magazine with his wife, Jen. They started this little magazine and it just expanded and got bigger and bigger. Before they knew it they had a full fledged publishing company. They started back in 1975. It was a quarterly black and white. Now it’s at seven times a year, full color. Website, four other magazines, books, videos. Very successful company. Marc: With over 300 employees, 5 magazines, and countless books and DVDs, the Taunton Press is indeed successful. After 30 years in a relatively slow moving industry like woodworking, how does Taunton keep things fresh? Asa: I’m Asa Christiana. I’m the editor of Fine Woodworking Magazine. That’s a huge challenge. That’s sort of one of our biggest challenges. We kind of have a five year rule. That is, if we’ve covered a topic more than five years ago, we feel like it’s fair game. There’s enough new woodworkers entering the market that we can cover it again. We would have to because there is a finite amount of topics. Unless you get so far out into the esoteric margins of stuff that only a few people would care about. We have kind of a five year rule. That said, when we do it again and we did it seven years ago, let’s say, we better do a new twist on it. Certainly with a new author who’s got a new take on it, and bring something new to the table. That’s kind of how we get around that. Marc: With this much woodworking history under their belts, this was a place I just had to explore. Let’s take a whirlwind tour of the entire facility. David: One of the really nice things about the offices here at Fine Woodworking is the small gallery of really beautiful furniture we have. All of which has been made by our authors for articles in the magazine over the years. Everything from this very large entertainment center in I believe that’s pear. We have a small desk with a slide out drawer for computer keyboard. Very nice screen-and-green style table. Another very lovely piece, small cabinet with some very beautiful hand-rot pulls. Yeah, beautiful pulls. Round dining table, that was in the magazine not too long ago. Two of my favorites. This is a recreation of Thomas Jefferson’s traveling writing desk that Launch Lining, who is one of our long time authors, did after looking at the original in the Smithsonian for just years and years. We turn the piece around, you can see some very very, very thin partitions, and some really tiny little V shaped dovetails to hold it all together. I remember Laun in the article was amazed that 18th century woodworkers could get it that fine. Look at the hand-done dovetails, yes. Finally, we have a segmented turning that was done for our 25th anniversary. The reason it was done for the 25th anniversary is because a bowl exactly of this design was on volume one, number one. The very first issue of Fine Woodworking. One of our longtime readers thought it would be really cool to do it all over again for the silver anniversary. We’ve published close to 200 issues of Fine Woodworking. This is our library where we keep extra office copies of just about every issue in that lineup. Some of the very early ones are kind of hard to come by. We’re here in the biggest shop room at Fine Woodworking. Kind of an all-purpose area where the editors from Fine Woodworking as well as from Fine Home Building, build props for articles that need to be photographed. They build some of their own projects and occasionally will build something for an article start to finish. It’s a terrific space and very versatile. I think very well equipped. We’ve got a sanding station that we built ourselves. Again, connected to it’s own little shop vac for dust control. Drill press, router table, and for people who are vertically challenged, hollow-chisel mortiser, big bandsaw, little bandsaw, wide planer, 12-inch jointer, smaller planer. That gets a lot of use. That’s running almost all the time. Oscillating spindle sander, bunch of routers in various states of undress, and the SawStop table saw with an out feed table that we built. Actually, we just rebuilt that one. Again, this gets used for building props for photographs. That wall of tool holders has been in a numerable photographs. in Fine Woodworking and Fine Home Building. Sharpening station, water stones, some diamond stones. Tormek slow speed grinder, and apparently a brand new bench grinder. That’s good to see. We have a set of large racks against one wall here where we can store wood that’s being used for props. It’s also space for editors here to keep their own projects. Marc: After a very enlightening tour, we set out to learn a little bit more about the process of creating an article. Mark: Hi, my name is Mark Schofield. I’m the managing editor here at Fine Woodworking. One of the questions we get asked is, how do I get published in Fine Woodworking? The answer is that you send a proposal to us. It can either come by mail or it can come in by email, but what happens is they all come to me. I do the initial vetting. There’s various factors that determine whether something would make a suitable article for us, or whether it would not fit the magazine. If I think that it would be a possibility of an article, what I do is I send it out to all the other editors. It’s what’s called a yellow jacket. We call them YJs. It goes around and all the editors write their comments on the outside. You can see sometimes everybody likes the article. With other ones, it’s not so popular. Every two or three weeks we have an editorial meeting where we discuss these and come to a conclusion. I would guess that I get probably two to three a day. Of which probably I would say three or four per week I actually circulate. Okay, thanks everybody for coming to this YJ meeting. The first proposal we have is from Garret Hack on different ways to cut a bead. Marc: It was really cool to watch this meeting. After Mark introduces the article idea, the group brainstorms the topic and decides if it’s a keeper. Once the decision is made, the article goes to one of the editorial staff. Asa: What we have is kind of the best of both worlds. We get the ideas and the info from outside, but we send our own staff, our own trained editors/photographers out to shoot those photos at the person’s shop. The person writing for us doesn’t need to shoot the photos. That’s a big misconception. People think when they submit and idea that they have to have these magazine ready photos and they’re intimidated because ours look so beautiful That’s all because editors get on a plane with a portable light kit and umbrellas and a camera. This is what they do all the time. People are out of the office at least a quarter of the time traveling North America mostly to get these photos that you see appear in the magazine. John: My name is John Tetrault. I’m the assistant art director here. Basically the editor will go out to the author’s shop and they’ll get the story, bring it back into the office here. We get a package that looks something like this. We call it blue folder. We’ll get a package of photo ins and photo outs. We have all kinds of goodies in here to chose from when we start to layout. I’ll grab one of those and I’ll read through the articles and try to understand, get the grasp of it, and start laying it out. Something like this, I’ll take all the measurements from the actual plane we’re building. I’ll do a drawing to scale. It kind of makes it easier if we do send out the illustrations to an illustrator. He has more of an idea what we’re asking for. I’ll scan these in, put them in the article as things are getting laid out. This was kind of a fun one for me personally because just to make sure everything was right as far as dimensions, I brought in some stock from home and went out to the shop and got to build one myself, just to see. This is kind of what I came up with, my version. I’m still kind of working on different handles for it. It’s kind of a work in progress, but they work really well. Marc: Now we all know about Fine Woodworking’s magazine, but what about the online content? Gina: Hi, I’m Gina Eide. I work as an assistant editor on Fine Woodworking’s website. The magazine, as soon as it’s sent to the printers, that’s when we get a PDF. I have to go through the PDF and I figure out which images I want to use to represent any given article. Then I start figuring out how to layout the article online. Another cool feature is that we always try to use the technology of the web, to make any given subject, to add more depth to it. For example, we have this article by Mark Edminson on a bench. It was cool because online we can have a video on the cord seat. We can also have a finishing. We have a text article that’s only on the web. It’s free; all these things are free here. Mike: Hi, I’m Mike Dobsevage. I’m in the video department of Taunton Press. I’m a video editor here. Basically, editors go out in the field and they generally shoot the videos with the talent. We get the entire videos and we digitize them in. Then edit them out sometimes to scripts. Sometimes we just use our own sensibilities and put the thing together. Then we basically screen it for the producer of it. Then we turn it into web video basically. Into flash video and upload it to our server. Marc: So you want of your very own articles published in Fine Woodworking magazine? Anatole: A lot of people think it’s difficult to get in the magazine. It’s true; it is difficult to get into any magazine. Partly, it’s just timing. Making the right pitch at the right time. I tell people just keep trying and send us your ideas. We want original ideas as well as time-tested things that you’ve done and tweaked. A lot of ideas in woodworking are not brand new. They’re ideas upon ideas; somebody’s developed something. It’s that little twist to an idea that you come up with that can be the tip or the full lenghth article that we’re looking for. Just don’t give up, keep trying Send us your pictures and let us know. Asa: We’re basically looking for about a one page write up about, what is this process. It’s usually going to be a technique. The first time you get in the magazine, it’s some kind of a technique. A finish you do. A way you cut a joint. How you do some specific thing you do that you think is pretty cool. A jig you made up. You just tell us about it in your on plain words. Send a couple snap shots or drawings, or whatever, that help us understand exactly what’s going on. That’s it. Don’t invest too much in it, but make sure we know through visuals, and your description, what’s going on. Then be patient. We’ll get back to you. You don’t have to be a great writer. We’ll help you with that. We’ll polish up the language if we have to later on in the process. You don’t have to shoot your own photos. You’ll get a visit from our staff. It’s kind of fun. We take you out to dinner. We spend time together in your shop. That’s a really fun part of the process too. Marc: After seeing the whole process from start to finish, I was quite impressed at just how much work goes into a single article. The Fine Woodworking staff clearly loves what they do, and I think the magazine reflects that. A big thank you to everyone at Taunton for allowing us to invade their domain and share this information with our viewers. (upbeat jazz music) Gina: But one of my main jobs… (laughs) Marc: Welcome to Marc’s house of table saws. We got so many table saws it’s ridiculous. (laughing) Marc: How long have you had the SawStop? David: A little over a year. Marc: How many times have you set it off? David: I’ve lost count. Marc: We’re here; the weather’s… Let’s go inside. (laughing) Voiceover: You’re lost. Marc: Am I lost; am I scared? Voiceover: You’re scared. Marc: Am I all alone in the woods, starving? (laughing) …

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